Tag Archives: first resolution

Stand by! Stand by! That day is coming – be ready. SET GOALS NOW!!!

27 Sunday Dec 2015

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I am willing to be that you, like me, will start the New Year with a whole list of goals and a basketful of good intentions. Even as I write this I am using the Three Resolutions goal sheet to create the plans that represent the goals that represent the strategies that I have for the next 12 months. I do so in the knowledge that some will be achieved, some will be progressed but not completed – and others may fail. That is in the nature of ‘life’ and certainly in the nature of sport. (Don’t get me started on why a manager gets sacked when the players are failing, when ultimately if no-one failed we’d have a very boring sports channel.)

Life is full of challenges, obstacles and interruptions that stop, delay or cause us to change, our goals. If life didn’t do that we wouldn’t need goals and we certainly wouldn’t need plans. Most of life’s hiccoughs we overcome, by pass, tunnel under or just smash to one side. A wall, a diversion, whatever gets in our way, we address and vanquish.

But the biggest of those life challenges is, unfortunately for is, very intimate. It knows us only too well, knows which buttons to press and really focuses on pressing them. It really does play to our weaknesses, if we let it. That challenge is (come on, you know this by now….)

Us.

On January the 1st a lot of us will declare that we will exercise more and will eat less. And, as Hyrum put it, by 1.30pm we’re sat in the fridge. The Reticular Activating System, which normally serves us with identifying our goal opportunities, now backfires. Now that ‘food’ is a non-goal, the RAS still kicks in and identifies food opportunities whenever it sees something that sparks its well-trained alarm system. Bless it, it doesn’t realise that we don’t want to see those opportunities. We seem unable to communicate to the RAS – which doesn’t listen – that what we wanted once we no longer want. The RAS doesn’t understand DON’T or WON’T. When we say ‘I don’t want food’ it hears ‘I want food.’ Even if it’s not that clever, it hears, notices and echoes ‘food’ right back at us. With a cheery grin.

That’s when Resolution 1 needs to be strong. It’s when we have to rely on our consciousness of our conscience, and make a firm decision NOT to do something our psyche aches for.

Overcome your appetites and passions from the very first day, the very first moment you decide what you want. Overcome that tendency to settle for the easy road, which you can coast along but doesn’t necessarily get you from where you are to where you want to be.

Now, having gone a**e over t%t when a dog did a Diego Costa on me during my run yesterday, slamming an already weakened wrist, an elbow, a hip and an only-just-repaired knee into the tarmac, I have a decision to make today. Resolution 1 says RUN. Only if my conscience genuinely believes that more repair is needed, should I delay the routine, long Sunday run. If, on the other hand, the pain of the road rash is gone and the knee remains as it is as I write this entry – then off I will go this afternoon. I have two goals that depend upon me doing my very best.

Will you listen to your conscience as you write down and then execute on your 2016 goals? Don’t write down a goal you know, in your heart, you will fail to execute. That way lies persistent failure and lowered self-esteem. Find and set a goal that challenges you to exercise self-discipline – or self-denial – and execute on it from Day 1.

Your character will develop as a by-product and that can’t be bad, can it?

Shut up and win.

09 Monday Feb 2015

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“There are more quarrels smothered by just shutting your mouth, and holding it shut, than by all the wisdom in the world.” Henry Ward Beecher

It is exceptionally easy to argue a point, rationalise self-defeating behaviour, or to rally against any perceived criticism. Someone says something with which you disagree, so you are obliged to reply, strongly if appropriate, and tell them exactly like it is. More often than not, doing that also obliges you to tell them what they are, as well. You can’t help yourself – you’re in flow, you’ve attacked their argument and, since they made that argument, they must pay for it.

But if we are to exercise self-denial, we have to deny ourselves that instant pleasure of attacking back. We have to use the gap between stimulus and response, exercise proactivity and exercise our self-awareness, imagination, will and often conscience and decide that this is not a battle worth engaging in, let alone winning.

