I can’t remember ever seriously making resolutions before, but this year it seemed right. I have to take steroids for asthma and they make me gain weight. So I’ve been in this existential pickle. Do I go for the hot bod and skip the steroids, or do I give in to my addiction to drawing air through my lungs several times every minute? Fortunately I can quit the steroids in warm weather, so I can take advantage of this weirdly hot winter in Texas, and breathe and exercise and eat right. It feels good.

Competition is part of the warp and woof of American life. I hate it and avoid it, but recently I have found myself in the odd position of having people compete against me without my knowledge. I’ve heard reports that people I consider my friends have discussed my work disparagingly outside my presence. It appears that there are some others I barely know who are trying to blackball me from the clicker community—of all bizarre and incongruous things. Of course, I heard that through the grapevine, so it may not be true. But it did make me think about what I need to do as a person. I need to be sure to never be the person who says something that might get back to someone and hurt them. I need to be sure to never say anything that may make someone think worse of another person.

Nevertheless, the idea that some people might not be completely supportive of me as a clicker training researcher took me completely by surprise. I got interested in clicker training, and ultimately behavior analysis, because here was a technology and a science of behavior change that proves that we can manage behavior more efficiently with kindness, with positive reinforcement instead of punishment, most of the time. With cooperation instead of coercive control. That delighted the hell out of me.

I still believe that. I still believe the data. The data protected my feelings from those alleged unkindnesses spoken by colleagues and friends. If no empirical data had demonstrated the behavior analytic work to be effective I would probably be suffering differently. It would hurt more. It would be scarier because of the uncertainty of not understanding why what I’m doing worked. The fear that I was just lucky and that someone might figure me out one day would be hanging over my head. But that isn’t the case. I’m confident in the work I’m doing, and I had hoped that work could be a source of community building. You’d think at my age naïveté wouldn’t be right up in my face all the time like this.

My New Year’s questions are: How will I create a life of work in which I can support people in being the best they can be? How can I work with animals and people and keep myself separate from unnecessary unkindness against or from other people? How can I protect myself from hard feelings when others choose not to come to me when they have concerns that only I can do anything about?

I long ago recognized that what I think is right today may not be what I decide is right tomorrow. As more information comes to me, I have to change. That’s how learning occurs. That’s the foundation of a rich life. Without that kind of learning and change, I might as well just dig a hole and lie down in it because the good life will be over. Someday I may know how to create resolutions with those with whom I have strong differences. I am still trying to figure that out. I suspect there are things that cannot be worked out. It would be easy to use that as a copout, though, to neglect fixing things that might be painful or challenging to fix. So, at least for tonight, I’ll keep hoping there is a way.

The times when I have been the happiest while working were the 15 years during which I organized or participated in women’s retreats. The retreats were founded on an agreement of community safety. This meant that we were only there to support one another and as long as we provided that support we received it ourselves. We pledged that what was said there stayed there. We studied goal-setting, taking care of ourselves, how to heal from tragedies like 9-11 and personal setbacks. How to propel ourselves forward. Understanding what it means to forgive ourselves and others. Understanding that living beings only do what works, and when it stops working the best penance is not guilt but finding another way to behave. This kind of community works. 

In December I approached someone I was having a concern with. I’d been fretting over it for weeks. It was hard. I rehearsed until I found an angle that could actually help that person, and not just provide me with revenge. That was the key to the success of that conversation. Once I talked to that person, it was resolved in a matter of hours. All that suffering I put myself through! The person was open and understanding. There was an explanation for part of it, something I hadn’t realized. There was an apology for part of it. There was a resolution we were both happy with. I liked that person better after all that than I did in the first place, and as far as I knew previously I had liked that person just fine. So there can be rewards for necessary honesty.

My other New Years resolution is to find a way to build a career that allows me to be kind to people and animals, and through which I can help other people succeed even as I succeed, rather than competing against them. It’s to find a way to minimize criticisms about myself by working on being a better person. It’s about understanding that people, like animals, do what has worked for them, and that unkind things people say about me are none of my business, and are only behavior that is being reinforced in the speaker’s environment.

May we all make our environments about building each other up instead of tearing each other down.

My best and deepest wishes for your success this coming year.