Making and keeping resolutions to change habits is hard. You will probably see a lot of blog posts or magazine articles about making and keeping your New Year's Resolution this time of year. The New Church offers some new perspective about what goes wrong when we try and fail to change our ways. Here are four things that often go wrong and what you can do to prevent or fix the problems.
1. Making a resolution you don't really want to keep.
New Church Teachings tell us that there are two things that constitute a person's mind: the will (the loving or feeling part) and the understanding (the thinking or reasoning part). These two parts work together, but one of the two is actually in charge—the will.
If you are making a resolution to improve yourself in some way, on some level you want to change, and therefore on some level you have a will to change. (Give yourself a pat on the back.)
However, that doesn't mean you really want to keep the resolution. Another part of your will will try to stop the change process. Fundamentally speaking, you are already doing what you want to do. If you wanted to do it any other way, you would be.
Solution: Strengthen your will to change.
If you want to succeed with your New Year's Resolution, take it seriously enough to find and eliminate the barriers or habits that stand in the way. It can also help to focus on the things you love that support the change you want to make. For example, if your New Year's Resolution is to be better about keeping your temper, find out and try to circumvent circumstances or behaviors that cause a short fuse and focus on the ways losing your temper hurts the people you love.
2. Not being willing to suffer through self-compulsion.
If the greater part of your will actually opposes the proposed resolution, then you must go in knowing it is an uphill climb. Fundamentally you don't feel like making this change, otherwise you would just do it, and it would be easy. If you don't feel like doing something but you do it anyway, that is self-compulsion. Self-compulsion is not fun or easy, but if you are going up hill, it's the only way.
Solution: Go in knowing you don't feel like doing it, but do it anyway.
You don't want to do it—your will opposes the change you are trying to make—but use your understanding to make yourself do it anyway.
There are tons of tricks to making yourself do something even if you don't feel like it, and most New Year's Resolution or goal setting articles focus on this part. Search out and try different strategies for tricking, coaxing, or generally bullying yourself into action. Do what works for you.
3. Not bringing the Lord into the process.
Two teachings make up the heart of what the New Church is all about: the Lord Jesus Christ is the one loving God and the process of becoming a better person leads to eternal life and happiness. A New Year's Resolution is a great way to involve yourself in the process of becoming a better person (especially if your resolution is moral or spiritual in nature), but not bringing the Lord into the process is just plain wasteful.
I say wasteful because the Lord wants you to succeed; He loves you and would love for you to be happy. He wants to give you the strength, determination, and joy that it takes to succeed in the change process. That being said, what is most important to your happiness is your relationship to your loving God. All good things in your life He gives you and much unhappiness comes from not recognizing His presence in those gifts.
Solution: Pray to the Lord for help and strength.
The Lord can give you more blessings and more success when you turn to Him in prayer to ask for the tools it takes to succeed in change, and then act as if of yourself to scrape and claw your way to success all the while knowing He is giving you every ounce of fight and every little win.
4. Failing to fail successfully.
There is no way you are capable of making a change without falling short in someway. It is insanity to expect anything else. Many New Year's Resolutions are abandoned because we convict ourselves of failing to keep the resolution and give up. The insanity of this attitude is easy to see in physical attainment goals. Would you expect to be able to hit a bulls eye with every shot you took from the first time you picked up a bow and arrow? Would you expect to juke all the defenders and score the winning goal without lots of missed shots and many stolen balls? Don't reasonably expect more in the other areas of your life.
Don't expect too much of yourself, but do hold yourself accountable. Just like you would not be happy with the arrows that flew wide of the mark in archery, don't be pleased with your failures to reach your goals. But just like learning archery, review why you missed and why you hit the mark.
Solution: When you miss the mark, ask yourself why and make the changes.
When failure happens, go back to the fundamentals and ask yourself why didn't that work. And when you do hit the mark with you resolutions, ask why did that work. I would suggest using the first three areas as a guide to reviewing your failures and successes. When your change becomes a habit, you can stop asking yourself why all the time. But until your change is a habit, it's best to keep asking yourself why what you did worked or not.
Here are questions you can ask to guide your evaluation of the change process.
Will and Understanding
Luke 14:28-33; New Jerusalem and Its Heavenly Doctrine has a small summary of the will and understanding (7 pages in a paperback sized book) starting from paragraph 28. (There is lot's of great stuff that follows on after that about levels of the mind and how these levels relate that will give you great insights into what any change process entails, so don't feel like you have to stop at just understanding the will and understanding.)
Self-compulsion
Luke 9:23-25; Secrets of Heaven 1937; Zen Habits on New Year's Resolutions. (The Zen Habits blog has lots of great tips and tricks for doing what you don't feel like doing; scroll to the bottom of the linked article to see more articles on the same topic.)
The Lord in the Change Process
Mark 11:22-24; John 14:12-18; there is a whole section in True Christian Religion (starting at paragraph 509) on the change process called "repentance," which in less Latinate English simply means "rethinking life," but paragraph 538 deals specifically with what to pray for.
Failing Successfully
John 15:1-8 (think of pruning as getting rid of what doesn't work); Luke 11:5-13; True Christian Religion 720.
Derrick is a father, husband, life-time student and student of life. He is also the assistant pastor at New Church Westville in South Africa (a new church). Some of Derrick's current hobbies include: strength training (which began with this program); gnu-linux-ubuntu; dog training with his German Shepherd puppy; dreaming of planting a church; learning and reading.