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To make smarter New Years resolutions

Floss. Stretch. Drink more water.

Floss. Stretch. Drink more water.

These always make my New Year’s Resolutions short-list. And on January 1, I wake up furry-mouthed, stiff and dehydrated, and think – So much for that. Try again next year .

Remember birthdays. Call my mother more often.

I’m not actually a list person. Even less am I a person of significant resolve. My friend Lisa says this makes it all the more impressive when I actually accomplish something.

Feel less guilt.

Most people claim that the only thing they’ve successfully given up with a New Year’s resolution is making New Year’s resolutions.

General cynicism about their usefulness, combined with the fact that most of us are hard-pressed to find a quiet hour for brain-storming, goal-setting and self-analysis once the solstice arrives, makes asking about people’s New Year’s resolutions the quickest conversation-ender there is. The closed book response: "I don’t make resolutions. I wised up years ago. Excuse me, I’m headed to the bar" – suggests unresolved issues at work. A little defensive? A little too quick to change the subject? Some ground guilt flakes with your festive entree?

One friend confessed her newest resolution, which had replaced the previous "remember to send Christmas cards". Stop feeling guilty about failure to send Christmas cards. It seems we’re making progress.

The best argument for boycotting resolutions is to avoid amassing more guilt for the things you’ve neglected, failed to accomplish, or just not gotten around to yet.

Still, I find myself zoning out on the drive into work, or in the steam of the shower, trying to come up with a dark horse, the resolution that zings up from behind my sluggish motherhood statements and vague agendas and takes the race by storm.

Get organized.

The New Year’s resolution, perhaps the most sophisticated modern tool for self-flagellation, is deeply embedded in our culture. Its roots are ancient – New Year was first observed in ancient Babylon about 2000 BC, in March at the onset of spring and the planting of new crops. Eleven days of debauchery followed, and a key ritual, making resolutions, was often grounded in the promise to return borrowed farm equipment.

The Romans followed suit, celebrating New Year in March, but they buggered around with the calendar so much they eventually had to start from scratch. In the rejigged calendar, January 1 was declared by the Roman Senate to be the beginning of the New Year. Julius Caesar, who instituted this new Julian calendar, chose January 1 to honour Janus, the god of doors and gates, beginnings and endings. Janus is a double-headed figure, who is at once looking back into the old year, and forwards, into the new. Tapping into an archetype like that, it’s little wonder we feel some kind of pull to consider where we’re at on Janus’s feast, to boldly pronounce where we’d rather be, to take stock of the direction we’re heading in.

According to self-professed leading optimum performance expert, John Assaraf, "New Year’s Resolutions are a total waste of time because they are not backed by the right mental preparation. People don’t understand how their brain functions and therefore renege on their resolutions 99 per cent of the time within very short order. Using will power is absolutely the worst way to achieve your new goals because it is controlled by your conscious mind, which is only responsible for one sixth of your abilities."

According to Assaraf, it’s the non-conscious and conditioned side of our personalities that control five sixths of our behaviour and perceptions. To change ourselves, then, we need to change our unconscious habits, and our deep-rooted self-images. That takes at least 30 days. By which point, our quick-fix mentality and Sesame Street attention span has long since declared failure on said resolutions, and moved on.

Think long-term, not short-term.

When my father-in-law came to apprentice us in the basic rules of home renovation, he started us with a paradigm shift. We were going to have to get organized. Tutorials on goal-setting and list-making, that we would normally have dodged, were dutifully absorbed. After all, without him, we’d be flailing, not knowing where to start.

So, here it is. The tried and tested formula to surviving home renos and other major life upheavals. You start every day with a list. These are the things you need to accomplish that day. If you come up with anything else that needs to be done, it needs to go on a separate piece of paper. You can’t clutter up today’s list or you’ll never get through it.

Tomorrow, you start again. You need a new piece of paper. Anything you didn’t do today has to be transcribed afresh. Otherwise, you’re working off a million scraps of lists and you feel like you’re constantly behind the eight-ball.

So, two lists. The master-plan. And the daily agenda.

This seems kind of rigid to me. But then, what do I know?

Climb harder.

I set goals and write lists only when I’m forced to. My climbing partner, frustrated with my lack of ambition, urged me to come up with a tick-list of climbs I wanted to lead. I resisted. Lead-climbing is stomach-churning enough, without the added pressure of a tick-list of things you’ve told someone else you want to accomplish. Foolishly, though, I acquiesced, and every morning as we approached the climbs, he’d ask, "So what’s on your tick list today?"