It is something I find myself doing, occasionally. Someone writes something attacking what I consider reasonable, and in a way that I perceive as ideologically biased, and the temptation to explain bluntly what I think of their viewpoint (and the fact that I see it to be blindly ideological rather than rationally argued) can be immense. But I also recognise that blind ideology cannot be argued against – that blindness is also deaf.

That’s assuming I am right, of course. But what if I am wrong, what if their argument does bear scrutiny? By attacking it I bring a shining light onto my own ignorance.

All that applies in a working/debating context, but what about in your relationships? Is it worth browbeating a spouse into intellectual submission? To what end? Who wins when you win an argument you need not have had in the first place?

Exercise the First Resolution in the name of the Third – serve others by denying yourself that “Ah! Told you so!” moment.

Religion without Sacrifice. (Don’t panic…)

15 Monday Dec 2014

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“Without sacrifice we may become active in a church but remain inactive in its gospel. In other words we go for the social façade of religion and the piety of religious practices.” Stephen R Covey

The 6th Deadly Sin is ‘Religion without Sacrifice’.

I know someone who went to church for a long time, but left when they started to realise that many people who went there professed faith and love but failed regularly to express it. In fact, such folk (like politicians, funnily enough) were visibly involved in self-aggrandisement within the hierarchy. If someone got in their way they seemed, shall we say, less charitable?

If you state, publicly, that you follow a certain path – whether that be a religious path or merely belief in a philosophy like the 7 Habits or the 3 Resolutions, then you should really try to exercise that philosophy in the moment of choice, and you should aim to do so consistently. In fact – and this is the hard part – you should be even more inclined to try to do that when it is most in-convenient, because that is when your commitment is most tested.

I find it hard, I admit. On the one hand I want to be a person of competence and good character and in the main I am, BUT occasionally something happens and I suddenly desire that the other driver involved crashes horrifically and dies in the blazing conflagration that their driving deserves. And I will always want to smash the fog-lights of people who use them in broad daylight or rain because it makes their car look pretty.

(Oops, heart on sleeve, there.)

I am no saint. Neither, I suspect, are you. But there’s no harm, and a great deal of gain, in at least moving in that direction. The First Resolution will provide you with the discipline to make better choices for yourself, and the Second Resolution will give you the character and the competence to make better choices for the benefit of others.

Mini-blog 3 – Popular television. Is it really?

08 Wednesday Oct 2014

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My daughter is a bit of a slave to soap operas, where characters, usually minority stereotypes with the same predictable problems and an inability to call the authorities when appropriate (because doing so would solve the problem too quickly for any plotline), repeat the same old mistakes in the name of entertainment. I can’t stand them and am quick to point out that (in the UK at least) they have their own Awards because they don’t deserve any awards from legitimate sources.

The problem I have with them is that they are not, as they pretend to be, reflective of society. We are not all dishonest, adulterers, liars, drunks, hiding something from anyone and everyone. And (as a retired copper), police officers are not automatically stroppy, arrogant power freaks with no sense of humour. Contrast the reality cop shows with the characters in soaps. BIG difference.

Another thing is that they do not educate – bringing some situation to ‘the awareness of the public’ is not a true description of what they do because (a) the public is already aware or they wouldn’t know what was going on and (b) it’s dramatized to the point of inaccuracy. It’s just an excuse to sell what’s on in the adverts.

In the final analysis, soap operas are popular because they are addictive. They draw us in to see what happens next as if that was important when, by virtue of it being ‘pretend’, it is not. Like any addition, The First Resolution is the antidote. These programmes are not popular because they are good. They are popular because the media insists they are, and we (you) believe them and provide the loop they need to survive. Deny yourself the ‘pleasure’ of this pointless pretence and find some informative programmes – or even an alternative medium – and study that, instead.

As the (ironically titled) programme said in the 70s: Why don’t you just turn off your television set and go out and do something less boring instead?

High Standards – a Cross to Bear?

31 Sunday Aug 2014

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When I was allocated a new position in the police service, I was also required to undertake an advanced driving course. Hitherto I had prided myself on being a talented driver, having tried my advanced driving test (failed twice); completed a racing driving course and done a few laps of Brands Hatch, and had a few amusing off-road type experiences. I’d even driven Land Rovers on tank courses. Over the years I’d read widely on advanced driving theory and practice and I felt I was quite skilled, even if my attitude stunk and I occasionally took the odd silly risk.

