A NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTION REBOOT
My Typical New Year’s Resolution Dilemma - Salad or Burger?
Note: If you arrived here after clicking on the link to Rising Tide on our newsletter “Conscious Connections”, surprise! Click here to get to Rising Tide, or feel free to hang out and enjoy this juicy article! It’s not quite like eating a hamburger, but it’s close…😉
I suck at New Year's Resolutions.
I’ve New-Year's-Resolved to lose 20 pounds for the last three years. I get a little momentum in January and maybe February. Then life happens. Or so I tell myself. I had a hard day and I’m too tired to work out. It’s impossible to eat healthy on the road. I need a glass of whiskey to help me sleep.
And just like that, another New Year’s Resolution gets tossed to the curb on the Street of Broken Dreams (cue sad violin music). Sound familiar?
The hell of it is, I have really, really good reasons to lose 20 pounds. According to my last physical exam, I am pre-diabetic bordering on full-blown diabetic. My blood pressure regularly bounces between “whew” and “oh shit”. I’ve lost a step or two (okay, two) playing hockey. And heart disease runs in my family.
So, what’s the deal - why can’t I do what it takes to get healthy? I’ve done it before - I dropped 40 pounds in my mid-30’s and rode my bike every day. What’s making it harder to lose weight this time? Is it just harder to lose weight when we get older? I am I simply undisciplined?
What I’m Really Committed To
The answer to those questions is yes…and no. It turns out that I'm committed to something more important than losing 20 pounds. What I'm really committed to is not suffering, to avoiding pain.
How did I figure this out? I used Robert Kegan’s and Lisa Lahey’s Immunity to Change Worksheet, and The Enneagram, an archetypal framework that describes the structure and dynamics of nine personality types (my Enneatype is Type 7).
Using these two tools, I’ve learned that my commitment to not suffering is deeply rooted in a core, self-limiting belief that “If I suffer, I will die". Or at least I’ll be really unhappy. That belief is so compelling that it colors the way I make meaning of the world and how I respond (or react) to what happens in that world. Of course, I have other strongly held beliefs, but this one feels more urgent and life-threatening. So I pay more attention to it. It forms the basis for my deeper inner motivation and worldview and is at the core of my personality.
The patterns of thoughts, feelings, intentions, and behaviors that help me navigate my world arise from my personality. Most of the time I’m not even aware of how my personality is running the show. Think of personality as sorta like a computer or smartphone operating system. We see and interact with Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat. We generally don’t “see” the operating system doing its thing. It runs in the background, outside of our awareness. But make no mistake, it runs the whole show.
Our personality is like that - it performs the millions of computations behind the scenes, so I don’t have to think about whether to choose the bacon double cheeseburger or the salad. It simplifies things down to simple patterns like “burger = delicious, eat it now” and “salad = meh, maybe next time”. Which makes it easy to choose the burger every time.
Time To Upgrade My Operating System
Dialing this back to my New Year’s Resolution, I can now see that choosing the salad over the burger runs against my programming. So does being in pain at the gym. If my New Year’s Resolution is an app and my personality is my operating system, it’s pretty clear that I need to upgrade my operating system. If I don’t, the app won’t install at all, or it will install, but only partially. It will limp along until around mid-February and then craps out completely. Ever notice how impossible it is to get a treadmill at the gym in January and February and then, magically, you have your pick of treadmills in March? It’s like that.
What does it mean to upgrade our operating system - our personality - to the current version? Aren’t we stuck with our personalities? Isn’t that just who we are? I mean, the human brain completes its development around age 25 and our personalities are more or less baked. That’s that, right?
Wrong! Researchers like Robert Kegan and Lisa Lahey found that, not only are adults able to grow and develop past our mid-twenties, we are actually built to grow and develop well into our old age. Recent studies in neuroscience and neuroplasticity support this finding. As part of a community of leadership and executive coaches, I can attest to shifts made by later-in-career leaders that led to better outcomes, sustainable results and more fulfilled lives. We are not doomed to living in an infinite loop dictated by an operating system we don’t see.
We can grow and develop in such a way that causes self-limiting beliefs (“If I suffer, I will die”) to shift to self-sustaining beliefs (“Even if I suffer, I will live”). When I shift my beliefs, I can shift my perspective. When I shift my perspective, I can shift my thoughts, feelings, intentions and behaviors in response. This is the essence of an operating system upgrade.
If I believe “Even if I suffer, I will live”, I can shift my perspective of losing 20 pounds from pain and deprivation to life giving and energizing. With that perspective, I can shift how I feel about eating healthy and exercising into something fun and fulfilling. In turn, I am more willing to eat healthy and exercise more consistently. Losing 20 pounds shifts from a one-time New Year’s Resolution into a new way of being, or a lifestyle of healthy eating and exercising.
