I’m aware of the fact that a lot of changes are being proposed by people who want to do better next year than they did in 2018. I think that’s great; we should always try to make things better, to do the very best we can. In fact, we often look at ourselves with a critical eye and then resolve to change. And much of the time we fail. Why is that? I would be less than honest if I said I knew the complete answer to that question. I do, however, have some ideas from my own experience, both personal and clinical, regarding why we often fall short of what we resolve to do.
Most people who engage in unsuccessful attempts at changing themselves for the better are familiar with a pattern – or at least they experience it. At first it feels great. You’ve got the wind at your back and things are really going to be different this time. Then something in life’s journey takes a bad turn – perhaps so subtle it goes unnoticed – and the stress level goes up for whatever reason. The ability to keep going with the new regime seems like it has simply disappeared. Or perhaps we were wrong to think it was there in the first place. Bit by bit, you slide back down. And with each step, the optimistic hope for a new you gets replaced by old feelings of dull disgust and disappointment.
But “there is no effort without error and shortcoming,” as Teddy Roosevelt said over a hundred years ago. He valued the effort itself far more than clean accomplishment. Life is not clean; it’s messy for everyone.
Why do we expect so much of ourselves?
When those first feelings of discouragement and disappointment begin to register, what is being called for is self-compassion. We often slide completely back down because we do not tolerate imperfection in our resolution. How many smokers have gone back to their old habit because of one cigarette? Or how many alcoholics fall off the wagon because of one drink? Or how many of us would be ultimately successful at accomplishing change after having the pragmatic sense to redefine our goals more realistically when the initial conceptualization proves untenable? Maybe five days a week is actually okay! It’s certainly better than none. Yet so often that’s how it goes. After the realization that we have deviated from our initial idea of the change, the effort is completely invalidated by our perfectionistic inner judges. The less of that judgment, the better.
If we resolve to make positive changes, we must recognize that we will not get it right all the time. If you’ve taken up a meditation practice or an exercise program and find yourself veering off the path during a particularly trying week, your success demands that you allow for those mistakes. The less critical importance we give them, and the more we refuse to allow them to erode our sense of self, the more we can avoid allowing them to define us. When we allow for mistakes, we avoid the pervasive disappointment in ourselves that takes us back to square one. If you think of the bad week as a permissible mistake, you can hop back into the game. If you conceptualize it as a failure, that’s what it will be.
Finally, it helps to be aware of the things that move us away from our aspirations in the first place. Is it a lack of a reliable social support network? Is it a balance problem? Are we being too relentless in our expectations and too harsh with ourselves? Whatever it is that clicks us up to that higher stress level, the more conscious we are of its nature, the better will be our tools to fine tune the process. In other words – here comes a cliché – we can learn from our mistakes! And that’s a big piece of it right there. We can either let our mistakes lead to discouragement or we can take them to heart and become wiser through having experienced them. And when you find that you are not performing up to your expectations with your New Year’s resolution, come back to this little piece and remind yourself that much of successful long-term change is about self-compassion.
