After reading, making resolutions is probably my biggest hobby. Like Mel, I make resolutions all the time. Sometimes I stick to them, sometimes not, but I never give up making them.
Ever since reading Ben Franklin's Autobiography, I've wondered if this activity is a particularly American cultural quirk, not that other cultures don't do it, but that Americans are more likely to do it? (Sort of like the way we love to quantify things--go to any tourist spot and you're sure to hear about the # of gallons of cement used, the # of trees planted, the # of babies born during the project, the weight of all the steel, the # of tourists who have visited the spot, whatever. Other countries use numbers, of course, but U.S. tourist sites seem uniquely fixated on them.)
Anyway, here's how Ben Franklin described his self-improvement efforts:
It was about this time I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I had imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method. . . .
Franklin's method was to list all the virtues he wanted to inculcate in himself, to focus on one virtue at a time (making each a habit before moving to the next), and to blog about his progress. OK, he didn't blog; he kept a notebook. Same difference.
I was talking with a psychologist friend about resolutions, and I asked her what the research suggests for success. She said, "Take them one at a time." I guess that means my first resolution should be to stop making so many resolutions. It won't be, though.
I was so crestfallen by the "one at a time" advice that I forgot to ask about intensity--is it better to go cold turkey, or to ease into a change? If you know, please speak up. I do know it's better to persist, even if you fall off the wagon. I read somewhere that most people fail multiple times before finally establishing a new habit.
My biggest success at keeping resolutions happened when I charted whether or not I'd kept the resolutions each day. IIRC, my resolutions were "drink 8 glasses of water," "exercise for 15 minutes on the exercycle," and "make a to-do list for the next day." At the time, I was also tracking fertility signs, so it was easy to add these three items to my chart, and I did keep my resolutions for months (until I became pregnant and everything changed). I've also found success with Robert Boice's suggestion to track how many pages are written every day. So I'll probably do some kind of resolution recording this year, maybe even here in my blog.
But first, I need to decide what my resolutions will be! I'm finding it surprisingly difficult to choose a few resolutions from the many possibilities. Even though I make resolutions all year long, the January resolutions always seem particularly significant, and they'll seem even more so if I make them public here. Stay tuned . . . .
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