No New Year’s Resolutions for Me

Every year I start out by making one or more New Year’s resolutions.  And every year, long before we are even half way through, those resolutions are long forgotten.  When they do come to mind, then I feel badly about once again not having succeeded in meeting whatever goals I had set.  I feel like a failure.  So this year, I am not going to make any resolutions and it is not because of my past failures.

When I started to assess my potential resolutions for this year, I suddenly realized that I had not failed in the past but rather tried to set my goals by an artificial date.  There is no way that I know what will come my way in the new year so how can I set real goals now for specifics that have not yet revealed themselves.  Let me give you an example.  I wrote my first blog on January 22, 2008.  At that time, I did not have any particular long-term goal for doing these blogs but somewhere along the way, I decided that it should be a weekly writing and as January 22, 2010 quickly approaches, I anticipate that I will write a blog each of the next 3 weeks to successfully complete 2 full years of writing here each week.

Now to me, that is an accomplishment as I never envisioned myself as a writer and had someone said to me in those early days that I should set a goal of writing every single week, I would probably have been discouraged before I even started.  I would have had no idea that there would ever be enough topics about which I would want to write.  I would have felt so much pressure to come up with something new every 7 days.  But, by doing something for the first time and allowing the process to evolve rather than setting stringent goals, I have been able to do something that I would never have imagined at its beginning.

I think this applies to anything that we wish to accomplish.  If we decide that we want to do something, any day throughout the year is a good starting point.  We may try to do something and find that the method that we employed doesn’t work.  So we have a choice to either give up or find something else that works better for us on a personal level.  For example, you may want to work out more but are so tired of going to the gym and repeating the same exercise routines over and over.  But what may work for you is to go and play a good game of tennis or basketball or some other sport that you enjoy and then what you are doing doesn’t even feel like work.  Or if you don’t feel like you have time to work out or play a game, there are ways to create from your housework or the long hours at the office some meaningful exercises that can effect the changes that you want.

So this year, for the first time, I am going to welcome the New Year with lots of hope and anticipation that I will find the ways to affect the changes that I would like to make in my own life and to find new ways to help others.  And it truly will not matter on what day I reach a goal or if I sustain something for an entire year, just as long as whatever I do makes a positive difference.

Do you have New Years resolutions? COMMENTS