Resolution Rhumba
Rick Lefever, Hypnotic Behavior Enhancer
Welcome to that glorious time of year that is uncomfortably nestled between unwrapped gifts and W2's. That's right... I'm talking about New Year's resolution time. New Year's resolutions time, when we set about to mold an ambitious new life for the coming year built upon the ragged remains of what didn't get done last year.
The basic challenge with this usually tried and trivial process of yearly review and re-writing is that it temporarily threatens the primary operational basis of our lives. That threat being a threat to our living in the familiar. I say temporarily, because our neural system generally does its level best to quickly forget, discard, or obliterate this effort rather than continue risking exposure to the threat of journeying into the unfamiliar.
We have no internal or external drive greater than our powerful urge to live in the safe familiar. Any resolution worth its salt represents a direct frontal assault on our edifice of the familiar. Do you want to lose weight, quit smoking, make more money, or give up any one of a host of nasty but familiar habits? Good luck.
A lean, healthy, rich, or virtuous you quite likely lay outside the realm of the familiar. This fact usually means that the lean, healthy, rich, or virtuous you also lay outside the realm of the possible, or allowable. For most of us unaided, welcoming the unfamiliar is the most challenging task we can face. It is so common that it is a major-league cliché... we don't very often reach our New Year's goals.
Lest you give up on this New Year's resolutions before they are even hatched, let me suggest a strategy that might just make a difference. What if we could fool your mind into re-writing the boundaries of familiar to include your new goals? In fact, why stop merely at expanding your sense of the familiar with regard to your goals? How about if we engineer a mental state where the accomplishment of your chosen goals became the path of least resistance? What if the "you" that crafted the resolution actually got to be the "you" that sat behind the steering wheel of your life?
Let's steal a trick from the tool box of hypnotic behavior enhancement. This simple trick is often very effective in expanding our comfort zone to include something new and, well, "resolutionary".
Pick one of your New Year's resolutions. I would recommend picking a minor one at first just to keep this exercise light and fun. Weave it into a nice goal image, as detailed and rich as possible. When you've truly made your target into a work of goal art set it carefully aside for a moment.
Now, scan your memory and find a pleasant past event that strongly resembles several aspects of your goal. The nature of the memory is not critical, as long as there are some common aspects that this memory image shares with your freshly designed goal image, and that the overall nature of the memory is positive. Which elements the two experiences, real memory and imagined goal, have in common is unimportant. They can be major or minor aspects of either of the two experiences. This recalled event is going to serve as the canvas on which we are going to paint your future goal. The important quality of this memory, and thus the canvas for your new goal image is that, being a memory, it is familiar. We are going to borrow the familiarity of the memory and apply it to your new goal.
So, using your mind's editorial creativity, reshape, re-write, and remold that memory until it becomes an accurate mental representation of your goal image. As you are rewriting your memory to incorporate your new goal, keep aware of the elements required by your mind to keep the "memory" quality of the experience. If you change any particular piece and suddenly notice that it no longer feels like a memory, then undo that last change and find a different change that leaves the "memory" feel. The critically important point to this exercise is that this edited memory never looses its "memory" feel.
When you are done editing, the newly crafted goal image/memory probably won't be an exact match of the goal image you created above, but as close as can be. Your end result will be very similar to your New Year's resolution goal image recently set aside, with one major difference — being built upon the skeleton of a memory it will have the comfortable familiarity of that memory rather than the threatening unfamiliarity of a shiny new goal. Without that potentially derailing and uncomfortable unfamiliarity, your goal has a much better chance of being realized. Additionally, you don't have to accomplish a remembered activity, it's already been done. You new goal becomes a fait accompli.
If you are interested in more information about Hypnotic Behavior Enhancement, please contact Rick Lefever at RoseSprings Center for the Healing Arts.
