Yesterday, I wrote about making Valentine’s Resolutions.  And, if you are on board with me, you defined the change you want to make in order to move toward living a life you love.  Merely clarifying your goal and phrasing it in positive language gets the ball rolling.  Suddenly, your energy shifts and you are eager to make your intention a reality.  I hope that is so for you.  The next step is to identify the benefits of making the change.   What compelling reason do you have for leaping tall buildings in order to get to the new behavior or new way of being?  If, for example,  you strive to become more accepting and forgiving and someone pushes your buttons, what is in it for you to accept and forgive inspite of your desire to retaliate, strike out, write off, have the last word or whatever your habitual response is? 

Speaking of buttons being pushed, what are some of the things that trigger your old, no longer useful behaviors?  What occurs that causes you to do the things you are trying to change?  What prompts you to be impatient and lose your temper with your kids?  Reach for a cigarette?  Eat large quantities of chocolate?  Identifying the triggers can help you anticipate your old ‘bad behavior’ and gives you a chance to short circuit it by inserting your new more effective action.

Some people made New Year’s Resolutions.  And 36% of those people, are looking at those good intentions in their rear view mirror by now.  If you are one of them, there’s no reason why you can’t ressurect them, or, if you didn’t make them at all on January 1, it isn’t too late to make them now.   Call them Valentine’s Resolutions and make them as an act of love for yourself.  What change, large or small, do you want to make that will help you live a life you love?  Will you express more love for someone?  Be more forgiving of yourself?  Quit smoking?  Stop tapping your foot?  Large or small, if there is a change you’d like to make, make it in the name of love, for yourself and everyone you touch.

As a first step, just decide what you’d like to do differently.  Phrase it in the positive.  Describe what you’d like to start doing, not what you’d like to stop doing.  Make sure it is something you really want to do and that you can commit to doing, not something you think you should do.  And, by want, I don’t mean that it might not be hard but that you can see enough value in it that when the going gets tough, you’ll stick with it.  Having a clear intention is the solid first step to change.  It’s the foundation from which you’ll build the rest of your plan.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about my struggle to write a blog post despite the fact that I knew I should do it.  After I wrote it, I realized that my resistance to writing was about ‘shoulding’.  I asked myself, ‘Who says I should?’ ’Do I think I should?’  ‘Why should I?’  And I came up with the fact that I’ve been told by blogging experts that I should, because I need to have a regular presence in the blogosphere.  I think I should because, well, THEY say so and I have this voice in my head that says, ‘If I were really serious about building my business and serving my clients, then I would write regularly.’ I realized that as long as those were the reasons why I should, I wouldn’t.  But, when I realized what I can gain by doing it, what’s in it for me, I got excited.  The benefit, for me is that, I really like to write and I’d like to get better at it and that once I get started I get on a roll and I have fun writing.  I think that people can relate to my writing and that what I have to say is useful to a lot of people.   So there are a lot of really good reasons to write often.  But, as long as certain conditions are in place (in my mind) it’s a stuggle.

Here are the top 6 things that get in my way and what I can do to overcome them:

 Problem:  I’m highly self-critical and often think my writing isn’t good enough. 

Solution:  Acknowledge my inner critic and invite her to  take a back seat for a while and come back later.  Continue writing until I am finished and then go back and edit.  Remember that my first attempt is only a draft, a starting point to work from, not the final product.

Problem:  I think I should.

Solution:  Determine what the value is for me; how will I benefit? 

Problem:  I don’t know how to get started.

Solution:  Just start.  Look inside at what’s going on, listen to your inner voice or look at an article or website and just start writing about what you find.  Usually, once I get started, it just starts to spill out of me.

Problem:  Self-defeating beliefs

Solution:  Test those beliefs.  Are they true?  Is it true that I have to post every day in order to be good and committed?  No.  I’m  good at what I do and committed to my clients and my business whether I post every day or not.

Problem:  Perfectionism

Solution:  “Perfect is the enemy of progress.”  Determine when good is good enough.

