Psst! Want to give yourself a failsafe way of getting out of keeping those resolutions you signed up for on new Year’s Eve? Follow these five easy steps.
1. Don’t analyse the conditions present. Of course you don’t need an idea of exactly where you’re starting from. And you certainly don’t need to know what’s around that will help or hinder you. *
2. Make your goals as vague and non-specific as possible. “To be a better person” or “to move freely at all times” is a totally acceptable and achievable goal to have. **
3. Don’t give yourself an end-point or time limit. I mean, you wouldn’t want to give yourself a suitable timeframe for analysing whether you’d made any progress. Then you might realise that you were going about things the wrong way. or, more interestingly, you might see that your goal was too ambitious, or just wasn’t right for you, and then you’d have to go to the trouble of thinking out a new one. How tedious.***
4. Don’t bother thinking about how to reward yourself when you’re finished. Rewards are for kids.
5. Don’t bother thinking about the nuts and bolts of how you’re going to achieve your goals. Who needs steps and planning anyway? If they’re meant to be, then they should just magically manifest themselves without you having to do any work at all. Shouldn’t they? ****
If you follow these steps faithfully, you will successfully avoid even coming close to achieving your resolutions again this year, and you can carry on muddling along through life in the same old ways as before.
Cool.
* FM Alexander, Use of the Self in the Irdeat edition, p. 423.
** These are genuine goals that students have come up with in my classes. Sad but true.
*** in Evolution of a Technique FM may not give specific time frames that he used for evaluating what he was doing, but it is pretty clear from the text that he did. See p.423.
**** See Use of the Self , p. 423 .
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