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January 2, 2007

New Year's Resolution #1: No More Resolutions!

If you have ever poured your mind, body and soul into creating and implementing New Year's resolutions, chances are good you won't be doing that again soon. New Year's resolutions are more notorious for producing frustration than personal growth; because of this, many therapists suggest alternate methods for moving to higher ground.

"My advice regarding New Year's resolutions," says Judith Brodie, a Denver, Colorado based therapist, and a parent coach, "is to not make them!" In her work at Vive!, Inc., a Boulder, Colorado-based company that helps families struggling with a troubled teen, Brodie has worked with countless parents who were desperate to make changes, but exasperated by failed attempts.

Despite Brodie's dismissive approach toward resolutions, she is a champion of process-oriented personal growth. "I'm a proponent of process," says Brodie, "of figuring out what we're ready for, what we want, what we need, and then taking small steady steps in that direction. Jumps, dives, and resolutions, in my experience, are hard for people to sustain."

Psychologist Robert Maurer, a professor in UCLA's Family Medicine Department, agrees with Brodie. "The average American makes the same New Year's resolution seven years in row before giving up," he says, "this is hardly a practical solution to us wanting to better our lives." In his new book, One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Maurer applies the Japanese corporate philosophy of Kaizen--or continuous improvement through micro changes--to therapeutic healing. Instead of creating frustration and failure by attempting immediate large-scale change, Maurer suggests easing into change. "My suggestion is to take an area of life you'd like to improve and identify an activity in that area you'd like to be doing. Engage in this activity for just one minute a day, four, five or six days per week to start."

In One Small Step Can Change Your Life, Maurer tells the story of a patient who had failed repeatedly at her attempts to stick with an exercise program. Her resistance to exercise was so great that he had her just stand on her treadmill for a minute a day where she would drink her first cup of coffee and read the paper. Before long, Maurer reports, standing led to walking a little and walking a little led to walking more and more. Small steps, Maurer contends, circumnavigate our natural, neurologically based resistance to radical change, clearing the path for a process of incremental, often life changing, improvement.

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