Problem:  I don’t have time.

Solution:  I’ll do what I can in the time I have.  If I don’t finish, I’ll come back to it later.  Often, things don’t take as long as I think they will and I find that the time I have available is, in fact, enough time.

Have you ever had one of those days when you were ‘supposed’ to do something and you just didn’t feel like it?  Like blogging for example (oops, did I say that out loud?)  So, I’ve been thinking all day that I should write a blog post and then, I’ve conveniently found something else to do.  Some of the things I’ve distracted myself with have been important and productive, others, not so much like eating again, checking my email for the zillionth time and cleaning the bathroom.  You know I’m desparate when I clean the bathroom.  Even as I’m writing this, I’m finding ways to avoid the subject.  Or am I?   Actually no.  Because one way to make writing easier for those of us who sometimes resist it is to make writing a habit.  What’s that mean?  It means that even when you don’t feel like it, even when you don’t know where to begin, even when it feels like a chore or that there’s something better to do, you do it anyway!  On a schedule, like clock work, no matter what, no kidding.  Just like you’d do anything else you were trying to make a new habit, like exercising, drinking a glass of water instead of smoking or biting your fingernails, washing the dishes instead of leaving them in the sink, putting things away after you’ve finished using them.  You’ve got to ‘just do it’, to borrow a phrase from Nike.  And the more you do it, the easier it gets and the easier it gets the more fun it is and the more fun it is, the better you get at it and before you know it, you do it without thinking about it or at least, without the struggle.  Before you know it, you can’t imagine yourself NOT doing it.   Before you know it, it has become a habit!  See you tomorrow.

Being more of a New England Patriots fan than a football fan, I didn’t have a lot of interest in yesterday’s Super Bowl  game, but I did watch it.  I’m not one to pass up a party with chili and ribs and other food that tastes really good and is really bad for you!

My favorite part of the game, (besides Springsteen doing the halftime show), was watching the commercials.  I thought most of them were pretty lame this year but I just loved the CareerBuilder.com ad.  If you didn’t see it, it showed a series of people who were miserable in their jobs because of stress, disrespectful and intolerable co-workers and the like.  It showed the symptoms of this stress including crying all the time and the desire to punch small animals.  And it was done in a sort of “I packed my Grandmother’s suitcase” kind of way.  You remember that game you used to play to pass the time on long car rides, where you repeated everything that had been ‘packed’ before and added something that began with the next letter of the alpabet?   So, over and over again, we saw a woman screaming and banging her head against her car steering wheel, an empoyee walking past his co-worker’s cubicle calling him an idiot, a half clad colleague, picking his toes, a man crying and someone punching a stuffed baby koala bear.  And, we saw the alternative to all of that, the woman riding a porpoise in the turquoise sea, having the time of her life. 

This commercial made me think of my many clients who do what they do in many areas of their lives because it’s what they’ve always done and it’s comfortable and familiar and because they don’t know how to get out of the perpetual loop.  They do it, in part, because to do things differently is too scary.  Being safe serves them in some way.   Yet at the same time, there is a little movie running in the background tempting them to a life they love, relationships they yearn for, a way out off the hampster wheel they are stuck on.  

The CareerBuilder.com commercial was criticized because the ‘experts’ felt that in this economy people  wouldn’t be complaining about having a job, any job, given the number of people who are unemployed or fear they soon could be.   I think you can take away a bigger message from the ad.  First, there are jobs out there.  The same companies that are cutting back in some areas may be hiring to beef up other areas.  And, it’s dangerous and self-defeating to think otherwise.  And, for me, the ad is a caricature of life.   We put up with, we tolerate, we let others’ behaviors run us, day in and day out.  We bang our head against the wall, we cry, we allow ourselves to become victims of our circumstances.  But even in challenging times, we can find ways to think differently, show up differently or do things differently in order to increase our satisfaction. And we have the power to make changes no matter what our situation.  

To see all of the Super Bowl ads, go to http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1874549_1874552_1876150,00.html