On New Year's Resolutions

Regarding New Year’s resolutions: I think they are lame. Or, rather, I think the illusory, dreamy, and frail milieu in which many offer up their resolutions are lame.

Please understand I am a principled man with a multi-year goal-set underwritten by a pragmatic action plan.

Yet, with each passing year, I become more aware of the pressing tension between that which I control and that which I do not. And I am finding that the aspects of life that I cannot control are heavily weighted. In fact, perhaps the only aspect of life that I can control is my attitude. Charles Swindoll says it best,

 The longer I live, the more I realize the impact of attitude on life. It is more important than the past, than education, than money, than circumstances, than failures, than successes, than what other people think or say or do. It is more important than appearance, giftedness or skill. It will make or break a company ... a church ... a home. The remarkable thing is we have a choice every day regarding the attitude we will embrace for that day. We cannot change our past ... we cannot change the fact that people will act in a certain way. We cannot change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude ... I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it. And so it is with you ... we are in charge of our Attitude.

Thus, my first point regarding resolutions is that we tend to gauge our resolutions on the basis of happiness; that is, the ideology that our resolutions are the ticket to future peace and contentment. Thus, our expectations are false in that if we have not found peace and contentment in our current circumstances, we will not do so in future circumstances.

Next, it seems that if we are truly honest with ourselves, our resolutions tend to be tainted by trepidations of cultural relevance. In other words, we tend to try to shape ourselves based on the perceived expectations of our culture or contemporary peer group. We want to eat better, not because we acknowledge our bodies as a Temple, but because we hope to be affirmed for our Beach Body. We vow to exercise, not to have more energy and to sleep well at night, but to look younger in an effort to validate ourselves among work colleagues. We aspire to the bigger house and the new car in an effort to impress a group of people who don’t even like us.

Thus, our resolutions have little staying power in terms of rousing us to take meaningful steps forward because the resolutions are of no life-impacting consequence.

Lastly, it seems to me that many approach their resolutions much like some who come to me for personal financial counseling. They plop down in chairs in front of my desk with the unspoken expectation, “Here we are! Fix us!” This is despite a decade of poor financial decisions, a lack of understanding of current financial standing, and no idea as to future dreams or goals.

In the same way, the resolution, just like the counselor, can be approached as the crutch or the savior rather than the quantified reality of what needs to be aspired too. By pronouncing the “resolution” to lose weight, we allow ourselves to feel good in taking a perceived action step, however false, and are now able to compartmentalize the remaining aspects of the decision (the painful self-sacrifice) into non-action. Rather than laying out a disciplined life-style agenda such as eating, exercising, time management, budgeting, goal setting and others, we stop at the feel-good resolution stage and we obligate ourselves to failure as defined by inaction.

In summary, please don’t share what you hope to accomplish in 2011. Tell us what you did today. Or perhaps as my wife shared with me, rather than choosing what we want to resolve this year, why don’t we ask God what He wants us to resolve this year?

(Disclosure: The author just purchased P90X from Beach Body! Yet, in 2010, I have lost 12 pounds by rising at 5:30 am to trail run with my wife, by eating a spinach salad for breakfast and oatmeal/ yogurt for lunch, and be setting tangible goals (such as a 25k trail challenge in April http://www.hikerun.com/) and by adhering to training plans to achieve those goals. The P90x gives me a 90 day jolt of motivation, structure, and variety to help me stay fresh and perhaps even help me impress a bunch of people (who don’t like me) with my beach abs! ha)