But in 2001 I went on this course, run by a ‘proper’ pursuit trained police Grade 1 Instructor, and my eyes were opened wide to new thinking, better observation skills and, one could argue, a higher expectation of what was expected of an advanced driver.

(For the purist I was an ‘intermediate’ advanced driver – not driving the full-blown Volvo T5s, BMW 535s etc. but a Volvo S40 area car. My take – the road’s the same shape and the pedals are in the same order, the rest is pursuit responsibility, familiarity with a slightly faster vehicle and even higher expectations. But traffic officers have a tendency to be a bit anal about their abilities/training so I dare not say all that out loud.)

Anyway, as a result of these higher expectations and a slightly more mature desire to comply with the new training and associated skill levels, I drove to the new system until I got to the point where I couldn’t drive the ‘old way’. My attitude still stinks a bit but the car control part is much better, as is compliance with protocols like observation skills, lane discipline, indicating, and so on.

The reason my attitude stinks is because I am very much more aware of the s**t skill levels of the ‘average’ motorist around whom I have to negotiate. The non-signaller, the ones who pull out on roundabouts in your path without signalling or accelerating swiftly enough NOT to get in the way, the lane hogger who switches his brain off on arrival in the middle lane and stays there from London to Edinburgh. And the phone user – a***holes whatever excuse they might think justifies potentially fatal consequences. You know the type – in fact, you may be one. (In which case change your attitude or get off my site! 🙂

At the same time, not driving related, my ‘high’ standard of verbal skills and the ability to write using sentences, correct grammar and punctuation means that the inability of others to do so, particularly when some of them are (on paper) cleverer than me – gets on my nerves. And the reading of Stephen Covey and Anthony Robbins on how we can reactively allow our environments to condition us to act in a certain way has made it abundantly clear to me why people use the word ‘obviously’ seven times a conversation and why teenagers say ‘like’ a lot; in fact, on holiday I heard a man use the word three times in one sentence – and that was three times in a row in one sentence!

Unfortunately, having (or at least striving to have) higher standards makes it abundantly, abundantly clear how low other people’s standards have become. Let me be clear – their standards are not necessarily low by intention (although they often are), it’s usually because they give no thought to how they are conditioned by their surroundings and the people in them, or they excuse their lowering of standards (driving being a very good and common example) because they aren’t being tested or examined any more. The lack of accountability for higher standards results in them being socially permitted to drop their standards to the common level.

Remember the Anthony Robbins experience with the US Marines I mentioned in an earlier blog? In one audio recording he described how he was asked to coach US Marines on leadership and motivation, and in doing so he was told that the men and women present were at the peak of their performance ‘lives’, and that when they left the Forces their standards slipped. When Robbins tells the story he opines that the reason their standards slip is because the expectations of the veterans’ post-service peer groups – new colleagues, friends, communities and society in general – are lower, and so the new standards displayed by those veterans are a reflection of the lowered expectations of the new peer group. In the Marines expectations were very high. Outside, they’re more ‘whatever works in the moment’.

One of the objectives of application of the First and Second Resolutions is to develop the self-discipline to behave in accordance with your higher values and to become exceptionally competent (expert?) in your chosen field of work – and competence can include competency in ‘routine’ life skills. To develop a higher sense of personal integrity as you discover what is important to you, to strive to act in accordance with those needs, and to achieve them at the highest possible level.

And that’s why it is annoying when I see what goes on around me. I see people capable of better who either don’t, or won’t, seek to behave at the higher level of competence or character. People who just let life dictate to them whether their behaviour is acceptable, convenient, just enough or even dangerous. Instead of taking action to make sure that they dictate to life what their standards are and how they will keep acting in their accord.

I’m still trying – are you?

