I have been reading and working through MJ Ryan’s This Year I Will… and I’ve gotten really into one aspect of her approach.
Ryan suggests that asking yourself why you do a particular self-sabotaging thing repeatedly is not always useful. Asking ‘Why?’ gets your left brain analyzing the problem but it won’t necessarily trigger any solutions. To do that, you need to bring your right brain on board by asking ‘What?’
What can I do differently?
What can I do right now?
What would make this situation better?
She says that answers may not be immediate, and they may not be direct – you might get a song or an image caught in your head and have to find the message – but answers will come.
I have already found this technique useful when I was trying to figure out how to exercise more. I had spent a long time trying to figure out why I didn’t but I had gotten nowhere, so after reading Ryan’s book I asked myself ‘What can I do to help myself exercise more frequently?’ and the answer came. I had to commit to doing some type of exercise daily, and I had to set a period of time to do it in.
So I decided that every day in May I would exercise for 30 consecutive minutes, but I wouldn’t specify what those 30 minutes would be. So, all throughout May, even when I was sick (Mother’s Day weekend! it sucked!) I clocked 30 minutes, either walking, doing WiiFit exercises, or going to the gym. Letting myself off the hook for the specifics, and deciding on an end date was key, and it made the difference*.
So, now I ask you to stop asking yourself why you aren’t getting something done, and instead ask what you need to/want to/can do to get it done?
*My Myers-Briggs personality type (infj) leaves me with a tendency to waste a lot of time searching for the perfect system to acheive sometime. I tend to avoid starting if I haven’t got a system in place. BUT being aware of that tendency has made me find ways to avoid the question of a system and just get started – to find the system as I work. It’s a challenge, but it’s helpful.
