Dig Deep To Make Ambitious Resolutions Stick

Are you making one or more ambitious New Year's resolutions?  If you hope to change a long-held habit or deeply ingrained behavior, you will have to dig deep.  In essence, you're job is to persuade yourself that the change is more than just a good idea.  It is worthy of true commitment that makes sense and resonates with what you believe about yourself and what you value so that you can develop a new day-to-day attitude to support the new behavior.  If you don't think it through in this way, you risk fighting with yourself to make the resolution stick.  You will be of two minds.  Part of you wants to change, but there is a part of you that remains unconvinced.  This conflict usually leads to failed resolutions.  You simply wear yourself out trying to do something that you don't believe in 100%.

Except for trivial matters, almost all of your choices and based on the network of beliefs, attitudes, and values that has grown in depth and complexity over time, sometimes years, sometimes over the course of your entire life.  As an example, you might resolve to fill up your car at a different gas station because of something you have recently learned about your old favorite's environmental practices. If you feel strongly enough about this issue, you will effortlessly change your routine.  

To keep this real, you do not need professional counseling or deep soul searching to break every bad habit or to start something new and beneficial. Sometimes behavior change can lead to a new attitude.  Sometimes, through sheer force of will you can develop a new habit that will produce its own reward in how you feel and think.  Your might find that willpower alone is enough to get into an effective exercise routine.  You start to see physical benefits.  You feel better.  You automatically convince yourself that it is worth the time and effort and stick with it.  

Whatever your situation and whatever your resolutions may be, don't agonize about them.  If they're a good idea, just go.  Get started.  But if you have tried and failed to do the same thing in the past, take some time to dig deep and work out why your were not successful.  What change do you have to make in your thoughts and feelings foundation to build the proper support for your new choices?

Thinking Ahead About New Year's Resolutions That Stick

If you’re like me at all, you may have made any number of New Year’s resolutions over the years, only to fail miserably at keeping them, sometimes after some weeks or months, sometimes after only days.  So how do we make resolutions that we will keep?  It helps to start thinking about them now, instead of coming up with a spur-of-the-moment good idea on December 31.  So, what makes an idea a “better idea” and one that is more likely to stick?  Most of our hasty resolutions are based only on the anticipated benefits.  We fall short when we run into the costs of keeping the resolution, costs that we are unprepared to pay.  Sometimes we lack the necessary support in our family and social circles.  Sometimes, we just don’t believe in ourselves.  We expect ourselves to fail.

Here are five questions.  Ask yourself each of them and answer honestly.  Then you will have a well thought-out resolution that will lead to a permanent and meaningful change in behavior.

1. What are the benefits?  These are the same things that come to mind when we come up with those good ideas that don’t last.  The difference however is this.  Spend a little time thinking through all of the benefits, not just the obvious ones, short term and long term. Sell yourself on the benefits.  Make a good case.
2. What are the costs?  What is it going to cost you in time, effort, discomfort and inconvenience to see this through?  Prepare yourself to accept whatever sacrifices will come your way.
3. What about other people?  What are others going to have to do to support me in this?  What changes must my family make?  My coworkers?  Others?  Will they be supportive?  How do you get them behind you?  As you line up support, you also create beneficial external pressure to stick with your plan.
4. What do you think about yourself?  Think about your ability to follow through and make positive change in your life.  Where have you had success in the past?  Envision repeating that success.  Make a plan to incorporate what went right and to avoid what went wrong. 
5. Is your goal realistic?  This is both the first and the last question.  Don’t make resolutions that are beyond anybody’s realistic ability to achieve.  Don’t try to lose 100 pounds by Valentine’s Day.  Create a plan to lose weight gradually and safely through sustainable changes in your habits.  Are you deeply in debt?  You probably won’t dig your way out by March, but you can resolve to make a two-year or three-year plan and to live with a spending plan that is below your income.  The surest way to fail is to attempt the impossible. 

In short…five actions:

• Plan a realistic goal.
• Focus on every way that you and others will benefit.
• Be prepared for the costs and to make the necessary sacrifices. 
• Enlist the support of others.
• Believe in yourself.

Hope for Haiti

I was looking through today's mail just as the Hope for Haiti benefit began on just about every television network. One piece of mail was from Compassion International encouraging us to take a few minutes to write to a beautiful girl whom we have sponsored for several years, Clairciane. She lives in Haiti, west of Port au Prince, about 20 miles from the epicenter.

