I once tried to fix myself with a resolution. The week ahead was already beginning to loom, and I decided that this time I would be calmer. More patient on the take. Slower to interrupt. The kind of consultant a nervous junior would be relieved to find. I meant it completely. I always did.
By Wednesday it was gone. Nothing dramatic happened. No scene anybody would remember. The resolution simply wore away somewhere between the bed shortage and a bleep that would not stop. By Thursday I was, more or less, the same man I had promised myself on Sunday I would no longer be.
So the next Sunday I tried again. This time I made the promise more precise. Gave it sharper edges. A proper commitment, I told myself. More serious, less vague.
And it dissolved on schedule. I did this for years. Years.
It is uncomfortable to admit that, because I would like to think I am someone who is able to learn. But I kept doing the same thing: making promises in a quiet room about how I would behave in a noisy one.
And when the promise failed, I blamed the promise-maker.
I had not wanted it enough. I had not been disciplined enough. I had let myself off the hook. So I reached for the only lever I seemed to know.
Push harder.
This is one of the traps in how we think about change. We treat it as a problem of insufficient will. If something has not changed, we assume we cannot have tried hard enough. The answer, therefore, must be more: more resolve, more vigilance, a better system, another notebook, a sterner conversation with ourselves.
Sometimes that works. Of course it does. Some things really do need practice, repetition and effort. But effort is most useful when you can see the problem in front of you. When the wall is visible and you simply have to find a way over it.
It is much less useful against the walls you keep walking into without knowing they are there.
And, under pressure, a great deal of what runs us is invisible in precisely that way.
I could not become calmer on a Wednesday because I had never actually seen the moment I stopped being calm.
It did not announce itself. There was no internal alarm. I did not hear a little voice saying, Here it comes, you are about to become clipped and impatient.
It just happened.
I was too busy being the thing to notice myself becoming it.
That, I think, is the part I missed for so long. You cannot correct a moment you never catch. And no amount of Sunday-night sincerity can reach into a Wednesday afternoon you are not fully present for.
The change began, not all at once, and certainly not neatly, when I became able to notice a little earlier.
First, I noticed afterwards. Usually much afterwards. Then I noticed as I was doing it, which was awful in a different way. There is something particularly dispiriting about hearing yourself give the clipped reply and being unable, or perhaps unwilling, to stop halfway through.
Eventually, occasionally, I caught it just before. Not every time. Not even most times. But sometimes there was a fraction of a second in which another response became possible.
That fraction mattered more than all the promises.
This is part of what sits underneath the framework I have been building here. Change seems to follow seeing. Or perhaps, more cautiously, seeing gives change somewhere to begin.
The headroom I call Cognitive Oxygen® (COx) is not just what careful thinking runs on. It is also what allows us to watch ourselves while we are acting, rather than reconstructing everything later, once the damage has been done.
When there is enough of it, you may catch the clipped reply as it forms. You may feel the pull of the shortcut before you take it. You may notice that the thing in your head is still an assumption and has not yet earned the status of a decision.
When that headroom disappears, the watcher seems to go with it. You do not simply become less thoughtful. You become less able to see that you have become less thoughtful.
I wish this were not true. It would be much more convenient if pressure merely made us worse while leaving us perfectly able to observe the decline. But that is not how it has felt in my own life. The blindness and the behaviour arrive together.
Then, afterwards, effort volunteers to clean up.
Try harder next time.
Be more careful.
Do not do that again.
But effort spends something too. Sometimes we use so much of ourselves gripping the behaviour that there is nothing left with which to notice it.
Red Team Thinking® is, for me, the same basic move pointed outward: trying to see what is actually there rather than what the tidy picture in my head says ought to be there.
The assumption I would rather not discover I have made.
The plan that works beautifully, provided three untested things all happen at once.
The awkward detail everyone has quietly stepped around.
We often miss these things not because we are stupid or careless, but because seeing them takes a quality of attention that pressure quietly confiscates. Then we try to make up the deficit with grip.
More focus. More vigilance. More effort.
It feels responsible. That is partly why it is such a convincing trap.
I once watched a department being told to try harder for the better part of a year.
Things kept being lost at handover. The response was reminders, posters and a stern email about focus and personal responsibility.
Be more careful.
As far as I could tell, nobody involved was careless. They were tired. They were interrupted. And they were trying—genuinely trying.
Still, the same things kept falling through the same gap.
Eventually, one registrar did something almost embarrassingly simple. She stood at the back of several handovers and watched.
Not to correct anybody. Not to produce another rule. Just to see what was happening.
The handover took place in a corridor. Everyone was standing. Interruptions came constantly. Nobody quite owned the list.
The gap was not inside a person. It was built into the room.
Once that became visible, the changes were almost mundane: a table, a door, one named person responsible for holding the list.
None of this required the staff to care more. They already cared.
We had spent months aiming effort at the people when the problem was sitting in the environment around them.
There is a fair objection here.
Does change not take work?
Yes. Obviously.
I am not suggesting that we glimpse the truth once and are remade by teatime. Seeing is not the whole of change. New habits still need to be practised. Structures have to be built. Sometimes we have to do the difficult thing repeatedly, badly at first, before it becomes any easier.
But seeing tells the work where to go.
It turns effort from a punishment into a response. It lets us spend energy on the thing that is actually happening, in the moment it happens, instead of throwing more determination at a picture we made on Sunday night.
Effort with its eyes open is a different animal.
Effort without sight is often just exhaustion with better branding.
So, the next time you hear yourself resolving to try harder at something you have already tried very hard to change, pause.
Not forever. Just long enough to become a little suspicious of the resolution.
Ask what happens in the actual moment. Where are you? What has happened just before? What does it feel like in your body? What becomes unavailable to you? What are you unable to see from inside it?
You may not be ready to fix it.
That is all right.
For now, perhaps, just try to be there when it happens.
Awake enough to see it.
Not judging. Not promising. Not already turning the moment into a lesson about what sort of person you are.
Just watching.
Change may still ask a great deal of you. But it may not be waiting for more effort.
It may simply be waiting for your attention.
This week, choose one behaviour you keep promising to fix. Stop promising for a while. The next time it appears, see if you can catch it happening—even if you do nothing differently. Seeing it once, from inside the moment, may be the first honest step.