Tend to Your Growth

I wanted to expand on a post I shared at new years, about new habits, learning, and growth, and what I’ve learned about those things through the Anat Baniel Method.

I usually find implementing new habits daunting, because I’ve seen my own failure so many times. What’s the point of starting something if you can’t follow through? We see this a lot with new year’s resolutions: great ambition dead in the water by the second week of February.

New year’s resolutions, and resolutions in general, are all well and good, but if you want to build a new habit, you have to come from a strong foundation. For example, you won’t succeed in getting up earlier if you can’t address or find out how to change why you’re exhausted. 

In the past, I posted about the myth of “no pain, no gain”. White-knuckling a resolution or a goal more often leads to burn out than to positive outcomes. 

I think on the surface, most of us would agree with that statement. But deep down, we don’t really believe it. We see videos of athletes at the top of their game, hear about their strict personal regimens, and think, “If they can do it, why can’t I?” Of course, what those videos don’t show is the potential tolls on their overall wellbeing, or the injuries they sustain, or the way that their entire lives revolve around their sport. If you’re an athlete, you’re told to “push”. If you run your own business, you’re told to “hustle”. If you’re a student, you often try to “cram”. The “no pain, no gain” mentality is everywhere, and I think we often subconsciously implement it in our day to day lives.

What does this have to do with ABM? During my training to become an practitioner, we did a lot of movement lessons. During the lessons, we focused on doing the movements slowly, gently, and without using excessive efforts. We were told we would achieve the best outcomes when we worked this way. Let me tell you, after trying it both ways, my teachers in the training were correct. I always did better and achieved more during the lessons when I went slowly and gently as opposed to pushing myself and using a lot of effort.

I don’t want to sound like I’m against hard work and high standards. It’s good to hold ourselves accountable, and to want to improve in areas where we fall short. But I want to propose a different attitude using another popular phrase, one that I think applies well to what I experienced during my ABM training: “Work smarter, not harder”.

The instructions I received during my training—go slowly and gently, and don’t use excessive efforts—are the opposite of how we usually approach learning. I think we expect learning to be difficult. We expect to have to struggle for the knowledge we’re seeking. One thing that Anat pointed out to us is that when we learn something, meaning, when we truly understand it, it becomes simple. We don’t have to work hard; it’s that “lightbulb” moment. 

With this in mind, here are a few suggestions for implementing new habits through building a strong foundation:

1. Start small: You might have a big goal in mind, but if you start big, and can’t keep up the pace, it’s easy to give up. Start smaller, do less instead of more. Going little by little will help build that strong foundation to get to your goal. 

2. Diligence vs. Dictatorship: Holding ourselves to high standards is one thing, having unreasonable expectations and not making adjustments when necessary is another. For example, it’s especially tempting to become little dictators over our bodies when we have fitness or health-related goals. Having diligence instead means recognizing areas we need to grow, and having patience with the journey.

3. Hold goals lightly: It’s good to have a goal, to have something to work towards. But if you keep missing your goal, and you’re hard on yourself, it can get very discouraging to keep trying. Try instead, if you miss your goal, to adjust your goal slightly, so you can stay in a space of learning and growth.

To me, working smarter and not harder means giving yourself permission to look at yourself from the ground up. Like I said earlier, new habits are built on a strong foundation. It’s easy to look at ourselves as a machine or a computer, where we can plug in inputs and cut off or numb places of pain. Working smarter, not harder, lends itself to seeing ourselves instead as an integrated whole of mind, body, heart, and soul. And from this perspective, we can better ask ourselves: what needs to be tended to so I can grow?