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Posts Tagged ‘Personal Change’
We all want to change something in order to make our world better so that we can enjoy it more. At this time of year those changes often take the form of New Year’s Resolutions, and right about now some of you are about to give up on a resolution or two. Don’t! The secret is to do 3 simple things to make your Resolutions really work for you instead of against you.
Before going into the three simple things, take a moment to consider the form of typical New Year’s Resolutions. They are things like “I’m going to lose weight.” or “I’m going to start feeling better.” Those are very broad topics. The problem is that these are like someone asking you to shoot at a target that’s “over there somewhere.” You can only hit a target if someone says, “Hit that target right there.” In the same sense you need a clear target. “I’m going to lose 30 pounds.” and “I will make my knees stop hurting.” are much less lofty Resolutions because you can definitely say whether or not you acomplish them. Even so, there is a problem with them. This goes into what can be called The Psychology of Daily Defeats. If you set your Resolution to lose 30 pounds, the fact is that you can’t acomplish that in a short amount of time. It just can’t be done. So, everytime you get on the scale you will say to yourself, “I haven’t lost the 30 pounds yet.” or “I still need to lose 25 pounds.” That means you experience defeat because you haven’t achieved your Resolution… evenutally you give up.
So the second step is to create micro Resolutions. Things you can easily accomplish on a day to day or weekly basis. For example, the lose 30 pounds Resolution can be broken up into micro Resolutions like…
- Find out about glycemic index based eating this week
- Do 1 Vitalogy Recipe this week
- Eat Vitalogy meals 80% of the time this week
- Lose 1 pound this week
These are simply, easily accomplished micro Resolutions you achieve one small thing each week. Then you begin to experience Daily Successes. That reinforces what you are doing.
Many people will recognize this as setting goals and tasks from objectives. Those words work great in business, but the problem is that they are too weak psychologically for personal change. So, the third simple thing to do is to make a commitment in writing to someone you care about for each micro Resolution… and report back to them on how you did. If you make the commitment to lose 1 pound, then report that back.
These three simple steps of
- defining clear targets
- setting easily acomplished micro Resolutions
- making commitments about your micro Resolutions
Will help you achieve the Resolutions that you made.
Posted in I’ve been reading a few comments, and, frankly this has inspired me to write an addendum to The Value of Nothing and the Wisdom of the Bodhisattvas. One of my favorite movies is Oh God You Devil staring George Burns who plays both God and the Devil. One scene where someone is interviewing the devil goes like this…
Interviewer: What is your greatest invention?
The Devil: Language
Another approach to that concept was provided by on of my teachers who said, “Modern man has lost the ability to distinguish reality from symbolic abstractions.” Let me provide an example.
Most people would say that a flower is a real thing. Yet, if you get a room full of people together and ask them to write down a description of a flower you will get some that say “a plant”, others that say “a rose”, others that say “a tulip”, and so forth. So really, flower is really an abstraction for a category of things. It is not a real thing itself. What about a “rose”? If you go through the same exercise you will get “red roses”, “yellow roses”, “bush roses”, “climbing roses”, and so forth. So rose, as real as it sounds, is another symbolic abstraction. Well, you can keep taking this to the next level and the next level until it starts to drive you crazy. What about things like love, freedom, conservative, liberal, and all the other similar abstractions we find in our language. I suspect that no two people agree on precisely what any of those terms mean.
Let’s shift for a moment to human beings. When you think about it, all human beings have the same real concerns. They want to eat, they want to have a place to sleep, they want to feel safe, they want to have companionship. Whether you are liberal, conservative, American, Russian, Arabic, Christian, Jew, Socialist, Lawyer, Doctor, or Indian Chief, your basic needs are the same as other the needs of other people. That is what is real and that’s an extremely important to point. When it comes to the realities of living, all people — past, present, and future — face the same issues.
Yet, throughout history certain individuals have discovered that they can promote their own self interests by creating linguistic abstractions that obscure the sameness of all people and, instead create divisions. By creating the abstractions that mentally create the “good guys” and the “bad guys” somebody ends up with more money or power. Yet, that is precisely the illusion that many religions talk about.
So, the question is whether it is a higher value for everyone to focus on the abstract divisiveness in order to get what’s yours or to focus on the sameness and try to ensure that all people get their real human needs met.
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
Blessed are the peacemakers
Jesus clearly gives us the commandment to focus on the sameness of our neighbors and not on imagined diversity. That is our challenge in making the word better because it’s critical for us to understand that can only happen if it’s better for everyone. It is, again, the Bodhisattva Vow. Returning to the so-called “free market” value system, keep in mind that our cultural moral ideal overturned the tables of the money changers and said, “Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.” Enough said.
People today know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Raj Patel has written The Value of Nothing a new book inspired by this Oscar Wilde quote. I like to slightly rephrase this as the value of no thing. The basic idea in the book, is that the free market economy has failed us by shifting our thinking to believe that considering price is the only determining factor of value. Yet, there is value in other things that a price cannot be attached to. For example, a hamburger that has a price of $4 really should be priced at $200 if you factor in the environmental costs of producing the hamburger, but the markets work in a way to exclude things like the value of the air we breathe, the safety of the water we drink, and the damage caused by a junk food diet. Unfortunately we have learned that if we can’t or don’t attach a price to something it is valueless and, therefore unimportant.
Since the economic collapse we are discovering that the free market centric model of thinking is, in Alan Greenspan’s [former chairman of the Federal Reserve] own words, flawed. Those things to which a price cannot be attached have the highest value. Unfortunately, the flawed model of how things work has been dominating the USA, if not the world since the end of World War II. That means that one change in crisis of consciousness must be that we begin to understand what we really value and act accordingly. Free market thinking may have brought us lots of material prosperity at the cost of our fundamental values. The truth is that free market thinking is only one world view. There are others, and the shift in consciousness begins when you reassess your own values and begin to act on what your true values are. For example, is it more important to get a 15% pay increase that demands 20% more time or is it a higher value to spend time with your children. On a more global level, is it more value for you to get that new BMW every year or two or is more valuable to see that all Americans have reasonable health insurance.
The second example focuses on what I will call a “I’ve got mine and the hell with everyone else because I want to get more” way of thinking that has arisen out of market-centric views of the world. Suppose, instead, that we think in terms of “I’ve got mine now how can I help others” way of thinking, not at a billionaire philanthropic level, but at a day to day personal level. The best example of this that I can think of are Buddhist Bodhisattvas and the Bodhisattva Vow. In Mahayana Buddhism a Bodhisattva is sort of like a Christian saint. They are people who have achieved a considerable degree of enlightenment who but forgo their ultimate enlightenment to help others achieve liberation. In Christian terms they give up immediate rewards of heaven in order that other people might achieve heaven. The Bodhisattvas understand the interconnectedness of all human beings and that they will not be fully enlightened until everyone else is. The Bodhisattva Vow is simply the commitment that a monk may take to work as a Bodhisattva as his/her own wisdom increases.
Putting this in another context, are you willing to have a Chevy instead of a BMW so that everyone can have a car?
Today brings home the point because of the huge earthquake in Haiti. People are suffering unbelievably. So, what are your values? You can begin to restructure your life to fit your values using The Warriors Time Management System. Get it free by clicking here.
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