The Tabula Rasa Directive — Clean Slates & Second Chances
It is time for New Year’s Resolutions… 🎉
Cut the crap. We are not doing this. 🙅♀️🙅♂️
Every year at the beginning of January (that is, at the turn of the year) we see people vouching for their sincerity to implement several long-term wishes of theirs. Something that would substantially improve their lives:
- “I will quit smoking.”
- “I will go to the gym.”
- “I will be eating more healthy.”
Then they share those (in reality) short-term hypocritic commitments with their friends and family — some even with the world. They do this in order to create a sense of “accountability”. Their accountability buddies, in turn, most of the time are the same sort of hypocrites. They check in with them once or twice. Then they become “too busy” to continue.
Thank you for nothing, “buddy”!
Before “Q1/[insert any year here]” is over, everything is forgotten. You start smoking again, you “pause” your gym membership for the rest of the year, you stuff your body with unhealthy food again. But hey, maybe this just “isn’t our year”, maybe next year will be. Yeah, sure. See you again in January! 🙈
🤷♀️🤷♂️ Let’s be honest: We have all been there. And admittedly, the core idea and motivation of “New Year’s Resolutions” is great, it is the implementation that sucks.
Towards a better Implementation
Is there a better, more effective and more sustainable way to implement those improvements? The answer that so many books and coaches give, is: Yes!
But let’s first have a look at the two aspects why the original implementation falls apart in the first place.
The Concept of Failure
Since our early youth, society teaches us the concept of “failure” over and over again:
- You have failed at a test in school.
- You have failed to impress that crush of yours.
- You have failed to get a well-paid job.
- You are a failure, you are a loser (as in those famous US teenage/high-school movies).
It is a stigma. It is just who you are.
But, is it?
In his book “Atomic Habits”, author James Clear explains that identity can be a powerful aspect of habit building in a positive, but also in a negative way: Every time you perform a certain behavior, you are casting a vote favoring a certain identity:
- I am smoking all the time. -> I am a smoker.
- I keep experiencing loss all the time. -> I am a loser.
Besides this “identity vote” pattern, you also happen to view failure as a permanent, one-way concept. As the saying goes:
Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Yet, most of the people are committing “mental suicide” when it comes to failing to implement a certain improvement, all the time.
So, how can we get rid of the stigmatizing and hurting effect of failure?
Maybe by erasing the concept altogether, wiping it out of our minds by realizing:
Failure is a Lie.
(If this sounds to drastic for you 🤯, you may want to at least re-interpret it. )
Second Chances
From a scientific, logical point of view, by definition failure cannot be permanent as long as you still have the chance to show up and try again — that is as long as you are alive. Usually, for the average person, that condition (being alive, that is) lasts around 28,000 days — which means if you fail at Day 1, you still have 27,999 daily second chances to try again and succeed. 🧮
I have read about the 10,000 hour rule of mastery. (You need around 10,000 hours to master a skill, is its claim.) Other sources (e.g. author Robin Sharma) claim that you need 60-66 days to implement a certain habit. Those apparently are the timeframes necessary to make things “stick”. ⌛
During those periods, while implementing a skill, you will experience a lot of ways how mastery is not achieved or how this habit will not stick ↘️↗️. But those are not failures, they are valuable insights, data, experience you gathered (a series of “micro second chances” 💡💡💡) on your way towards your goal.
👶 If you think about it, this is how babies actually learn to first crawl and then to walk — by trying, falling down, trying again. They keep taking second chances again and again until they eventually succeed. For them, there is no such concept as Failure because it was not (yet) taught to them.
I journal a lot and also keep reflecting about gratitude for the things in my life. Sometimes, I just note down “Still alive”. I am simply grateful for the gift of being around for another day, to get another shot at all of this.
If the year has 365 days (some of them even have 366) why would you only think about resolutions (= commitments to improve yourself) at the turn of the year and not beyond that?
Are you “too busy to improve” beyond Q1?
Be honest with yourself. ☝️
Continuous reflection and improvement are part of a long-term mindset, not a short-term “trend” at the beginning of the year.
(It is the same hypocrisy as it is with Christmas for many people. If Christmas truly is about the “Celebration of Love”, would we then actually hate each other during the rest of the year? It may seem so, sometimes. Think about it.)
Tabula Rasa — Two powerful Words
🧳🧳🧳 If we truly believe in failure, we are also prone to “carry baggage” with us, that is, negative experiences from our failures, negative stories we tell us, more votes cast on a “loser” or “failure” identity. It is the accumulative negative memories, the mental baggage, that slows and eventually drags us down. The truth simply is:
You are not holding grudges, they are holding you.
One way to manage this, as we just described, is to view those “failures” as the feedback, the lessons learned on our way to mastery, they truly are. We then would say we have accumulated experience, not negative memories.
A second thought extends on the concept of second chances.
🍽️ The Latin phrase “tabula rasa” (literally “scraped tablet”) describes the concept of “a clean slate”, a fresh, unwritten piece of paper, maybe a page reserved for this very day inside your journal.
Indeed, the ancient Romans/Greeks kept their notes on re-usable and therefore sustainable (!) wax tablets where the layer of wax could simply be scraped off to renew the tablet every day.
Tabula Rasa is therefore your opportunity for a fresh start, a “reset button” you can press everyday so that you can start with a “clean slate”.
And the baggage?
Convert the negative memories into something far more powerful: 🧳➡️🎒
Exchange your mental baggage filled with bad memories for a backpack filled with lessons learned.
Tabula Rasa, however is not given to you just like that, it needs to be granted by yourself. It is an act of forgiveness, of letting go and moving on. It is a conscious decision you can take over and over again.
Are you a chore person?
Everyday there are in fact actual slates piling up in our households that need to be swiped clean. Though it can sometimes be exhausting to do those chores, imagine what a great feeling of achievement it can be to finally have them done, to finish them. Order is restored, what a relief! 😅
I never met a single person that told me: “Oh no, my dishes have become dirty again. I will stop cleaning them altogether. I am a failure.”
Instead, we keep doing them, over and over again.
Ask yourself:
Why would we then stop when it comes to implementing our improvements?
Every time you fall down, you stumble, tell yourself those two powerful words “Tabula Rasa”, get up again, grant yourself your second chance and move on.
The Directive
If we were to put those two concepts into a “recipe”, into a directive that you should apply every single day (the entire year!), it would be this:
When implementing an improvement you want to make:
Take a step towards your goal.
If you stumble, remember: Failure is a Lie.
Don’t let Failure drag you down (let go of baggage).
Extract all the Feedback you get (put it in your backpack).
Wipe the slate clean — Tabula Rasa— start afresh.
Repeat.
Don’t fall for New Year’s Resolutions if you want to take your personal growth game to the next level — try the Tabula Rasa Directive instead. ✌️
Take your journal, or a clean sheet of paper, and start afresh today.
️️️🍽️ Tabula Rasa. ️
As always, I am curious about what you think — drop your thoughts in the comments below, but remember don’t put any crappy New Years Resolutions there! You are better than that.
Make 2021 your greatest year (yet)! 🎉
#thestrugglebeginstoday
Trivia / What if…
A friend of mine also pointed out that “Tabula Rasa” was the title of a Belgian-German co-produced TV series. In this series, the protagonist experiences her own version of “Tabula Rasa”: Her mind gets wiped clean (like a clean slate) all the time (=she forgets everything). The uncontrolled loss of memory might be scary in this psycho thriller format, but wouldn’t it be a blessing for all traumatized persons if they could make use of this power selectively?
