Finding a new approach to new year resolutions

I always make new year resolutions, and they are usually quite generic. That approach works so long as you come up with a specific way of implementing it. Two years ago I decided to join a badminton club and I’m still going and still enjoying it. In hindsight I don’t even identify it as a resolution fulfilled, just something I did. Try and make your resolutions like this – a generic goal (get fit) turned in to a specific action (join badminton club). If I had just stuck to the generic resolution I would have gone jogging for a couple of weeks and then given up. Instead, I look forward to badminton evening every week and have a whole new bunch of friends.

For this year I decided that I want to take up a team sport and go back to studying. I’ve found a local cricket team  - Kings Heath CC – that have a good training set up and will take on beginners; and I’ve signed up for an economics course (in the Austrian tradition, naturally).

The strange thing is that I know I will thoroughly enjoy both of these things, but I needed the impetus of “making resolutions” to get into gear and actually make them happen. Why is this? Some people are blessed with an inexhaustible supply of energy and enthusiasm, but I could procrastinate for my country and I think many people are the same. This means I need all the help I can get with resolutions, so I’m trying to go for resolutions that will be “good for me” but that I will also enjoy.

One resolution I make time and again is a negative one – to stop wasting so much time on the internet, reading newspapers, and generally filling up my life with activities that don’t actually inspire or enthuse me (addictive as they are). This resolution never works. Instead I’m going to try and make a conscious effort to fill my time with things I love and this should squeeze the time for time wasting out of my day. Barbara Winter has a good take on this at Joyfully Jobless.

A typical negative resolution might be to eat more healthily. It is easy to approach that by deciding to cut out junk food. But if you eat junk food it is because you like junk food, so that probably won’t stick. A better approach might be to take a cookery course, so you can feel positive and confident about making good food choices rather than feeling like you are just depriving yourself of your treats.

Looking back at last year, I did make some changes but they weren’t new year resolutions as such. Still, it’s useful to look back and see how I did:

• Four day week – This didn’t work out how I planned but nonetheless has been a good learning experience, about myself and my motivations as much as anything else.
• Swimming – I took swimming lessons (quite a few actually), and although I improved a lot I never quite nailed it. I also wasn’t able to fit it in to my week outside of lessons. I started going to the pool before badminton but my badminton suffered, and I decided I didn’t want to go the leisure centre on another evening just for swimming. However. I do have a much better grounding should I need/want to take it up again.
• Cycling to work – Love it, saves money, gets me out in the fresh(ish) air

Looking back at these (and the badminton) gave me the confidence of knowing that I can make changes to my life that do stick, even if they don’t all work out as I expected.

Things you should never ask me

When I’m drunk, I can be a bore. I know it, and other people know it too. Perhaps you are one of those who know. If so, I apologise.

I can also be a bore when sober, but I don’t think it’s so bad then. See, when I’m drunk, I even start to bore myself. I go off on a topic and talk about it too forcefully for too long. My mind suddenly realises that I’ve gone on too long, but my mouth keeps talking. My mind hears me making the same point repeatedly in only very slightly different ways, but my mouth insists I continue.

It usually only happens when I am talking to one other person. I don’t think that I bore groups particularly, mainly because I’m not conversationally dominant enough to browbeat a whole group of people into submission.

So, as thanks for reading my blog, I’d like to offer YOU some advice on how to not end up on the receiving end of my drunken monotony. If you are talking to me at a party or in the pub, discussing weighty matters, and you suspect/know I have had a few drinks, never ever bring up the following topics if you want to escape alive:

• The state of English cricket
• The European Union
• The need (or otherwise) for manned space exploration (especially with regards to Mars)
• Sanctimonious hypocritical lefties (e.g. most of Labour, Polly Toynbee)
• The smoking ban

If you do wish to discuss any of the above topics, please feel free to firmly interject if I have been going on too long. I won’t take it personally – indeed, I shall probably thank you.

Having partially wised-up to my ranting topics, I will politely refuse to engage in any conversations regarding abortion or fox hunting.

Don’t try and change public opinion

In an article mainly about something else, Richard Black of the BBC describes the often frustrated attempts by environmentalists to change public opinion.

Campaigners – and sometimes politicians – spend hour after anguished hour debating how to reach people who are not currently interested in, or aware of, environmental issues…

Environmental groups paint murals, film-makers recount the demise of life in the oceans.

Rock bands develop “lower-carbon” tour plans, wildlife groups encourage us to take the kids out for a day’s nature observing in the countryside (you know, that other place, the one where we don’t live, that has more cows than cars…)

But still – in the campaigners’ world view – the balance weighing public opinion stubbornly refuses to shift.

“Raising awareness” often seems like the last refuge of someone who doesn’t know how to achieve their goals.  You are saying that someone (usually government) should do something about this, whatever “this” is.  Why don’t you do something about it yourself?

If climate change is your enemy, don’t go around moaning about oil companies or buying the Guardian and feeling smug; become an engineer and design a new technology or process that helps.  Too difficult?  Well don’t blame others for not yet succeeding then.  Maybe you are not an engineer, but you have an eye for a good idea, or marketing or something.  New ventures need these skills too, so find an engineer and get on with it.  Or is it just safer and more fun to moan from the sidelines?

Perhaps you are appalled by poverty in the developing world?  Surely a wristband and a Live8 concert will do the trick? Or maybe you will have to find out about microfinance and economics instead, and then work out what action you should take, and take it.  Don’t go on about how other people (government) should be spending other people’s (taxpayers) money, and get on and spend your own damn time and money and effort making a difference.  Oh, and treat people in developing countries as grown-ups, not supplicants for your soul-salving hand-outs of other people’s money.

I know, I know, easier said than done.  And some things, such as injustices caused by bad laws, do need changes in public opinion (or at least the opinion of law-makers) in order to occur.  But always, always, think first: What can I do?  Don’t default to thinking about what other should do.