Intention is not strategy

How often have you said, or heard someone else say: "I'll do better next time." The intent is genuine, so transparent that if will alone were enough, it (whatever 'it' is) would already be in the bag,

As a teacher, I often flummox students by asking, "Great! How?"

Many people - both children and adults - take this is as disbelief in their sincerity. "Well, I'll try harder, I'll try my very best" is the usual answer. So I ask again: "How will you try? What will you actually do differently?"

I'm not yanking their chain. Or yours now. Intention is not strategy. Try is not a plan, so as the old saying goes "if you're not planning to succeed, you're planning to fail" and another "if you do what you've done, you get what you've had".

Trying harder is like that. A lot of the time it stands in for "I have no idea what is going wrong, so I'll just throw effort into it in the hope that something sticks." We think the problem is in our will to change, and sometimes that is true, but often its more that we don't know what practical, physical steps to take.

This applies whether the change is learning the fingering in a passage of piano music, or remembering to pick up the milk on the way home, or exercising a bit of what Nigella Lawson calls 'dietary restraint'. Last week we tried to "just get it right" and this week we'll try that again, this time it's bound to work...

I do it, I suspect most people do it about something. In some magical future, we'll be perfect, and we'll get what we want by simply willing it to happen. We wish we could be more skillful at our jobs, our relationships, our hobbies, our driving... All too often, we're quite content with 'trying'.

It exacerbates problems in relationships, where Stephanie Dowrick has commented that we judge others on their actions, but we judge ourselves on our intentions. (Did anyone order cognitive dissonance to go?)

When mentor Tim Gunn on Project Runway says "Make it happen", he's not asking the designers to try harder, he's asking them to decide what needs to be done and then do it.

So if you want something different - no matter how big or small - try to work out something however small that you'll do differently next time. And if that doesn't work, try something else the time after.

This is post 4 of 100 Posts in 100 Days.