Why New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Work

 Ok, sometimes they work. But most of our resolutions are doomed to  fail. Why? After all, most of us aren’t stupid. We’re not lazy. And  we’re not bad. So you’d think that if we put our mind to making a  positive change in our life, we’d have better track records.

There’s a reason that our best intentions fall short. And it isn’t that  we’re sinners. The reason is that we’re complex. We operate on  multiple levels. The conscious level, from which we make most of our  resolutions, is just one—and not actually the most important one.  Paul may have got the diagnosis wrong, but he nailed the dilemma:

“I do not understand what I do…for I have the desire to do what is    good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want  to do; no, the evil I do not want to do, this is what I keep on doing.  Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it  is sin living in me (Romans 7:15-20).

I’m not sure that if Paul had met Harvard psychologist, Robert Kegan (The Evolving Self and Immunity to Change), he would have rewritten Romans 7. But he would have benefitted mightily from a little modern psychology. Kegan’s book Immunity to Change (co-authored with Lisa Laskow Lahey) delves into the unconscious processes that impede our capacity to actualize what we say we want to do. They developed a very useful tool that is based on an ancient model of inquiry to help individuals and institutions make good on their best intentions.

I can’t do justice to the brilliance of the model in this blog. You’ll have to read the book. But what follows is a brief description. In my opinion it demystifies Paul’s quandary—and perhaps our own. It also adds a few layers of nuance to what can sometimes come across as magic in the spirituality of intentions.

Step 1. Voice your chronic complaints. My colleague and friend, The Rev. Dr. Tom Thresher made a slight adaptation of the model by starting with something we’re always complaining about. If you’re not certain ask your spouse or your co-workers. We complain, not because we’re whiners, but because underlying the complaint is a noble value—something that we care deeply about.

(If no chronic complaints come to mind, go with Kegan’s first step which is simply to identify a desired improvement in your life, and what you are doing/not doing to realize that improvement—Step 3 below.)

Step 2. Name the noble value underlying the complaint.  If I’m always complaining about people who gossip it must reflect a deeply held commitment. For example, Tom says that underlying my complaint about people who gossip is the following commitment: “I am deeply committed to honest and direct communication”. Now you’re not feeling so badly about yourself, I bet. You’re not a whiner. You are a person of integrity!

Step 3. OK, now write down what you do, or don’t do, that prevents that deeply held commitment from being fully realized in your own life. In a moment of radical honesty, you might remember that despite your best efforts, last Thursday night at choir practice you dropped a juicy bit of confidential information about Bill. It got you a lot of attention. Or you might simply realize that you are indirect in the way you communicate with your co-workers.  The point of the exercise is not to heap guilt upon yourself. Treat this as information, not as an opportunity for self-condemnation. Remember, you are complex, not evil.

Step 4. Now you are going to identify your “competing commitments”—this is where the complexity comes in. Here you identify other commitments that you may not be conscious of, but which are nevertheless causing you to do stuff that undermine your noble intentions. What will likely surface at this point is all the stuff you are afraid might happen if you were to actually follow through on your noble commitment (direct communication). You might be afraid that people won’t like you anymore. You won’t be as interesting. Others will have no reason to listen to you if don’t entertain them with these juicy gems of gossip. These fears are both deep and deeply unconscious. Tom says that it’s not uncommon for people to express the fear that ultimately they are afraid that they will die alone under a bridge if they live into their noble ideals!

Again, we’re not bad. We’re complex. We want to be loved. If we can’t find ways for people to love us, we all have this instinctive sense that we’ll die. That was true when you were an infant, and that’s when a lot of us made the necessary bargain: “If you can’t love me when I’m real, than what do I have to do for you to at least like me?” If we’ve never done intentional work to bring consciousness to that particular negotiation, we’ll spend a lifetime constructing our life around it.

You can see that Step 4 is all about identifying commitments that compete with our noble commitment. If I am committed to being liked, and to not being alone, then following through with my intentions threatens to undermine my other competing commitment to be liked. If we’re stuck, it’s not because we’re weak or lacking in willpower. In fact, we’ve accomplished a very effective truce between our conscious noble commitments and our competing, unconscious commitments. You’re brilliant actually. But when you introduce conscious awareness, the future belongs to you!

Step 5. Now we’re getting to the nub. We’re ready to uncover to Big Assumptions (BA). We don’t see our BAs. We see through them. As Paul said in his famous love letter. “We see in a mirror darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). These BAs are powerful shapers of our reality, but until we do the kind of inquiry that Kegan helps us to do, we don’t even know that they are operative. They are the invisible 95% of the iceberg below the surface. List these BAs in the form of “if”…”then”…propositions.

• I assume that if I wasn’t liked, then I would be alone
• I assume that if someone doesn’t like me, then I won’t be able to survive
• I assume that if I’m alone, then I would be miserable and it would be hard to function
• I assume that if I was alone and miserable and dysfunctional, then my life would collapse, I’d lose my family, and I’d die alone under a bridge!

The goal here is to loosen our attachment to the BAs, to create even the tiniest bit of doubt as to their veracity—search for the exception that undermines the big assumption. I’m thinking that using this inquiry would make for a very meaningful New Year’s Eve with trusted friends.

May 2012 be a year of freedom and fullness for you.