Summertime is my season for thinking about making changes and getting stuff done, and so I've been been mulling over strategies lately. Gretchen Rubin's book Better Than Before talks a lot about understanding yourself as a key to changing your habits. She has developed a framework -- her forthcoming book is all about this framework -- that describes differences in motivation.
Hold on, there must be a google-able image I can share...
...Oh, look, an image and a quiz. Want to take it and share in the comments?
I haven't taken the quiz because I don't think I need to. I am an aspiring upholder. I have upholder inclinations. But I have some definite obliger stuff going on as well. From the moment I read her descriptions, this bothered me. It was as if (in my mind) the upholders were the good kind of people and everybody else just needed to grow up. Those obligers should just pick up their marbles and go home.
And then, after an embarrassingly long time, it dawned on me that this attitude was unlikely to prove productive. What if I just acknowledged those obliger tendencies? Just a tiny bit of external accountability does great things for me: a blog post, or (sometimes) a Rav forum post, or stating my goals for the month while I am meeting a work friend for coffee. The half-marathon group I did last summer is the reason I finished my half-marathon. The sidebar checklists I used to post here were unbelievably motivating for me; I would practically salivate at the prospect of opening up the editor and adding a <del>. Maybe the best example is the Crazy Shakespeare Project. At the time I felt guilty because it took me 53 weeks (rather than 52) to read 17 Shakespeare plays plus the poetry, but in hindsight I have to say that was a pretty successful undertaking.
Maybe it's better to work with the way I am put together instead of wishing I were put together differently. (You think, Jamie?)
Here's the other thing I have been mulling over: I like working toward goals better than working on habits. There are lots and lots of voices saying that habit-building is the the golden key to a full and happy life free of periodontal disease. And I can see their point, sure, but habits don't give a person as many opportunities to open the editor and add a <del>. Habit formation leaves me feeling like I am inching forward when I want to swoop.
One of the pro-habit/anti-goal writers I read recent-ish-ly said it was better to work on a habit of daily exercise than to say "I will spend 18 weeks preparing for my first marathon!" He said that scenario set people up for falling off the exercise wagon: the marathon ends, and so does the training program, and it's back to eating Doritos on the couch for our marathoner. I read this and winced: my own exercise routine tanked after my half-marathon in September, and didn't really recover until 10K training in the spring.
So clearly, it's a both-and situation: you can't hit the goal of running the marathon without the habit (or at least the four-month habit) of serious exercise. A person can set up successive goals that feed habit formation. But it's probably helpful for me to know this about myself: I do best with a clear and ambitious goal, a deadline that is optimistic but not crazy, and a little bit of an audience. It took me three tries to type the "little bit of an audience" part, because I still wish I could be sufficiently motivated by the goal itself.
It occurs to me that this discovery should not be surprising. A person who just entered her fourteenth year of blogging is clearly a person who might like a little bit of an audience. Even so, I am wincing a little at myself. So tell me about you, please: upholder? obliger? rebel? questioner? And habits or goals or both?
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