Or how can we truly reach our resolutions. (Regardless of the time of the year)

When a new cycle begins, like a new year, we fill our conversations with congratulations and good wishes.

We talk about happiness, prosperity, and abundance traditionally. As we start to notice that this things don’t happen, at least not always and several times not in the way we planned; we move towards “I wish you the best”.

We also talk about reaching goals. Every year with a greater and more enhanced effort. So much, that there are “memes”about how “unsuccessful” this is.

It seems that the challenge is not in having good wishes, or dreaming with goals; it seems that the challenge is in how to take the good wishes into real life, how to achieve this goals. And for this I want to invite you to make a reflection in three dimensions:

  1. What you want is what you actually want?

Many of us confuse the solution with the result.

When someone asks us: what do you want?

We answer things like: “My mom to be different”, “my collaborator to change”, “improve the relationship I have with my boss”… it seems like they’re clear wishes… are they?

Let’s take one, for example: Do you know what would happen if your collaborator changed? In the best of cases we’ll say something like: he would be more compromised, he would put his heart into it, he would pay more attention. In most cases we start talking about the things we don’t want “he would stop being so apathetic”, “he would stop arriving late”.

Concepts like “compromise”, “attention”, “put the heart into” are “generic” and little do they help in building if they’re not accorded in behaviors.

And saying with we don’t want doesn’t get us closer to what we want. That’s a great myth. In order to define what we want we must ask ourselves, what would be the difference if our collaborator was more committed or stopped being so apathetic?

Then what we really want has the possibility to emerge, for example: he would deliver the reports in time or get 5 minutes earlier to the meeting.

We believe that if we identify the problem, this will take us to the solution and it’s not necessarily like that.

Being clear about what I want and not confuse it with the problem or the solution makes a difference that gets us closer to building what we really want with the other.

2. Who will make it possible for this to be transformed into action?

Easy! Right? The boss and the collaborator.

We, people, don’t belong to social systems, we build the social systems and if someone’s missing there’s a piece missing that could bring everything down.

And once again, not necessarily. Actually it is highly probable that is not like that and that there’s more people contributing.

Who generates the input for the report? Who receives and uses it? Who can infer? Etc, etc.

When we don’t see what we want to produce as an integral process and value each part and contribution, it’s possible that we’ll end up without what we wish for.

3. And finally, the action.

The action is accorded and co-builded, in the opposite case, we’ll have lots of good intentions and few results.

Many of us talk about concepts thinking they’re clear and accorded, maybe because we still have the old paradigm of “we can communicate and understand others”.

As Michael Blumenstein used to say, “we are not designed to communicate, we are designed to build”. And it seems that in order to build we must build together, we can’t make it by ourselves, because building means “constructing with”. And in order to build we must do, so, which ones are the actions that we must do? And we could get lost in infinite discussions here.

A way to talk in order to create the propper field to build together, is say the verbs of what we want in infinitive. Which ones are the actions that we need, want to include in order to generate our result?

To look. To build. To say. To measure. To meditate. To plan.

Why in infinitive? Because it doesn’t personalize with pronouns that identify some and exclude others. Because doing it in this way makes a invitation to imagine the type and quality of result we can build together. Let’s take action and contribute from our autonomy, let’s build together, and co create the result we want: Living a good life!

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