Five Stages in Personal Change, According to Podcaster

On one of his recent Mindset Mentor podcasts, personal development coach Rob Dial repeated a show I've heard before, but have felt to be one of his more significant and applicable topics: what makes people quit their goals.  I guess at this time a little more than a week after many people have started out with their New Year's resolutions, a large portion of them are having second thoughts about them...if not giving up altogether.  Citing Don Kelly and Daryl Connor, who first presented their Emotional Cycle of Change in 1979, Dial lays out the five stages in goal development:

1 Uninformed Optimism-great enthusiasm and misplaced confidence

2 Informed Pessimism-dawning awareness of the goal's difficulties

3 The Valley of Despair-discouragement and a feeling of futility  

  (Connor and Kelly have the 3rd stage as "Hopeful Realism"-also a bottoming out but with more optimism)

4 Informed Optimism-understanding that the goal is attainable with the means to attain it

5 Completion-the lack of ability has been replaced by incorporation into habit, becoming part of identity

I can look back into my past and see how I encountered the above different stages for various projects I've pursued. And since I've set about to structure some of my retirement with new projects, I know I will have to meet each stage as it comes.  Rob Dial suggests that, at that beginning stage, I spend some time and effort to ascertain exactly what it is that I want to achieve and why...this can be of supreme importance in not giving up when stages two and three come into play.  Dial's "Valley of Despair" makes more sense to me than Kelly and Connor's "Hopeful Realism"... then again you could just add the latter to the former and make it six stages instead of five. For me, personal projects are like adventures leading to other adventures...a lot of fun but also a lot of hard work, with failures along the way to be seen as outcomes I can learn from...

Spreading Self Thin over Projects...and Enjoying It

I'm looking at probably too high a number of personal projects I'm currently engaged in, wondering whether I'm spreading myself too thinly.  The answer is likely "Yes", yet I have decided to do just that while enjoying the essence and variety of the different areas.  Several foreign languages, writing, reading, distance running/walking and mathematics in its various forms occupy much of my "free" time and attention, and to be sure progress in any one of them isn't steep, to say the least.  Yet that doesn't bother me.  I enjoy the process of gradually accumulating known vocabulary in various languages while picking out patterns and meanings in what I hear.  My blog writing, allowing for an occasional missing day, is a personal discipline I've been true to for years, and plan to continue it as long as I am able.  I read, primarily either science fiction short stories or books...primarily in audio format...I've checked out from the library.  I, in turn, write my reactions on this blog after reading them.  My running has never been fast enough to command anyone's attention, although as I age, I find myself more and more eligible for age category awards in races even when finishing far behind most of the young whippersnappers out there. And math, which I've always had a very high aptitude for, is a pure academic subject for which I see no personal practical value other than eventually teaching it either as a tutor or in a part-time classroom setting following my retirement. Add to all this a wonderful wife and family and more passive interests like stargazing and watching sports...and occasional travel adventures...and it all adds up to one word: fun. I've also noticed a correspondingly higher level of contentment, gratitude and optimism after I made the conscious personal decision to studiously avoid the news, in all its biased and sensationalist forms...

Working on Reorganizing Personal Information System

This book I just read (and wrote about), Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, has made a big impact on my thinking, and it's occupying a good deal of my "free" time right now as I construct a personal data and retrieval system that complements what I already have "in my head".  It's fun and at the same time a bit tedious...but once I have everything in place this all should make my life flow a lot more smoothly.  But it does take time and I may have to scrap whole ways of doing things in order to make it work better for me.  I recommend the book, and who knows: you might just pick up better on Forte's often arcane language than I did.  But I did clearly get his core message, having lived through a muddle of excessively tangled, disorganized information for years...

