Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to change my life and make a fresh new start of things… but that usually only lasts anywhere from a week to a month before I revert back to old negative behaviors or, even worse, I backslide entirely and stop doing anything to maintain my existence, tumbling headlong into the doldrums of depression, ennui, and apathy. Positive self-directed change just never seems to stick with me longer than that. I feel like I must be Teflon to self-improvement sometimes.
I’ve tried “restarting” my life over and over without success for far too long. I’m ready to try something different.
In Step Four of their well-known twelve-step program for recovering from alcoholism, Alcoholics Anonymous recommends taking time to make a “fearless moral inventory” of yourself whenever your lifestyle. This step — like all the steps in their twelve-step program — is incredibly useful in other ways and can be adapted beyond Alcoholics Anonymous’ program. You can draft a personal inventory for anytime your life has become untenable and use it to constantly tweak your life for optimal performance.
Perhaps it’s time I focused on making such an inventory for myself: a list of what I’m doing wrong and how to fix what’s broken.
Months ago, I drafted an internal document I refer to as The Dunebat Directives, a list of my goals and aspirations and a brief roadmap toward achieving them and toward developing better habits.1 While The Dunebat Directives — a document I tweak, rework, and rewrite whenever needed — is a good start, I feel it’s not enough to really serve my needs for total self-improvement and lifestyle reorganization and enhancement.
Today, I hope to build on what I started with The Dunebat Directives by forming it into a more fully fleshed-out personal inventory and an extensive plan of action. I may publish whatever portions of this document that I feel would be appropriate to share in public here at Dunebat Country.
Wish me good fortune…
Featured image courtesy of GoDaddy.com.
- I have published one part of The Dunebat Directives, The Dunebat Doctrines, here at Dunebat Country already.[↩]
