Why Don't My Self-Improvement Plans Stick?
Think of every plan you've started in the last five years. The morning routine. The reading list. The gym, the budget, the meditation app with the forest sounds.
Most of them worked. For three weeks. Then life came in through a side door and the plan was gone, and you felt vaguely ashamed, and a few months later you started another one.
I did this for about a decade. The plans weren't bad. Some were excellent. What I eventually noticed is that they all worked on one part of me and left the rest alone, and the rest came and got me.
One night I stayed up until morning finishing a journal chapter, proud that I'd found the cure for my dullness. I woke at ten to a relative's visit already underway, ate three meals, and then everyone passed out.
That evening I could sit and write journal entries for hours. I could read popular articles about literature. But the book I'd abandoned months earlier? My will just sat there in denial. My father had told a story that week about a farmer who ploughed his field every season, whatever the gods were doing, so he was ready when the rain finally came. I wrote that down and did nothing with it. I'd stopped using my phone two days earlier and was less distracted. I was no more productive.
That plan worked on one part of me. The diary got tidier and the book stayed exactly where it was.
Three kinds of work, not one
Swami Sivananda summed up his whole teaching in six words, and the Divine Life Society still prints them on the front of its books: Serve, Love, Give, Purify, Meditate, Realise.
I read those six words for years as a slogan. Then one day I saw them as a list of three jobs.
Purify is the work of cleaning up: what you eat, what you've buried, what you keep telling yourself. Meditate and Realise are the work of waking up: knowing what you are underneath the moods and the grooves. Serve, Love, Give are the work of growing up: taking responsibility for yourself, then for the people around you, then for something bigger.
Clean up. Wake up. Grow up. The three verbs come from Ken Wilber's work on human development, and I'm borrowing them because they're plain. The content under each one is older than either of us. It's all in the Gita, the Yoga Sutras and the Sivananda books, and I've been writing about it for fourteen days without naming it.
I call the whole approach Responsibilism. The name is mine. The three jobs are not.
Why one job isn't enough
Here's why the plans fail, as far as I can tell.
A diet is clean-up work. A meditation app is wake-up work. A career plan is grow-up work. Each one is real. But if you do one and skip the other two, the two you skipped will undo the one you did.
Take the diet. You eat well for three weeks. But you never looked at why you eat at 10 pm, which is wake-up work, the witness we found two days ago. And you never changed the job that leaves you hollow at 10 pm, which is grow-up work. So the diet holds until the first bad week, and then the fridge wins, because the fridge was never the problem.
Or take the meditation. You sit for ten minutes a day. But you're sitting on four coffees and five hours' sleep, so the mind is wired or heavy before you start, and you conclude that meditation doesn't work for you. It works fine. It just can't do the cleaning as well.
The Gita describes a person who's doing all three at once in a single verse. Moderate in food and recreation, moderate in effort at work, moderate in sleep and waking, and for that person, yoga ends sorrow (6.17). Food and sleep are clean up. The yoga is wake up. The work is grow up. All in one sentence, and all held in balance.
The three stages, briefly
I'll take each one properly in the coming weeks. For today, the shape.
Clean up is Sivananda's purify. It's the body and the past. Food, sleep, fasting, the breath. And then the harder part: looking at what's in the storeroom, the chitta (the mind-stuff), the impressions and grooves and knots we've spent this week naming. Patanjali's word for this is svadhyaya (self-study, 2.1). You can't clean a room you won't look at.
Wake up is meditate and realise. It's the eight limbs, the practice of sitting, and the slow discovery that you are the witness, and the weather passes through. Everything in the last week has pointed here. It's where most productivity advice stops, if it gets here at all.
Grow up is serve, love, give. It's taking responsibility, in the plain sense, for your corner of the world. Your work, your money, the people who depend on you. The Gita is firm that waking up doesn't excuse you from this. Krishna tells Arjuna that even the wise must act, because people follow what the best among them do (3.20 to 3.21). Sivananda says service alone purifies the heart, which means grow-up work feeds back into clean-up work. The three form a loop.
Why the name
Why Responsibilism and not just yoga? Because yoga, in most people's minds, has become the wake-up stage alone, or worse, just the postures. The word has shrunk. I wanted a word that holds all three jobs and puts the plain one, responsibility, in the middle, where it belongs.
It also answers the question I started with. Why do you feel vaguely unfulfilled even when the plan is going well? Fulfilment comes from all three done adequately, at the same time, for a long while. That's less dramatic than a transformation. It's also the only version I've seen last.
What to do with this
A short audit. Twenty minutes, one page.
Write the three headings. Clean up, wake up, grow up.
Under each, write what you're actually doing. Not what you plan to. What happened this week. Be honest, and be brief.
Find the empty column. Most people have one job they do and one they've never touched. The empty column is where the last three plans went to die.
Add one small thing there. Only one. If clean-up is empty, pick the 12-hour overnight fast from last week. If wake-up is empty, two minutes a day of watching the mind. If grow-up is empty, one commitment you've been avoiding, kept this week.
Balance doesn't have to be perfect. Stop leaving one of the three empty, because the empty one is where the plan leaks out.
Another way to look at it
We treat self-improvement as a project, with a start and a finish and a result. The Sivananda line has no finish. Serve, love, give, purify, meditate, realise. It's a description of a day, repeated. I find that much easier to live with than a transformation, because a day I can do, and then do again.
Tomorrow: why writing it down helps so much, and the oldest clean-up tool in the tradition.
Where to read more
The Sivananda-tradition books behind today's piece:
Inspiring Talks of Gurudev Sivananda, Swami Venkatesananda (the six words explained in Sivananda's own talk)
Practice of Karma Yoga, Swami Sivananda (service as purification)
Bhagavad Gita, 3.20 to 3.21 and 6.17; Yoga Sutras, 2.1
If this helped, subscribe to Yogic Productivity on Substack, where the three stages will be taken one at a time over the coming months. And if you'd like a pen friend for the clean-up part, an Explorative Letter is where I'd start.
Comments