A Pathway For Change
Seems simple, doesn’t it? Well, simple ain’t the same thing as easy. I won’t kid you, the growth and development needed to upgrade our operating system is hard work, perhaps the hardest work you’ll ever do. And that’s why so many of us fail at keeping our New Year’s Resolutions. Our personality doesn’t want to us to change. Change is dangerous. Change is risky. Change is painful. So our personality cleverly and quietly waits for critical moments of choice and baits us back to the burger. Or tells us that rain and cold make for miserable runs.
The good news is that researchers and practitioners in the fields of cognitive and behavioral psychology, neuroscience, leadership development, and coaching, have done a lot of work to suss out development pathways needed to upgrade our operating system. Putting these pathways into everyday practice will result in positive shifts in our lives.
I’d like to offer you a pathway I call the "The Six Practices of Conscious Leaders”, a framework that’s helped me organize my approach to making big shifts in my life. These practices can be taken on singly or combined in various ways to support making the changes that matter the most to you. I’ll stick with the context of my New Year’s Resolution to demonstrate how to operationalize the Practices.
Clarity - The first thing I need to get clear on is that my go-to pattern is not working for me - in fact, it’s getting me the opposite of what I want. Because my operating system - my personality - runs in the background, my thinking, feeling, and behavior patterns may not be obvious at first. This is where having a coach comes in handy. My coach helped me see my go-to pattern and the fear, self-limiting beliefs, and stealth commitments that drive unhealthy choices. My coach has also helped me get clear on my life purpose and why health plays a critical role in my ability to fulfill that purpose.
Compassion - Once we see how our patterns can get us the opposite of what we truly want, it’s a short jump to feeling like a loser. "I’ve known for three years that I need to drop 20 pounds. I must not be good/strong/disciplined/smart enough to get it done.” This is shame - what Brené Brown describes as “the intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love, belonging, and connection.” The antidote to shame is compassion, particularly self-compassion: “I’m human, I’ll fail from time to time, and I’m still a good person.” Shame can’t withstand cutting yourself some slack.
Commitment - Now that I’m clear on my life purpose, what can I really commit to? The commitment that is aligned to my life purpose is like this: “I commit to living a healthy life that lets me fulfill my purpose for as long as I can before I die”. Now that’s a commitment! It provides a greater “why” and a larger context for eating healthy and exercising regularly than a cold, lifeless New Year’s Resolution of losing 20 pounds. Weight loss is now an outcome, an important part of me living a life of purpose.
Connection - We're all wired for connection with others. Sure, we could figure out how to make these big shifts by ourselves. But it’s a heckuva lot easier when we have support from the people in our lives that we trust who are rooting for our success. Asking for help is one of the simplest ways to connect with another person, especially when we need support in making a life change. It’s hard for me to ask for help because doing so might make me feel like a loser. But when I’ve asked for help, especially from Monique (my wife), I’ve always gotten it and it’s made my relationships closer.
Courage - I know I’m going to fail on my commitment to health. I know I’ll feel shame after choosing the burger. I know I’ll skip a workout and feel like a loser. I know my weight will go down and up and down again. This fills me with the fear of failing. But courage is not a lack of fear. It’s about being afraid and moving forward anyway. I could choose my go-to pattern and sidestep fear. Or I can try on a different pattern, knowing that sooner or later, I’ll fall flat on my face. That’s vulnerability. And as Brené Brown says in Dare To Lead, “You can’t get to courage without rumbling with vulnerability. Embrace the suck!"
Consistency - When I was a hardcore endurance cyclist, my cycling coach would stress, “Endurance training is not about how far you can ride in a day. It’s about how far you can ride consistently, day after day.” Shifting to a new pattern, one that is rooted in healthy living, requires practice - in my thoughts, intentions, and behaviors. The good news is that it’s really about practicing the five Practices above every day. As I do this, I develop my consciousness so I can make powerful choices consistently, especially when the burger sounds a lot more delicious than the salad.
"The Six Practices of Conscious Leaders” are a guide to making fundamental shifts in our way of being which manifests in changes to the patterns of our decisions and actions. There’s more to each one of these practices than can be covered here and I will expand on each one in future articles. In fact, there’s probably a seventh Practice called “Choice”; I’ll noodle on that and get back to you.
To be honest, committing to a healthy lifestyle is a hard path to walk and I fall down all the time. I love eating fine cuisine. I love luxuriating. I love my creature comforts. But I also love the idea of living a long, fulfilled life where I've had a positive impact on the world. Plus, Monique wants me around so we can grow old together (contrary to popular belief, 53 is not old these days ). Who am I to say no?
So here’s to a successful operating system upgrade and a smooth reboot of your own New Year’s Resolution! May you find and fulfill your life purpose in 2020 with Clarity, Compassion, Connection, Commitment, Courage, and Consistency.
Suggested Reading:
Immunity To Change, Robert Kegan and Lisa Laskow Lahey
The Essential Enneagram, David Daniels and Virginia Price
The Wisdom of the Enneagram: The Complete Guide to Psychological and Spiritual Growth for the Nine Personality Types, Don Riso and Russ Hudson
Dare To Lead, Brene Brown
Co-Active Leadership: Five Ways to Lead, Karen Kimsey-House and Henry Kimsey-House
