This blog post will be published on the 1st February, by which time the New Year’s Resolutions of many people will have long since been broken! We all start off with the best intentions to lose weight, or to go to the gym more, but life soon gets in the way and it’s all too easy to fall back into the old ways of behaving. It’s human nature.
But what about magic resolutions? Do you make any at the start of the year in the hope of making more out of your hobby, or of learning some new skill, or of catching up with your magic reading? Do those resolutions suffer the same fate as the more general ones? Probably.
So what’s to be done? Well, if you are genuinely serious about resolving to improve your magic life (or your general life, for that matter), there is a way of structuring your behaviour that may enable you to actually achieve your aims. Here are my suggestions.
1. The first thing to do is to look at the last 12 months of magic activity and try and identify whether there is anything that you regret or that you wish you could do better.
Assuming that there is, the next stage is to come up with some practical, achievable ideas that will enable you to put things right. These shouldn’t be unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky ideas, because nothing is more demotivating than setting yourself hopelessly optimistic targets, but instead aims that you genuinely feel are possible. Not necessarily easy, just achievable.
2. Ideas on their own are not enough, however, because you need to turn those ideas next into a plan. For instance, you may have an ‘idea’ that you want to spend an evening a week catching up with your magic reading, but you need to turn this into a concrete plan by then saying, “and it will be every Tuesday as I am always at home that evening.”
3. But planning to spend every Tuesday evening on your magic reading catch up is not quite going to do it on its own. It needs to be made more definite. In this example you might initially put an entry in your diary on each Tuesday so that every time you look at your week ahead, you are reminded of what Tuesday evenings are for. It’s like making an appointment with the dentist—you have to do it!
With bigger plans such as deciding you want to hire a hall and put on a commercial kids show, setting a date and booking the hall would be your third stage to actually making it happen. Creating a set time or date is so much better than just vaguely promising yourself you will do it ‘some time this coming year.’
4. But all this may still not be enough. Dates can be cancelled if you get cold feet, so the final stage to ensure that your plan gets to happen is to tell lots of people all about it!
In the case of the Tuesday evenings, you tell your family that you will not be available on Tuesdays from now on, and you tell your mates you can’t come down the pub on Tuesdays any more!
With the kids show, you advertise it widely and encourage advance ticket sales. If people have paid you for a show, you are duty bound to deliver it or cause yourself a lot of hassle. And it’s this accountability that will help you achieve your goals.