I love New Year’s Resolutions. I do! I think this is the instructional technologist in me geeking out.

Throughout my professional life, I focus on how to change behavior, looking at motivations, corporate culture, studying actual behaviors versus some manager’s perceptions of ‘lazy employees,’ subtle job affordances and nuances that impact whether someone will or will not integrate a new business policy or maximize use of certain software. How do you entice someone to change their behavior? This is what I do for a living.

Well, that’s all very well and good in others. But what about me?

New Year’s Resolutions are the perfect opportunity for me to practice my craft on myself. While I think it would be fascinating to attempt to write an Audience Analysis Report uh…on me, I must admit that the instructional designer on the case is quite biased. (He believes the subject to be extremely witty, moderately handsome, and overly skilled when it comes to using the olfactory sense to discover a homemade, chicken pot pie baking anywhere within a three-mile radius). Yes, perhaps I need a little perspective. I know my tricks. I know how to create wiggle room for myself to avoid creating a resolution I’ll keep.

That’s one perspective.

And.

The other side.

New Year’s Resolutions for me are spiritual – it’s a time to take stock of the man I am and the man I *want* to be and check out how much alignment there is between those two realities. So writing a New Year’s resolution is more than just Mager’s dimensions of creating a learning objective. The resolution has to be soulfully crafted – or it’s just a lame wish with no legs.

It’s January 9th and I’m finally ready to commit to my New Year’s Resolutions. I’ve spent the last week kickin’ them around in my head – trying to get specific like the Instructional Technologist in me would appreciate and also soulful, like a poet. So here goes.

Memorize 12 poems to bless my life and write 12 of my own poems

After Warrior Monk, I really found a love of poetry. I am tempted to say “rediscovered” poetry (after all, I was an English major!) but the reality is, I’ve always appreciated poetry analytically…and still never saw it’s power and grace to go somewhere conventional words cannot.

It’s important to me to have the words “to bless my life” in that resolution – I am not memorizing for memorization’s sake. (Note to self: “There once was a man from Nantucket…” doesn’t count as a life-blessing poem.)

Honor My Body

Boy, I struggled with this one. I started out brainstorming all kinds of rules-oriented resolutions that ended up being various flavors of ‘lose weight and exercise more.’ While those outcomes may be something I want in my life…as resolutions they end up feeling like RULES. I medicated/self-cared as a kid/teenager by overeating. That was the only way I knew how to express what I could not express; I stuffed myself. So now, attempts to regulate that aspect of my life awakens my inner-adolescent says, “Fuck you! You don’t own me! You’re not the boss of me!”

That teenage part of me usually rebels by oh…I don’t know…devouring two rows of Double-Stuf Chocolate Oreos. Oh my god – those RULE when trying to achieve 200% heart-cloggery-goodness with 0% nutritional value. The chocolate frosting – bonus.

By infusing this resolution with spirituality – with the king’s energy of blessing and honoring, I’m not creating a set of rules – I’m creating a kingdom – a temple. Now, I’m excited by the idea of figuring out what that means in terms of eating and exercising. And in the end, isn’t that the goal of a New Year’s resolution? Get myself excited about change?

Change my relationship with sugar: experiment and fail as necessary until success

Again – I started out toying with a resolution on New Year’s Day to no longer eat sugar. Uh…that didn’t last too long. Adolescent energy or not, my sugar dependency needs to shift in my life, for my health and my very existence. Turning 40 this year rather ups the ante. This is probably my meatiest, most challenging resolution, I think. By writing failures into the resolution, I’m reminding myself what’s permissible and possible. There can be no success without those failures. If I fail a lot this year in this quest – I win! I accept this challenge – this is do-able.

Read 40 books

I love having a gianormous reading goal. In the past I’ve made a New Year’s Resolution to read 52 books over the course of a year – and even succeeded at that a few years. However. When the number is THAT high, I get focused on the goal and not the experience. Suddenly after reading three outdated issues of Time magazine I find myself wondering, ‘Can I count this as a book? Huh? Huh?’
Last year, I made no such reading goal. The end result was that I read very few books – watched a LOT more TV. In fact, I borrowed a friend’s entire seven seasons of Star Trek Voyager, and consumed all seven seasons over the course of roughly three months. That’s 113 hours of television (almost three 40-hour work weeks). Yes, there’s a problem I have with television.

Meditate daily

I am going to resist defining meditation. This might be 30 minutes of sitting. It may be three elongated breaths in traffic. Perhaps I’ll wash the dishes with extra awareness – anything can be meditation if it’s done mindfully. I want the awareness of meditation, and the act of doing it, without strict definitions of what it must be.

I can succeed at these.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Warrior. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.