But worse than the pressure of the tick-list, than scouring through the guide book looking for a handful of scary, but marginally achievable goals, was when I managed to tick them all, that very week. "You didn’t set them high enough," said climbing partner, smugly.

Well, I didn’t think I was actually going to accomplish them. I was planning on dragging them out all summer. Now what?

Dr. Lisa Shatford

is a clinical psychologist in private practice in Toronto, and a ski instructor. She conducts a mental skills training program for members of the ski school at Blue Mountain in Collingwood, Ontario, and many of her articles have been absorbed by ambitious Whistler-Blackcomb ski pros, training for their senior certification. Shatford’s recommendations include wording your goals in a positive way, writing them down, securing a buddy or support network. She also advocates making your goals measurable and specific, with short and long term targets.

Shatford would say that I had set goals that weren’t sufficiently challenging. She writes, "Setting easy goals will not result in improved performance, just boredom or false confidence. Good goals are those you can reach, but only with considerable effort. A basic principle of human nature is that we work harder to get things that are slightly out of reach. Finding the balance between setting yourself up for failure with an impossible goal, and pushing yourself toward success with a hard but reasonable goal, can take some trial-and-error, but will pay off."

Despite my own personal aversion to the New Year’s resolution, every sports psychologist and coach echoes Janus’s call to take stock, and make some plans, specific, targeted, and measurable. These interim goals should be attached to rewards, so you can create your own Pavlovian response.

Dr. Shatford writes, "In an evaluation of Canadian Olympic athletes, one of the most important factors found among the medallists, and those whose performance exceeded pre-games predictions, was a comprehensive goal setting strategy. It is the most commonly used sport psychology tool among nationally ranked athletes."

Australian sprinter, Cathy Freeman, is an example. Freeman took gold on her home turf in the 400 metres at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. She’d won gold in the 200 and 400 metre races at the Victoria Commonwealth Games in 1994. She ran a personal best in Atlanta in 1996, but came second to the French runner, Marie Jose Perec. At Sydney, after two years of dominating the circuit, she ran a personal best of 49.11 seconds. A photography exhibit in Brisbane the following year showcased images of Freeman taken by a photographer who had followed her around during the months leading up to the Olympics. One photograph showed a scrap of paper with 49.11 scrawled on it, in Freeman’s hand. During her training, in the lead-up to Sydney, she had written that number down. She’d never run it before. And on the day she won in Sydney, she ran that time, precisely.

Dr. Shatford contends that setting goals requires that you make a formal statement or promise to yourself. You give yourself a road-map to the goal. But Cathy Freeman’s story makes me wonder if there’s a little more magic to it than that.

Realize you don’t have forever.

The last time I saw Kristin, she was taking her boyfriend Peter in to have a bone marrow transplant. At 28, he had just written a will, deposited sperm at the IVF clinic in case the treatment made him infertile, and searched through his family for a marrow match. At 28, I was scrolling through a list someone had e-mailed of all the things you’re meant to have achieved by age 30 and feeling a rising sense of panic. I wasn’t even close to having a signature cocktail, a fail-safe dinner party recipe, a set of champagne glasses.

What became obvious to me at that moment is that when your day is filled with surviving the effects of chemotherapy, lining up arrangements for a brother who turned out to be a marrow match, in talking through your business affairs with your partner, there’s no room for lists of things you want to do before you turn 30, before you have children, before you die.

The time is always NOW. Before the unexpected. Before the careering bus comes around the corner just as you are stepping onto the road.

After I read that article, and with Peter and Kristin on my mind, I made myself a list. And to my shame, I didn’t go out on a 365 day deadline blitz to satisfy them. A perverse part of me wonders what may have happened if I did, and then wrote another list the next year… what exactly might have been achieved, attempted, failed, considered?

But the sense of urgency you feel when you leave the bedside of a friend who is dying doesn’t stay with you once you start the keys in the ignition and drive off onto your quest for love, job satisfaction, repaying your student loans and the perfect handbag.

Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.

Be bold, wrote Goethe. For there’s two basic steps to achieving your dreams, whether you’re setting them in motion on the first day of the year, or any other date you choose. First, say the words aloud. Speak them. Be accountable to them. Like a spell, or a prayer, they have to leave the ether of your mind. They have to enter the world.

Second, get down and dirty. Sweat for it. Train. Make effort. Keep the faith. Remember that you don’t have forever, that you, too, will die someday. Begin it now.



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