By Allison Iantosca, PCC
January leaves no wanting for posts about goals and resolutions and setting of intentions. I read some with envy. Some stir my resolve. With all of them I get familiar again with a determination that this very year will be the apex of my human mastery. A promise I make and break only days in and will remake and rebreak on a steady cycle through Valentine’s Day, July 4th, Thanksgiving and on back to the first of 2027.
Fascinating how easily I relent to my own norm. Alas. Blogs and posts are already being penned about this as well. A small comfort that I am not alone in my fallibility, but we must be missing some basic point. I wonder if the mistake we make is believing that change requires surrender, when in truth what stops us is a fierce commitment to preserving what we believe we cannot afford to lose.
Because I don’t think we can master our humanity by starting with what we don’t have, for in so doing we miss what we do have.
If we want strength, we miss our commitment to tenderness. If we want time for ourselves, we miss the loyalty we pledge to others. If we do only what we love, we miss our devotion to curiosity.
Tenderness, loyalty, curiosity…imagine giving these up! Or any of the other traits we so assiduously nurture and cultivate with active allegiance to our survival as a good-enough-human. These ways of being so precious to us as they should be– they have been useful all these many years. So useful in fact, we might not even notice how freely we employ them…until we ask ourselves to do their opposite.
Then the focus shifts to somehow acquiring a behavior we don’t actually care for, first, because it has been exiled to the shadow, and second, because in pursuing it, we quietly dismiss the very goodness of what we already possess. We create a false polarity– I am either this or I am that– with an unspoken conclusion that I cannot be both. And judgment quickly follows. This way is good; that way is bad. I am bad for wanting this, or weak for being like that. STOP.
We are whole humans, already using what we have to navigate our world. The task, then, is not correction but awareness—not judgment, but a widening of sight. Awareness creates space, and in that space, choice and possibility materialize. When we truly see how deeply we value one way of being—when we recognize it as our default and feel how firmly it is ours—only then do we have the steadiness and courage to risk something different.
At the brink of this New Year, I want choice and possibility for all of us. Instead of beginning with what we lack, let’s begin with what we already carry. So much of what we do—often without thinking—is genuinely good. The fact that we can call on it with such ease is no small thing; it is a form of quiet mastery. That is worth noting. In fact, what comes most naturally to us may be exactly what others are hoping to learn. Imagine that!
In other words, I’m glad we know how to do the things we do. So, for the sake of the success of our New Year’s Resolutions, let’s not toss out what we’ve got. Instead let’s see what we’d like to add. I have a hunch this sense of wholeness might be just the thing to make it– at least until Valentine’s Day.
Allison Iantosca, PCC is a Gestalt International Study Center (GISC) trained coach certified by ICF with extensive leadership and management experience. She is an Executive Coach and is the Owner and President of Boston based FH Perry Builder.
*Photo Credit: Crazy Nana Unsplash