 

Blog Part

I was rather pleased to discover that  I lost 6lbs this week, which means I lost the holiday weight gain (as expected) and a further 2lbs as well, meaning that I am now only 2lbs above my 2009 Half Marathon weight. That means I am ‘only’ 7lbs behind my lead measure of 210lbs by tomorrow (September 1st), and will hopefully be back on track by the 1st of October. At worst, I’ll be at target weight by Christmas provided I continue losing weight at the planned rate.

The running continues, although I was remiss twice this week – I still did the 4 runs I promised myself I would do every week in acknowledgment that occasionally life intervenes in your plan.

 

Self-preservation through Unified Living

09 Saturday Aug 2014

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Living your values, it is generally accepted in the personal development field, is the best way to ensure high personal self-esteem and life-long happiness. Charles Hobbs (TimePower) and Hyrum Smith (FranklinCovey) both specifically address how living in accordance with your highest universal principles – your own set of genuine, conscience driven rules and standards – is the best way to feel successful, because it is intrinsic (part of you) and no dependant on outside approval, social acceptance or material wealth. Living your values means serenity and peace. And violating them brings anxiety, guilt and even depression.

How do I know this? From experience, that’s how.

A couple of days ago I was merrily driving along, using the correct driving principles as taught to me by skilled police drivers, and adhering to the speed limit when a chap drove up behind me so close I couldn’t see his headlights. Considering we were in a 30mph limited road which was on the approach to a roundabout this seemed a bit silly, but I didn’t bite. I just raised my hand in a circle, separated the finger and thumb, and indicated thereby that perhaps the driver may consider pulling back a tad. He did so, and I gave him the thumbs up. Just as he accelerated hard and overtook so that he was still on the wrong side of the road as we came to the bollard at the roundabout entrance.

Now, if I had been proactive and used the stimulus/response gap to think ‘he’s a nutter so I’ll give him space’, things would have been fine. However, in that instant, I chose the ‘oh, we’ll see who can get to the gap first then, shall we?’ reactive technique. As it was, there was just enough – by inches – space so that no collisions occurred and I was able to add a verbal description of the driver through our mutually open car windows before we went I our separate directions.

And for the rest of the day I felt really off.

I felt off because I had failed to act in accordance with my unifying principle ‘I demonstrate high levels of skill and patience in driving.’ I felt off because I had not considered that circumstances like this lead to potential confrontation and while I am not fearful of ‘it’, confrontation is such an open ended activity. If I win the immediate confrontation I have no guarantee that it stops when it is over, especially these days when violence and revenge and utter stupidity seem to be the watchword of people whose first response is reactive thuggery, rather than being dragged slowly towards that end. Would I find that he would torch my car, find out where I live and threaten my kinfolk? If there had been a rumble, even if I had won what could the legal consequences have been? Was I prepared for them, did I want or need such inconvenience? And if the road hadn’t been wide enough, was I prepared to spend money and time repairing my car because I was reactively miffed?

Over the remainder of the day (and my reaction still irked me at bedtime) it occurred to me that, occasionally, it is not the highest ideals that we find hard to live up to, but the tiny ones. Say we choose to study, and do so diligently towards a professional qualification. It’s hard, but it’s doable. At the same time we resolve to be patient, and then someone jumps into the front of a queue and we go nuts. In many ways the patience objective is the easiest – easy to understand, easy to see ourselves doing it, easy to define – but the stimulus to challenge it can be too sudden and we have no time to think (correction, we do not take the time to think) and so we fail.

It’s a lesson we should all consider to be valuable. We have failed, so next time we won’t. It’s a demonstration that we are compliant with both the First and Second Resolutions. We discipline ourselves to be patient, deny ourselves the counterfeit sense of righteousness that the offending behaviour can engender within us, and our character shines through (with some competence in patientology).

Next time – just drive off ahead of the tailgater, or let him go. Let him offend and endanger someone else – I am too important to me and to my family and friends to suffer because of my own ego.

As are you.

Blog Part
Only two pounds lost this week but the running programme continues apace (see what I did there?). This weight loss means (if it continues at 2lbs per week) I may miss my 1/9/ target but as the months differ in lengths I anticipate that any slide back will be compensated for by 1/10/14. The diet remains easy to comply with, too.