How to get a New Year’s Resolution to stick

Imagine a family where every year, Mom tells the kids that this year, they really need to do their homework before they play video games. Mom is 100% sincere in her desire for the kids to do their homework first thing. She’s resolved. She’s committed. But the kids don’t do it. Why not?

Well it’s not much of a mystery, is it? The kids were the ones who needed to be resolved in order for this to happen. But they weren’t. Mom wanting it real bad doesn’t guarantee anything on their end.

The problem with New Year’s resolutions

That’s what goes on inside of us when we set a New Year’s Resolution in the usual way. A conscious—and conscientious—part of our personality sets the resolution. But in order to follow through with it, the subconscious, emotional parts of us—the parts that try to keep us rested and happy—have to be on board. Because those subconscious parts of us have a lot of say over what we do.

The Marital Spat That Wasn’t

Some people are happily married. As of two years ago today, I’m ecstatically married. Ninety-nine of the time, spending my life with my partner is hilarious and delightful and fulfilling.

As I type this, he started singing a sea chanty at me out of nowhere. See what I mean? [Husband note: I Saw Three Ships is a Christmas song, not a sea chanty] Yes, I let him read over this and leave notes. Checks and balances.

As wonderful as that 99% of the time is, that last 1% can be just about as painful. There’s something about being “all in” with someone that makes fighting with them hit your deepest insecurities, right? 

Early on in our relationship, we had a conflict that took us months to fully resolve. It activated the “fixer” part of me, so I tried everything: individual therapy, couples therapy, and reading everything I could find about healthy conflict resolution, including a 400 page book by famed couples therapist John Gottman. One of the things I read somewhere haunted me: the idea that couples therapy works by helping couples talk more constructively, but they almost never keep it up outside the therapist’s office.

How to Get Self-Care Right

It seems like every time I see a post about self-care, it’s telling me that I’ve misunderstood it or I’m doing it wrong. My favorite is when they say “self-care isn’t about bubble baths!” What do people have against bubble baths? (Misogyny, probably.)

But if you look closely, people are mainly alternating between saying that self-care is about self-indulgence, and saying that self-care is about being healthy and responsible.

So, which is it?

How Long Does Life Coaching Take? Speed vs Efficiency

When I first started learning about parts work, I read that it worked very quickly. And the demos seemed to back this up: IFS founder Dick Schwartz can go from meeting a person, to working with their protectors (defense mechanisms) to unburdening an exile (healing and transformation) in the middle of a podcast, and still have time to chitchat before the episode is over.

But as I read more first-person accounts and started doing my own work, I realized it’s not always like that. People with highly traumatizing childhoods still spend years in IFS therapy. It might be more like three years instead of the ten or twenty years they’d spent in talk therapy, but it’s years.

What about people who aren’t focused on healing intense trauma, but soothing the bumps and bruises of life so they can accomplish their goals—people in coaching rather than therapy? Sometimes people have a breakthrough in one session, but often it takes months to get to know a person’s protectors, gain their trust enough to go deeper, and reconsolidate a key memory, ushering in tangible change in the person’s life. And they may want to keep doing the work for longer than that, because we humans tend to have more than just one bruise!

At first, I was a little bit disappointed. It’s common in the helping professions for people to tout their best-case outcomes instead of their average outcomes, which can be misleading. At the same time, I’ve realized that speed is not the goal. Instead of trying to maximize speed, I focus on efficiency—going no faster than your system wants to go, but also not wasting time.

How to Have a Breakthrough: Memory Reconsolidation

Emotional learnings keep us safe

Imagine your great-great-etc grandparent, a hunter-gatherer, stumbling across a new type of berry. Is it a good source of energy? Or poison? They take a risk and taste a tiny bit—AGH! It tastes terrible. They’re probably tasting the bitterness of toxic alkaloids and would get sick if they ate more. Fortunately, the human brain adapted to protect them from making that mistake more than once. They’ve just acquired the emotional learning “this kind of berry is bad for me.” It’s an emotional learning because they learned it in the presence of the strong emotion of revulsion.

Unlike the facts you crammed for your history test, emotional learnings die hard. Imagine that years later, your ancestor came across the same type of berry, and, like you in your history test, they’ve forgotten their mental diary entry of the day they first found this berry. (They would remember it if prompted, but it’s not “active” right now.) Consciously, they don’t see anything wrong with this berry. But subconsciously, their emotional learning is guiding them. Their stomach gets a little queasy. Something feels off. They lose their appetite and decide not to try the berry. Their emotional learning is keeping them safe from illness even without their conscious awareness of it.

When to fire me

A lot of service providers have an onboarding process. Not many of them use that process to tell you when to fire them. But after watching The Shrink Next Door and reading about the true story behind it, I decided that it’s essential to my ethical practice.

The Shrink Next Door is the story of Isaac Herschkopf’s thirty-year career of exploiting his clients to such a degree that he even ended up taking over client Marty Markowitz’s house. Finally, Markowitz had a wake-up call, freed himself from Herschkopf’s spell, and reported him to the health department in 2012. Seven years passed without an investigation. In 2019, two things happened, and I don’t know which happened first, but I have my suspicions: a journalist found the story and made a podcast about it, and the department finally started investigating. Two more years passed before Herschkopf’s license was finally revoked in 2021.

Why you don’t need more willpower

If you’re considering coaching, it’s probably because you do things you wish you didn’t do. Well, that’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, you’re the boss of you, right? Why do anything you don’t want to do? Stop hitting yourself!

Just kidding. Your plight makes perfect sense if we rephrase “you do things you wish you didn’t do” as “the subconscious parts of you do things the conscious parts of you wish they didn’t do.” When you think about yourself, it’s your conscious parts doing the thinking, so it’s easy to confuse “yourself” with just “the conscious parts of you.” That leaves the actions of your subconscious parts as this annoying mystery:

“Why do I waste time on the internet when the task in front of me is really important?”

“Why do I turn down a job interview that would be a great opportunity?”

“Why do I agree to do a task that isn’t my job even after telling myself I’m going to stand firm this time?”