Happy New Year? There's an App for That
New Year’s Eve has long been a time of reflecting on the past year, and of course, on New Year’s Day we celebrate what we hope will be in the year ahead. In our culture, many people engage in self-reflection and make resolutions with the goal of personal change.
This year, I again experience the same sense of hope and anticipation shared by many, but I was surprised to also feel a tinge of sadness as I heard the usual advice from experts about how to keep our resolutions. I even saw several news stories about smartphone applications designed to help users keep their resolutions, such as this one from ABC News.
Now, I welcome the advice of psychologists and smartphone technology; after all, I’m a therapist who has played my fair share of Angry Birds. We often choose our New Year’s resolutions with the intention of making personal changes that have been difficult for us in the past, and naturally we want all the help we can get. Indeed, growing is a trying thing. As a friend and colleague of mine poignantly described today in her blog, meaningful and lasting change requires courage and vulnerability: Change by definition asks us to acknowledge where we are, however painful, and brings us where we have not been before, however unknown.
My conflicted feelings this year arise from my concern that too frequently the advice of experts, smartphone applications, and other such motivation boosters actually do little to affect the personal changes we seek to make. Unfortunately, most people who make New Year’s resolutions will not succeed in keeping them, which may suggest that our resolutions are too lofty. I suspect, though, that we frequently fail because of the way we think about personal growth and how it’s achieved.
As I have written about previously in this blog, we tend to conceptualize our thoughts and feelings as byproducts of internal psychological forces that are free from the influence of others. Our mental and emotional lives are measured against some imaginary ideal of objective psychological health that is somehow achievable, and our perceived shortcomings are our responsibility alone. New Year’s resolutions, from this vantage point, are action plans to address these flaws. We often fear to invite others to participate in our process of change because we are afraid of letting others see what we want to change. We may want to “fix” ourselves in order to feel safe enough to connect with others at all, or we seek to change only what is ostensibly undesirable about ourselves in our relationships while hiding from others our authentic selves. Whatever the case, we look to impersonal self-help resources to aid us while keeping others at a safe distance.
In the spirit of vulnerability, as I write today, I feel challenged to connect with others in new and stretching ways, and perhaps you feel the same way.
How could you invite others into the changes you want to make this year? How could you recognize and value the voice of others in your life? What concerns or fears do you experience in thinking about connecting with others as you want to, and how could you share that with them?