Change is in the air as it usually does when the calendar flips and we enter a new year. You sense new possibilities. Hope is renewed. You are excited by your plans to build the New You. Yet, you sense there is a tiny bug creeping about in New Hopeland. You don’t see it. Not immediately anyway. But you are familiar with the bug. It has upended many a plan to reinvent the self.
The disillusionment begins really on the first day you get back to office and face the same old soul-crushing work you thought you’d left behind on December 24th. Because, come on, who really works full steam between Christmas and New Year? Anyway, back to January 2nd or 3rd, and we are living through the same old meetings, unreasonable client demands, and work that had to happen ‘yesterday’.
Your New You plans are consigned to the corner of the bookshelf you’re too busy to organise. They join the New You plans from last year, the one before that, the one before that… you get the idea.
After going through this cycle for at least half a dozen times, I wondered if there is a way to break out of this cycle.
The first question we can ask ourselves is, ‘Is our plan actually good?’. There’s no point in relying on our feelings at this stage. Because making the plans always feels good. “You get to experience all the excitement of becoming an entirely different person, without having yet had to put in the effort – and without having failed,” writes Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, in a recent column for The Guardian.
But pretty soon the plans will run into the headwinds of reality.
The first problem I face is forgetting. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve started and then simply forgotten about a creative project. Or the organic salad dressing with zero preservatives that has been used only once and now lies forgotten in the corner of the refrigerator.
Then there is the matter of difficulty. It does not feel good to write a story, practice notes on the guitar, or lift weights. The fact that it does not feel good is surprising. But more importantly as with most things that don’t feel good, your mind’s default response is to try and avoid them altogether.
And what’s the best way to avoid the new behaviour patterns you are trying to adopt? By falling back on your existing behaviour patterns which are incompatible with the goals you set out to achieve.
The result: Creating the New You turns out to be quite the time and effort hog. Something the planning-you is simply blind to. Or as Burkeman puts it, “Schemes for constructing a New You are inevitably devised by the Old You, who has some pretty glaring issues.”
Burkeman recommends that we make a “wholehearted committment to acceptance”. This may seem like an excuse for mediocrity. But there is a counterintuitive psychology at play here. “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change,” says psychotherapist Carl Rogers.
‘Acceptance’ works to neutralise ‘Perfectionism’, which is judgemental and clouds our view of ourselves and the situation we are in. Perfectionism also hates the messiness of reality – like the organic salad dressing which has turned a different colour. On the other hand, ‘Acceptance’ gives us a clearer view and the courage to step into the mess. It provides us with the belief that we can change our imperfect selves – however imperfectly.
Time to buy a fresh bottle of salad dressing. After all, it’s the New Year!
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