Don’t Make a Single New Year’s Resolution Until You Have Read This!

It’s coming up to that time of year when people make their New Year’s Resolutions. If you want to increase the likelihood that you will follow through with them this year, then it’s important to do a bit of mental housecleaning first. You would do well to think about your current list of desires and which of them are neatly disposed off, or packed away or which lie strewn all over the place making your house look a mess, too small and uncomfortable to move through.

Each desire, want or need that we have creates a set point in the mind. It’s like an order to a firm that needs fulfilling and is expected to be fulfilled. The orders are stored and the subconscious, which is generally very reactive and reflexive in it abilities, will attempt to carry these orders out and fulfill them. Our subconscious is our worker. Only the subconscious can control the motor functions of the body that actually transform desires into practical realities.

Your emotional response system acts like a bookkeeper and a supervisor. If you succeed then the order is crossed off of the books and you can feel content; you’ve justified your pay. If you exceed the order then you get a bonus in the form of a happy emotion because you delivered more than was required. If you fail to meet the order then you receive a reprimand and you will feel unhappy. If it’s a big order and you fail to meet it then you will be punished and made to feel miserable.

However, you are not assessed purely in terms of whether you fulfill the order or not. You are also assessed on the speed and quality of what you do and also whether you have a bias towards fulfilling easy orders only, or whether you also tackle the big, important and long term orders as well.

This is why an overflowing order book is a source of constant reprimand and discontent for the poor subconscious worker as it is always fighting a losing battle. Too many orders in one day will clearly not be fulfilled and the subconscious knows that. It knows that it’s going to be punished, so it resists doing anything in the first place. Why make the effort if failure and punishment are guaranteed? Here lies a principle cause of procrastination.

This is also a reason why we engage in doing so many trivial things. If we have too many things on the books we will feel overwhelmed and since the only way to receive our basic pay is to fulfill at least some form of order then we will opt for the easy stuff. The difficult stuff leads too easily to punishment and a further backlog of unfulfilled orders stacks up whilst we tackled the other stuff.

The problem with your emotional bookkeeper and supervisor is that it is too fastidious. It is too critical, exacting and overparticular. Every entry on the books must accounted for and each entry must be fulfilled precisely or else you will receive a bad report. You can’t really blame your bookkeeper. It has almost zero latitude to judge differently. It has no authority to direct and manage the workflow. Orders stay on the books and must be fulfilled precisely unless the boss says otherwise.

The boss in this instance is your consciousness. Your boss is the one who sends the orders to the bookkeeper. Only the boss has the authority to change the criteria of an order or cancel it altogether. Only the boss can decide whether a time extension is necessary and acceptable, or whether new training, or new equipment is needed to fulfill the order.

A great problem is that the boss is generally oblivious to the state of the order book and the condition of the worker. The worker reports to the supervisor and gets punishment or reward. The worker will solve problems to the best of its abilities but it has little or no scope for original and creative problem solving. If a few trial and error efforts don’t work then it gives up.

It is only when the worker is so heavily punished and important orders go unfulfilled for such a long time that the whole business is put into crisis that the boss gets involved and takes a personal hand in sorting the whole mess out.

A bad boss is unable to resolve the whole mess. A good boss will make a clear assessment of what’s going on. If the order book is overflowing and has too many orders that are impossible to fill then the boss will go through it and cancel orders. Sometimes the boss has to go back years, even decades, to cancel out open orders, because the meticulous bookkeeper and supervisor will hold the worker to account otherwise.

Sometimes the boss must change the criteria for the orders. Specifications must be changed, timescales must be changed, quality standards must be changed. Sometimes the boss has to accept that the company cannot produce what has been ordered. Those orders must either be cancelled, or else the worker must undergo training (and that means canceling other orders so that there is enough time for training).

The boss also needs to accept that the worker needs break times, holidays, and recreation time. These must be planned for.

In summary, if your worker is exhausted and your supervisor is continually dishing out punishments, then you are mismanaging yourself. For 2009, before you put new orders (your New Year’s Resolutions) on the books, do your staff a great favor and go through your order book.

Cancel out every outstanding order that you have that is no longer necessary, relevant, desired, or important. Cancel out orders that are impossible to fulfill. Change the specification of important orders so that you have a decent chance of meeting them. Delay putting orders on the books, if they cannot be worked upon any time soon.

To do this, make a list of the important areas of your life: career, finances, health, fitness, relationships, hobbies, personal development and so on. Then list the desires that you have for each area. Make a note of long term unfulfilled desires in particular and carefully consider whether you can and should strike them from the books. Carefully reassess your current pressing desires to see if you can make them easier to deal with and more likely to be fulfilled.

Do all of this before taking on new orders. It’s an exercise that can take a long time to do well, so do it for your most pressing and most exasperating problems first. The relief that you feel will encourage you to clear the books in the other areas of your life too.

When you do this, you put your house in order. You dispose of your rubbish. You pack away things that are not currently needed. You tidy up your work space and your living space. You can move through your home without constantly having to watch out for things that will trip you up, or that you will bash into, or that will fall on your head without warning.

You can properly assess your real situation and you can now take on important new activities and commitments.

I hope that this helps you to get 2009 off to a great start and I wish you the best of good fortune with all of your (carefully considered) aspirations for the forthcoming year.

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