New Year, New Me?
If you’re anything like me, you’ll be very glad to see the back of 2020 and hoping that 2021 goes a little smoother if nothing else! Also, if you’re anything like me, you don’t bother with New Year resolutions because you’ve learned from experience that January (especially if you live in Scotland) is the most depressing time of year to make major life changes. Now, I actually really like winter - it’s my second favourite season after autumn - but January brings the post-festive slump and the weather is always minging. That’s why I started mine in December.
Fortunately, I’ve also learned some hacks for whenever I decide to try for these major life changes. I touched on some of them in my blog post last month about Changing Behaviours, but now that I’ve identified motivation as the issue, I’m digging a little deeper into my toolkit to overcome it. And part of that means psycho-analysing myself…
I like to think that I have pretty good emotional intelligence and a reasonably high level of self-awareness, and I always considered that a strength when it came to performing. But I’ve come across several athletes over the years who are the polar opposite, yet still incredibly successful, and more than once I’ve had to wonder if blissful ignorance isn’t perhaps the better way to approach performance sport. I was at my best when I didn’t really understand what I was doing and just trusted my instincts. Doubts weren’t a problem because I just didn’t question anything.
The problem is that approach only works until it doesn’t. The moment the wheels come off, I lacked the self-awareness to assess and correct myself. It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that it was an area that needed addressed, and I think all the work I’ve done developing those skills has paid off. Because understanding myself and how I operate is invaluable knowledge to have. And what’s fun now is that I can use that knowledge to, essentially, hack myself.
When we were preparing for the Rio 2016 Olympic Games, my governing body put me and the rest of the team through a personality profiling programme called Insights. I’ve seen a few variations on this - there’s the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, another called the Strength Deployment Inventory… it all serves the same purpose. By analysing your response to a series of questions, these programmes can discern your personality type and/or values, and the information is then used to help you develop self-awareness. In this instance it was a team-building exercise, designed to help us understand ourselves and each other better so that we could function more cohesively as a team in what was probably going to be one of the most high-pressure environments we would ever experience.
As a team-building exercise, it was actually very useful in helping me understand those around me. As preparation for a stressful situation, it was also helpful, but I already had a decent understanding of myself and how stress affected my behaviour as I’d done similar profiling in the past. Insights breaks it down into four personality types, with corresponding behaviours on both good and bad days:
The names are a little fluffy for my tastes, but you get the gist. I wasn’t in the least bit surprised to find I came out slap bang in the middle of Red and Blue. The balance I had between the two was then perfectly demonstrated to me during another team-building exercise where one very Blue teammate spent the allotted time reading the instructions and thinking it through without taking an action, while another very Red teammate went off and started working with no consideration and got it completely wrong. Given the chance, I would have read the instructions, made a plan and then enacted it without further delay. But, situated in the Blue/Red hemisphere as I am, I lack the social qualities to integrate well in a team, so the honour of completing the task went to the Yellow member of our little group.
Understanding how the other people in the team work too was important. I’ll be straight with you - people can be weird under pressure. I had a teammate once who I adored 99% of the time. When we share a room at competitions, we got on like a house on fire. But the big multi-sport events? Well, under pressure I turn inwards. I like quiet and my own space and a calm environment around me. This teammate was the total opposite. Under stress she became more high strung than ever - loud and boisterous and in constant need of distraction. But because I understood enough about her and how she coped with stress (and likewise she understood about me and how I coped) we could work together. It meant we could communicate without judgement when we needed something from the other. She could tell me when I was being cold and distant, and I could tell her when I needed some quiet time.
And I’m not a naturally social person. As I’ve said before, I often find even the most basic social interaction challenging and I struggle with different personalities. Someone who comes out as Sunshine Yellow on the Insights wheel might as well be speaking a different language sometimes. And as outlined above, on a bad day I can be stuffy and intolerant. Put that with a flamboyant and excitable Yellow and you’ve got a potentially explosive mix. So I’ve worked hard to learn about this stuff, to understand basic psychology - like values and core beliefs - and personality types, so I can better interact with those around me. It’s also been helpful for writing too! Character development is a dawdle…
But getting back to my original point. Knowing myself as well as I do has allowed me to manipulate myself to achieve an outcome. I promise, it’s not as weird as it sounds. As I said a couple of weeks ago, I’m a lazy human being. I don’t enjoy hard work, even if I know I’m capable of it, and will avoid anything remotely resembling it whenever I can. I struggled a lot over the summer to make myself work through a load of book edits - we were in the process of moving house, while still living with my in-laws, and the pandemic disrupted my creative flow (if that doesn’t sound too pretentious). Given the situation, I was pretty gentle with myself at the time because I know myself well enough to know that pushing myself would result in a stressy Jen and a sh*tty product. Once we were moved and settled, that problem went away, but I was out of the habit and struggled to knuckle down and get on with it.
So I made a bet with myself. I gave myself a deadline and I said if I finished the edits by that date I could buy this lovely, if expensive, dress that I’d been eyeing up for weeks. It was a challenging goal, and when I set it, my instinct was that I probably wouldn’t manage it.
I finished with three days to spare.
Now this is clearly not a sustainable model of motivation, but I know that I am reward driven and in this instance it was the right thing to do. As well as completing the work (and getting the dress), I found a renewed sense of purpose for my writing that had been lacking for several months. Longer, if I’m being honest.
It helps those close to me too. At the end of the Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, some of my teammates wanted to go to the bar. I wasn’t keen, having nothing to celebrate, but they weren’t having any of it. They nagged and nagged until my sister intervened. “The more you nag her, the more she’ll dig her heels in,” she explained loudly and well within my hearing. “Tell her it’s up to her, but that it would really mean a lot to you if she’d join you.”
Traitor.
But she’s right. Pushing me is not the way to get me to do anything. In fact, it’s pretty much guaranteed to ensure I do the complete opposite. But I’m also a people-pleaser, at least with people I like, and the suggestion (even knowing full-well that it was contrived) that I was letting them down was enough to get me moving. Needless to say, I ended up in the bar that night and a lovely evening it was too.
Knowing myself, knowing what drives me and what buttons I can push, helps me (and others) get the best out of myself. Honestly, given my social anxieties, it’s something I wish people were more open about. It would make communication so much easier if it was just acceptable to explain “you know what, under pressure I become snippy and I try my best to manage it but please don’t take anything I say to heart and don’t take it personally if I don’t want to chat.” How much easier would life be if we could all just have these conversations as standard? But maybe that’s just me…
Anyway, these are some of the tricks I’ll be using to maintain the changes I made pre-Christmas. I’ll keep you posted with how it’s going.
Have you set yourself any New Year resolutions? And where do you think you sit on the Insights wheel? Let me know in the comments!