The 9.2% Club - on successful resolutions, cats, self-help and thinking about thinking

This morning I began reading a book I bought over a decade and a half ago. When I bought it, I thought it would be beneficial, but I didn't take the action to realise the benefits. I hadn't made the time. Until now. Why does intention to action sometimes take over 15 years to happen? How can we shrink that time delay to benefit far more immediately from the wisdom we're presented with?

The book is titled 50 Self-Help Classics a by Tom Butler-Bowden, 2001. Ah, the irony.

Butler-Bowden writes, self-help is "the refusal to accept 'common unhappiness' or 'quiet desperation' as the lot of humankind." He continues, "To make the most of life, we need things like vision, emotional intelligence, ethics, an awareness of history and a thirst for knowledge and ideas. These qualities can't be force-fed by education, family or religion, or even provided by your firm. We live in a time in which institutions may be able to protect us from hunger, thirst and cold, but will not be able to airlift us out of misery caused by absence of purpose, or ignorance of how to change ourselves."

Change happens when we make a decision to change and take the action necessary to begin, continue and conclude the process. In a study by Statistic Brain on New Year's Resolutions for 2017, here are the top resolutions for 2017:

1. Lose Weight / Healthier Eating (21.4%)
2. Life/Self Improvements (12.3%)
3. Better Financial Decisions (8.5%)
4. Quit Smoking (7.1%)
5. Do more exciting things (6.3%)
6. Spend more time with family/close friends (6.2%)
7. Work out more often (5.5%)
8. Learn something on my own (5.3%)
9. Do more good deeds for others (5.2%)
10. Find the love of my life (4.3%)
11. Find a better job (4.1%)

    --  All others combined (13.8%)

When we look at these, all of them seem to be trying to change ourselves, our relationships, and our circumstances. To be better, to be better people, to more fully express ourselves in life.

How can you most fully express your unique Self? Butler-Bowdon argues, "evolution happens by differentiation, not by matching up to some general standard. Through conformity we achieve only excellence; by being more and more ourselves, we become outstanding."

Maybe we're just becoming cat people. A BBC article titled, It is almost impossible to herd cats, thanks to evolution (by Jane Palmer, 2017), examined why cats are so independent and tend to do their own thing. In the article, Oregon State University biologist Monique Udell had been conducting experiments with cats. "When Udell performed her early experiments on cats, she encountered a lot of difficulties trying to motivate her subjects to engage in the task at hand. She had previously worked with dogs, which would willingly perform any task repeatedly for a food reward. But cats were not so easily pleased. Eventually, Udell started having success when she began giving cats the option of choosing what their reward was."

In the article Palmer explained findings from another study that found, "in keeping with their solitary uncooperative reputation, cats turned out to be neurotic, impulsive and resistant to being ordered around.... Much of animal behaviour - including affinity or resistance to herding - lies deep in a creature's neural circuitry."

We're animals, we're creatures, and we want to change, but we're resisting it. And, it stems from our embedded neural circuitry, in our brains. It's our thinking we need to change.

And perhaps we need to choose our reward for engaging in the task at hand and not as a substitute for it.

Change is possible. Lions are the cat exception, as they work together in a pride. John Fryxell, an integrative biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, said, "Lions managed the feat, so it must be possible for the proper set of mutations to occur, and if they managed to pull off the trick, maybe [herding cats] is not that crazy an idea, after all."

The king of the beasts managed to adapt themselves and make the changes.

The Statistic Brain study found 9.2% of people who make New Year's Resolutions felt they were successful in achieving their resolution. Many people focus on that (or worse, they simply quote a 3-4% success rate based on no research at all) and declare that New Year's Resolutions are a futile and useless exercise. I disagree. The Statistic Brain study also found that while 48.4% had infrequent success (but at least some success), "People who make resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don't explicitly make resolutions."

Make your resolutions. And increase your check-in frequency. Keeping your resolutions top-of-mind is critical. Just as every day you're bombarded with ads trying to coerce you into aligning your thinking and behaviour with the advertisers' products, advertise your goals to yourself so your behaviours align too.

In 1902's As A Man Thinketh, James Allen suggests, "We do not attract what we want, but what we are." In other words, we don't get success, we become it. Embody the external achievement. It also highlights how critical are the quality and direction of our questions. It's self-sabotaging to ask, "Why can't I achieve X, or make myself do Y?" Those questions point toward stuckness, not where you want to go, and they inadvertently seek answers to keep you where you are.

Allen said, "Circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him." Wherever you are in life right now, is an opportunity for growth by revealing the true person that you are, the resourceful, positive possibility thinker who takes action to make life better. Process failure more efficiently, and get to success faster.

Self-help writer Wayne Dyer observed, that "being broke is a temporary state of affairs that afflicts almost everyone at one time or another, but being poor is an attitude, a set of beliefs that gets reinforced when we shift to blaming life circumstances for the condition of our poverty." (Real Magic, 1992)

Allen says that delivering poor quality work and justifying it by claiming you're being paid so little is an attitude that keeps you in the very situation you might despise. "Most of us are anxious to improve out circumstances, but are unwilling to improve ourselves - and we therefore remain bound."

Bulter-Bowden summarises: "People are nearly always the unconscious cause of their own lack of prosperity." (50 Self-Help Classics, 2001)

It comes down to this question: are you willing to accept that your current situation was largely a result of decisions you made or did not choose to make? If you're still blaming something else, then you've answered "no" to the question. Take responsibility for your role in the past that has led to this present and use your ability to create a better response in the present to craft a better future.

Start with shifting your thinking.

Allen claimed that when we curtail our negative and destructive thoughts, "All the world softens towards us, and is ready to help us." He is arguing that we attract not only what we love, but what we fear. Whatever thoughts we feed, grow in our unconscious mind and become fuel for later events in the real world.

I'd argue that the fuel simply strengthens our filters. It is in the way we process the later events in the real world through our cognitive filters that determine the meaning we give those events. That meaning then governs our emotions and actions and determines our results and experiences. Bad filters, bad action, bad results. Great filters, great action, great results.

Our filters have been slowly programmed over time through our good and bad experiences, teachers, mentors, bosses, colleagues, parents, friends, siblings, media, religious beliefs, world events, cultural context etc. The whole concept of generational differences - baby-boomers, Gen X, Gen Y, millennials, etc - is simply grouping people with common filters and predicting their behaviours and attitudes. It's their filters. Our filters influence our thinking.

Allen emphasises right thinking and calmness of mind. A calm, relaxed and purposeful person conveys self-control. They convey a maturity of thought and a strength of character. That makes them attractive to others particularly in times of crisis. Think about the way you think. How can you think more calmly as storms brew and rage around you? Be a rock of certainty in tempestuous times.

"As a man thinketh in his heart, so he is" is a quote from the Proverbs 23:7 in the Bible (KJV). It was warning about accepting niceties from someone with evil intentions. Their motivations - the thinking in their heart - is their true character. What are your true motivations? They will define you through the actions taken as a result of them.

It's time to unleash your inner lion and move from being the 48.4% of infrequent success and into the 9.2% club. It depends on your motivations, your clarity, your cadence of self-advertising, your determined actions and your choice of rewards.

It's been 16 years, but I feel great that I'm finally reading that book.

Tim Wade
timwade.com