From Indoctrination to Imagination - What is True and Beautiful?

Rethinking New Year's Resolutions: Start with Self-Awareness

So often around New Year's we make resolutions to drink less, exercise more, increase our creativity, be a better parent/leader/colleague/partner, etc. But instead of jumping straight into new habits that have trouble sticking, I'd like to share with you a different approach. The first step to change and creating habits that stick is to identify the behaviours that get in the way of who we actually are in our core.

Recognizing and Understanding Saboteurs

One of my top saboteurs is the Pleaser. I automatically, often unconsciously, end up in Pleaser mode because that's what I've been conditioned to do all my life. And over Christmas it reared its ugly head twice, catching me off guard: cooking a whole Christmas meal for an extended family... wait, what??... had I agreed to this?! And being ripped off by a jerk plumber who charged me a fortune to fix a leak.

But instead of getting angry and resentful - which I most certainly did for a while - I realised that the only one I had to look at was myself. I need to get better at recognising when I am in a Pleaser mode. Then I can choose to set boundaries and tell others what I want and need.

Our saboteurs developed in childhood to help us cope with challenges. But I also think they are part of our cultural and gender norms and expectations. Very often women have a Pleaser Saboteur because our world has indoctrinated women to be of service to others - always - and to put their own needs last.

But whether it's the Pleaser or any other sabotaging behaviour you want to change, the first step is to become aware of it, to feel the negative feeling in its entirety and sit with it... Then second, pause and be curious. Ask yourself... what do I want instead? What can you do when you're not being sabotaged? Share this gold nugget of an insight with someone else, or write it down to make it more real. And then as you focus, feel what it's like, plan and take action... it will come to life.

From Indoctrination to Imagination: Creating Your Own Path

Glennon Doyle in her book Untamed writes about this process. I share with you some of what she writes. How do we go from indoctrination to imagination?

"When we use the language of indoctrination - with its should and shouldn’t, right and wrong, good and bad - we are activating our minds. Our minds are polluted by our training. In order to get beyond our training, we need to activate our imaginations and ask ourselves: what is true and beautiful?

Here is how: Each [person/woman] honoured her own discontent. She did not dismiss it, bury it, deflect it, deny it, blame it on someone else or tell herself to shut up and be grateful. She heard her Knowing whisper, “Not this,” and she admitted to herself that she heard it. She sat with it for a while. Then she dared to utter her inner whisper out loud. She shared her discontent with another human being.

Then, when she was ready to move from Not This to This Instead, she dared to call upon her imagination to tell her the story she was born to tell with her life. She dreamed up what it would look like to have her specific version of truth and beauty come to life.

The norms were created by somebody, and each of us is somebody. We can make our own normal. We can stop asking what the world wants from us and instead ask ourselves what we want for our world. We can remember and unleash the life-changing, relationship-changing, world-changing power of our own imagination. It might take us a lifetime. Luckily, a lifetime is exactly how long we have."

So for 2024, after identifying behaviours you want to change, ask yourself what is true and beautiful? And let your imagination soar.