I had dinner with a friend who started running again after a lapse of time, and in the following years, lost weight and regained a fitness level that surpasses everyone I know. She's disciplined about her running and eating, and has now started to add yoga and reiki to her routine. I know many people, including me, who pledge to change something and within weeks abandon that vow. It takes a huge amount of fortitude to do what my friend's done; it's hard to break habitual patterns. But there is something else that it takes -- and this, I suspect, is what I am lacking. For my friend to have done what she has done takes a certain level of love. Change is a loving choice.
Whenever I vow to do _______ (fill in the blank with anything: walk more, eat less, start swimming again, play golf, yada yada), I do so from a hating stance. From a place of anger and, dare I say, disgust with myself. I know what my lack of fitness is doing to my current life and I can easily envision future consequences. So, more often than not, when I start to think about making life changes I do so as a school marm might, wagging her finger in my face. We do that all of the time -- wag our own fingers in our own faces.
And maybe that's why it has not worked. It hard to do something for someone who is expressing loathing, even if it is yourself.
None of my great teachers and mentors have been so because of a harsh stance they took with me (Except for Coach Stull who always yelled at me a little bit when he saw me taking the shortcut when I did tennis laps).
Every single person who got me to work hard did so because of three things: 1) they liked me, 2) respected me, and 3) saw great potential in me and pushed me to my greater self. Coach Stull did that too, besides the yelling. So did Coach Huey. Anna Crider. Nancy Zafris. George Cannon. Carrie Conrad. Clover Beal. Even my buddhism teacher, now, even though she wouldn't admit it to me.
And you know what? I can't even remember the names of the people that tried to force or belittle me into growth. They simply had no impact.
So, how do I save my own life? I gotta like me. I have to respect me. I have to see great potential in me. Just like all of my great teachers.
I know this may seem obvious to you. Or maybe you heard it ten years ago on Oprah. But me? I just figured it out.
So knowing this, I could make a vow to eat better tomorrow, which I certainly need to do, or I could pledge to start to take spring walks. But instead, I think I will just promise to be gentle and loving with myself. Watch myself from a more distant vantage...maybe hear Ryan Gosling's voice in my head. "Hey girl, you gonna eat that salad or do you want me to feed it to you?" Yeah, that'll work. That'll work for sure.
Jean, you are SO right. One thing I'm doing for professional development (but it ends up being personal too--of course!) is taking a class led by some other teachers at my school, and they're calling it
ReplyDelete"Thinking Smart, Living Well." It basically introduces us to some of the really interesting scientific work that's being done on how we think, how we make decisions, who we are. And by some serendipity, our reading for Monday's class fits exactly what you're writing about here. It was a chapter from _The Willpower Instinct_ by Kelly McGonigal. It was chapter 6 (we also read 4, which was very interesting), if you can find it and read it, but the points I wanted to touch on are:
Guilt doesn't work! We think it does--we REALLY think it does, even when confronted by the research--but it doesn't. "Study after study shows that self-criticism is consistently associated with less motivation and worse self-control. It is also one of the single biggest predictors of depression, which drains both 'I will' and 'I want' power. In contrast, self-compassion--being supportive and kind to yourself, especially in the face of stress and failure--is associated with more motivation and better self-control."
Whoa!
"Suprisingly, it's forgiveness, not guilt, that increases accountability. [...] One reason forgiveness helps people recover from mistakes is that it takes away the shame and pain of thinking about what happened. The what-the-hell-effect [that is, for instance, figuring that you've already failed when you eat one chocolate chip cookie, so you might as well eat the whole three dozen you baked] is an attempt to escape the bad feelings that follow a setback. Without the guilt and self-criticism, there's nothing to escape. That means it's easier to reflect on how the failure happened, and less tempting to repeat it."
She goes on to talk about how good we feel when we make the decision to change (New Year's Resolution!), and that decision is "the ultimate in instant gratification," but "The effort of actually making the change cannot compare, from a happiness point of view, to the rush of imagining that you will change. And so it's not only easier, but also much more fun, to milk the *promise* of change for all it's worth, without the messy business of following through. That is why so many people are happier giving up and starting again, over and over, rather than finding a way to make a change for good."
So there you go--I hope that was as interesting and helpful to you as it was to me.