It is almost three weeks after New Years now, and so you may very well have broken the last of your New Year's resolutions by now. At the same time the United States waits expectantly and hopefully as we swear in our new President. So, what have these got to do with each other?
With both resolutions and new administrations, we start off with hope. The future lies ahead of us, and we want to see a change for the better. In the case of New Year's resolutions, we are trying to change some aspect of our own behavior, or perhaps to add a new behavior into our repertoire. In the case of the country, we hope the administration will make positive changes, and each of us must take on some responsibility to try to make the world a better place.
Why do we so often fail? New Year's resolutions fade, until the following December, when we can make them again. After an initial honeymoon period, we seem to become disillusioned with our elected leaders.
One thread that binds these cases together is that we tend to avoid thinking about negative things when we plan for the future.
Take New Year's resolutions as an example. To succeed at changing a behavior or adding a new behavior, we have to start by thinking specifically about how we will add that behavior to our routine. I have written about that in previous posts. Another thing we must do to succeed is to think carefully about all of the possible obstacles that will prevent us from succeeding. If you want to start going to the gym, for example, you must think about what will happen on weeks when work gets busy. How will you balance your responsibilities at home and at work and still make it to the gym?
Unfortunately, we don't like to think about obstacles and other things that are potentially negative. For example, Mary Frances Luce, Jim Bettman, and John Payne studied choices people made about pleasant and unpleasant things. A choice involving an unpleasant thing might be to select which of three charities to give money to, where each of the charities aims to fix something sad in the world. These researchers found that people systematically spent less time making choices about sad and unpleasant things than about pleasant and happy things.
A similar thing tends to happen when contemplating a behavior change. It is very important to think through the obstacles we will face when satisfying goals in order to come up with specific plans that will allow us to overcome those obstacles. But thinking about obstacles is unpleasant, and so we avoid it. As a result, we are not prepared to deal with all of the obstacles that invariably come up when trying to change our behavior.
And as a new administration prepares to take office, it would be worth thinking through the obstacles this country faces now. We have to remember that no matter how badly we want change to occur, it occurs slowly, and only when we are prepared for the possible setbacks we face. If we prepare for those obstacles now, they will not come as such a surprise to us in the future.
In the end, we cannot afford to shy away from thinking about things that are unpleasant.
