New Year’s Resolutions

One of my primary challenges for this upcoming year is prioritizing. I enjoy my new job, but I wasn’t working an office job during most of 2017. That means I’m going to have to stop doing, or do dramatically less of what I had been doing in 2017.

Since starting this new job, I’ve seen a dramatic decrease in hours spent coaching, interacting with friends & family, hiking, jogging, cooking, reading, and blog posts. Every one of those is making me sad.

It would be a challenge to add anything right now, since most of my free time is going to doing a little bit of the things I used to do. But there are two things I really want to add or increase – time spent with friends and family, and a contentment exercise I’ll describe in a minute.

But first I have to find some things to decrease! One of the biggest mistakes people make with New Year’s Resolutions is trying to add to an already full schedule without removing anything. And I am a worst offender! Removing priorities is a hard, sad thing for me.

But I’ve decided I’m going to decrease my coaching. I’m basically going to quit for awhile except for a few exceptions. One exception is a young man the age of my son whom I’ve been working with a very long time, and he feels like a family member to me. Other exceptions are my close friends and family (some of whom I coach) because my first resolution is about increasing time with friends and family, and coaching counts as “time with”!

The other thing I hope to do less of is moving, remodeling, dealing with real estate and business and tax responsibilities. Some of that is inevitable, and some of that we’ve started and need to finish. (I’m currently looking for a landscape company, an estate planner, a CPA, and an attorney to help with our property LLC’s). Ugh! But going forward, I believe that this segment of my life will take less time and effort than it has in the last 2 years.

Ok, so now for the fun part – Now that I’ve identified a couple areas to decrease, I can name a couple of areas I’d like to increase!

The first is friends & family. They are very important to me – but you wouldn’t know it by the way I neglect them. I want to do a better job keeping up with my friendships. That New Year’s Resolution tops my list every year!

Secondly – about 12-14 years ago I was studying a set of philosophies that helped me work with my clients with Asperger’s. There’s a type of evaluative thinking pattern that’s particularly common in Asperger’s, but we all do it a lot. Instead of simply being curious about what we are perceiving around us, we almost instantly judge it as being somewhere on the bad-to-good spectrum, and frequently also have opinions about whether we like it or not, and whether it should or should not be that way.

Sometimes this evaluation and forming opinions about what is happening around us is useful and necessary. We basically can’t make decisions without being evaluative. So being evaluative isn’t wrong. I just don’t want to be constantly doing it out of habit for no reason.

But most of us do it out of habit, regardless of whether it’s actually useful. And in fact, once it becomes an ingrained habit, it can make us discontent, judgmental, and stifle creativity. Even if we succeed at “staying positive” in our evaluations, the very act of constantly judging can decrease our base level of contentment. It’s also mentally taxing.

In addition, in the latest relationship books, they are advising people to say, “Tell me about your day,” rather than ask, “How was your day?” The reason they are giving for this is that you’ll get a more meaningful answer and a closer connection. But that same advice also follows the practice I had been working on 12 years ago. Tell me ABOUT your day, rather than evaluate your day on a good-bad continuum and pronounce an opinion.

I’ve been thinking about how I can revive that practice. I do not have time to take on more study. But I think I can remember enough from 12 years ago to work on implementing some basics.

It’s the implementation that actually matters. Reading and learning new ideas can be entertaining. But, trying, daily, to be different than what comes naturally is a challenge.  We all know people who have read books and gone to workshops and learned a lot – but nothing changes!

So here’s my daily practice: I’m going to try to notice when I’m being asked for a good-bad judgement, and when I am asking others for one, and when I am volunteering one.  These instances are as common, simple and innocuous as, “Did you have a good day?”

When you start to listen, it’s amazing how often we use the terms such as “good” and “bad”, and questions such as “Did you like…?” and statements such as, “It’s good that…” in our daily speech. Even the concept of “it’s fine” is an evaluative conclusion. It’s a very necessary thought pattern that we do all day long. “It’s fine, I can hit the send button,” “It’s fine, I can proceed through the intersection,” It’s fine, I can go on to my next task.” But just because we have to make that evaluation all day to function, doesn’t mean we want to be doing it when we don’t have to!

We tend to solidify into evaluative thinking pattern habits that aren’t always as creative or as curious or as open-minded as they could be. Our life, and the life of those around us, could become richer and more meaningful. Whether that would be good or bad – or if it’s just fine how it is – I’ll leave to you to decide 😉