The Hierarchical Mindset: You Can't Take It With You

One morning about ten years ago I was sitting at the nearest Starbucks to my house, a small establishment at the end of a Publix strip mall...years later it would be relocated down the road in order to install a drive-through.  My table was at the front window just on the inside, putting me near customers standing in line.  At the time I was reviewing my old basic Vietnamese language vocabulary I had learned many years earlier while working at a local Chinese restaurant with several Vietnamese refugees when a church acquaintance whom I distantly knew walked into the store.  She turned, noticed me and my book, and asked me what I was studying...to which I replied.  Then, without missing a beat, she derisively asked "What are you going to do with it?"  Sounds on the surface like a reasonable question, but the fact that this was the one she chose to pose revealed something important about her personality makeup. She could have asked questions like how long I have been studying Vietnamese, what my background was with it, or more pertinently, what I thought about this east Asian language.  For some reason, though, when someone reveals they are pursuing any kind of academic endeavor they often get this "What's it for?" kind of response as if learning anything new must be justified in terms of material gain or climbing a social hierarchy...I call this type of person "hierarchical".  People who in their youth always had to be the star athlete or musician or have the teacher's favor and get straight A's or be at the top of a social circle grew up with a hierarchical attitude, a lot of it having to do with the fact that as humans we organize ourselves socially in packs like wolves, vying for who will be the "alpha" and continually sorting out our standing further down the line: this was especially prevalent at my bus stop with the biggest bully reigning as "top dog" and the most picked-upon and verbally abused kids stuck at the bottom. A few years ago, before the pandemic hit, I attended a monthly Saturday morning men's breakfast at my church, intending to establish a new, positive routine in my life and develop a little more sociability in my introverted existence.  It didn't take long for me to discover that too many of those attending were steeped in hierarchy, verbally jostling with one another about their academic, career and business credentials and accomplishments, all while comically feigning humility and spirituality...this was the single reason I finally gave up going to those meetings.  I am not hierarchical and as such find those deeply engrossed in the rat race and social standing to be tedious and boring to be around...but I also realize that each of them, too, has their own story and dignity, deserving respect and grace but instead too often expecting obeisance and servility, which ruins everything for me.  I study things because they are interesting to me...whose knows, maybe I'll find some material or social use for them later. But if you want to engage me in conversation about a project I'm pursuing then how about, at least temporarily, step down from your imaginary social ladder and ask me about the content of what I'm doing...or at least how I came about to it...instead of treating me like the low dog in a pack who has to justify himself.  No, I'm not judging people with a hierarchical mindset...I'm just sick and tired of them judging me.  The play You Can't Take It With You...I prefer the 1984 PBS Great Performances version starring Jason Robards...vividly illustrates what I've just been talking about...

Quote of the Week...from Carl Friedrich Gauss

It is not knowledge, but the act of learning, not possession but the act of getting there, which grants the greatest enjoyment.                                          ---Carl Friedrich Gauss

Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), from Germany, was the greatest mathematician of his time.  I picked his above quote because it illustrates the duality...and apparent contradiction...involved in areas like goal-planning and self-motivation.  You want to learn or accomplish something that currently is beyond your present means, be it not enough skill, connections, money...or whatever.  Fulfilling that goal requires a focused and consistent investment of your time and energy...with your future achievement always being forefront in your mind.  Yet when it has been attained, most likely you will look back and see that the journey to the goal's end was the meaningful aspect of it all...yet without the goal you would not have set out on that journey.  This also dovetails nicely with the message from Paolo Coelho's novel The Alchemist, which I read recently.  Gauss is referring to learning and indicates that while it's important to amass knowledge and enlightenment, the road to them is the true jewel of the process.  I get what he's saying: I've always liked to study stuff...yet my problem has always been a lack of focused, clear end goals.  Regarding mathematics, the true greats in that field...such as the late John Nash...realized that behind all of its complexity, mathematical reasoning can be broken down into a relativity simple...but sometimes elusive...pattern of principles known as "governing dynamics".  People like Gauss and Nash always seemed to have clear goals and projects before them, but it was getting down within those dynamics and learning that gave them their true joy.  So set clear goals, work to accomplish them...and revel in that process of work...

Quote of the Week...from Yogi Berra

Make a game plan and stick to it.  Unless it's not working.                      ---Yogi Berra

Yogi Berra was a Hall of Fame catcher and fantastic hitter for the New York Yankees during my early childhood when they were tearing up the baseball world as a fixture in the World Series from year to year, winning several of them along the way.  Later on he tried his hand at managing with mixed results.  What many remember him the most for, however...besides his many Yoo-Hoo TV commercials...was his sense of humor and ability to twist the English language like a pretzel, creating ludicrous contradictions in many of his sayings, like "Ninety percent of the lies they're telling about me aren't true" or "I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous".  Sometimes, though, he would come up with something that for most sounded ridiculous, but upon thinking about it a little would actually contain some profound wisdom...like the above quote, for example...

Yogi was a baseball man and it's natural that he would term advance strategizing as "a game plan", and in sports as will as other endeavors it only makes common sense to know up front what you're going to do before commencing with it.  There will almost always be a few bumps at the start...but if your strategy is well thought out it's probably in your best interests to stick with it.  But in competitive environments the opponent not only has his own game plan, but is also adjusting to yours in order to render it ineffective.  Still, even without an adversary to throw a monkey wrench into all your well-laid plans, the pervasive nature of chaos as it can overtake any undertaking (ooh, that's sounds like something Yogi might say) demands that tactics and priorities must change along with the often-confusing changes going on around.  Besides, in a game or a project, you only have so much information to start with...the flood of input soon into it can be daunting and it's probably a good idea to stick to your guns until you can adequately process it all.  But if it's become clear that your strategy is a complete exercise in futility, why not then ditch it and try something new?  Yogi, you never let me down with your wisdom...