Over 6o,000 children are enrolled in Compassion's programs in Haiti, about 10% of them in Port au Prince. Approximately 50 of Compassion's centers were affected by the earthquake. So far, Compassion has reports from only 28 of them. At least 100 children are known to have died, dozens injured and hundreds left homeless. Who knows how many have lost a father or mother, a sister or a brother?

I was struck by the timing as I opened the mail today. When was that mailing planned? Almost certainly before the earthquake. That it would arrive today and that I would find it at the very beginning of the TV benefit is only a small thing. But it is a poignant reminder that we are all in this journey together. We hope to hear soon that Clairciane and her family are safe. We pray and wait with hope, hope for Clairciane, hope for Haiti.

How soon we forget!

Or shall I put that in the form of a question, "How soon will we forget?"

How soon before most of us forget about Haiti? I hate to seem a cynic but I know how we are. Once the shocking news coverage slows down, we'll begin to forget and I fear that we will mostly forget long before the misery is relieved.

Feel free to point out why I'm wrong. I'd love to be wrong about this.

Take A 9/11 Coffee Break

A lot of people, including me, just can't get started in the morning without our coffee. You see us walking down the street, sipping from a paper cup. You see us driving with one hand on the wheel and another holding a travel mug.

It occurred to me this morning, while thinking about 9/11, thinking about what's important and what isn't, that if I really like coffee, if it is really more than just a habit, that I ought to sit down, take five or ten minutes and enjoy it.

Today especially, eight years on since that horrible Tuesday morning of September 11, 2001, we all could use a pause. Take a few moments to remember the victims, their families and the heroes of that day. Just take a few moments and consider what it means to be an American and how that changed eight years ago.

Take a few minutes and enjoy a nice cup of coffee. Please. Do it in honor of those friends, neighbors, business associates and strangers who were just arriving at work that morning, carrying a nice cup of coffee and a bagel; or those who had been at their desk for a while and were thinking about having a second cup. Have a nice cup of coffee today. Seriously. But while you do, don't forget those who had their last cup of coffee that morning. Never forget about them.

The Human Trafficking Supply Chain

Suppliers and Consumers

When we talk about the international trade in illegal drugs, we sometimes talk about supplier countries and consumer countries. There is supply and there is demand, connected by a supply chain. Likewise, human trafficking is a supply chain business estimated at over $9 billion / year.

Supply

Poverty and lack of education and awareness create vulnerability. The most vulnerable, the children of the poor, are the primary supply source for human traffickers.

Demand

For those victims who are trafficked for "simple forced labor", the demand is a matter of greed, absent oversight of working conditions and broken economies. When victims are trafficked into the sex trade, the demand question is even uglier. Call it an addiction, depravity or what you will. There would be no trade without consumers.

What can we do?
What we must do is intervene where we can, anywhere along the chain. Education, economic development and law enforcement are just three of the possible interventions. Born To Fly International emphasizes education. Today is a great day to help them out. RIGHT NOW, they are in the midst of a one-day fundraiser... looking for 9,000 gifts of $9 so they can go to press with their first wordless children's book. Please help out at http://born2fly.org/ and then tell a friend!

Fanatic At Large

William Wilberforce, the great British abolitionist once said, “If to be feelingly alive to the sufferings of my fellow-creatures is to be a fanatic, I am one of the most incurable fanatics ever permitted to be at large.” I do not have the passion or persistence of Wilberforce but I know that his work is not done. Although the British Empire abolished the slave trade during his lifetime and slavery as an institution soon after his death in 1833, the buying, selling and exploitation of our “fellow-creatures” continues today, in 2009.

The problem of human trafficking and modern day slavery is massive and reaches nearly every country. It almost seems too big, too widespread to defeat but the size of our foe should not determine the size of our fight. We must persist. We must do what we can. Mother Theresa said, “We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop.”

As I have been writing about for several days (this is the eighth of nine blogs on the topic), Diana Scimone, Founder and President of Born To Fly International, is one of those "fanatics at large" who cares beyond all normal measure for her "fellow creatures." Her organization is working against human trafficking and deserves our help and support. Tomorrow, 9-9-9, they are looking for 9,000 friends who can spare a mere $9 each to help them publish educational materials aimed at raising awareness of children and parents around the world. Please take a look: http://born2fly.org