I-Quest:  Happy New Year!

An Identity-Quest is the process of consciously developing an understanding of your multiple identities and how to refine them over time.

    

     I think January 1 is the most symbolically powerful day in the entire year.  It signals hope.  It signals change.  It is, as they say, the first day of the rest of your life.  Big stuff.  Huge.  Monumental.  This is the day, consciously or unconsciously, most people hope to become different, better, transformed.  Somehow life will be just a little happier.  Some of us map it out carefully like we are about to journey to the rainforests of South America – make it sustainable!  Breathtaking!  Eco-friendly! A file or notebook full of lists will make the journey perfect. Others just name the changes they want:  Lose weight, stop smoking, be kinder, be more assertive, relax, spend more time with family, etc.  Turns out both approaches are superficial and in the end are  about as effective as Bob Newhardt’s TV psychiatrist advice to a woman who is terrified of being buried alive in a box:  “Just Stop it!”    The sad reality is that most people who start the new year with a resolution to do something or to be different, end up failing.  And it’s not because they aren’t trying hard enough, often it’s because they are counting on a strategy that cannot work – will power.  Oliver Burkeman, a psychologist, argues that will power is a “depletable resource”.  He says that the more of it you use making one change, the less you’ll have left over to make others.  Or maybe because you are exhausted from the mental effort, constantly thinking about what you are trying to change – I remember a friend of mine in college saying that when she was on a diet and wanted to think about anything but food, that is all she thought about.  Or maybe it’s because change is just more complicated than that.

     The idea of will power doesn’t get to the heart of what is known about personal, permanent change.  It’s way helpful to know how you got to be the way you are in the first place – understanding a little about the influences, tools and even processes that have made you who you are will, in turn, make them available to you to enact real, substantive transformation. That is part of the I-Quest project I hope to share and explore with you in this blog.  Self-change is not about a simple series of behaviors, doing something different.  That is a small part for sure but behaviors have to reflect deeper, inner shifts.  The real deal lies in the assumptions you make about who you should be when you step into one of the many different social roles you play in your life:   as a professional, a friend, a mother/father, wife/husband, a daughter/son, a lover, etc.  What it means to be a mother, a husband, a daughter, a sister, a professional, etc. are identities that  have been constructed over time through ongoing, daily, interactive experiences with others.  We learn how to be a mother from watching mothers and interacting with our own. From the time we are born, the incredible number of social and cultural interactions in which we are involved on a daily basis begin to take root and say  how we should put ourselves together.  People construct understandings of how they should be in the world.  But what has been constructed can be deconstructed and reconstructed so that we can always become a new version of ourselves -- one we are more satisfied with and ultimately one more aligned with who we have always wanted to be. 

     Let’s go back to making resolutions on this super-duper important day; to start with,  you do not want a long list of resolutions.  One, two, three at the most and it’s better if they are connected – that they live together in the same identity.  For example, if the outcome you want for this year is to be a healthier person, then, nutrition and exercise naturally belong together (less stress and other things might also go in this category but it may be too much to take on all together and living a less stressed life could be one cool result of the other two).  One of the biggest issues is to start right away by focusing on your identity of being a person who is healthy – “I am someone who (fill in the blank) – eats fresh fruit and vegetables  every day, someone who monitors and controls the number of calories I eat, exercises 30 minutes 4-5 times a week, is aware of current thinking regarding nutrition, etc.  This is your, unique identity and, so, make it work for you, make sure it feels right, that it resonates with you, it’s really who you want to become. Writing about this new self can sometimes make an enormous difference and fuel a process of change that will inevitably take time. I have many journals and computer files of personal writing; each morning I grab one and do what I call “Writing Myself into the Day”.  Sometimes the writing is just affirmations of my strengths and successes but the focus is usually on the identity I am currently working on, how a person like that would think, how they would talk, and actions that would project someone who is really like that. People who are becoming healthy, for example, never say they are on a diet because that is almost always a short term thing, rather, they articulate other identity-related comments like:  “I don’t think sugar is that healthy (and I'm a healthy person) so I’ll skip the cookie for now.”  Identities are complex and don’t come into being quickly.  Stay focused, reflect on how you want to perform this particular part of yourself.  And remember one of my favorite quotes:  “Even if you stumble, you’re still moving forward.”