January 2010: You Are Still You

 

"Cheers to a New Year and another chance for us to get things right” ~Oprah Win­frey

With a new year comes the feel­ing of a fresh start. Which seems espe­cially excit­ing if the pre­vi­ous year was less than stel­lar. I know some folks who could not wait to shake off 2009 like unwanted mud on the bot­tom of their shoes. Oth­ers were sad to see it go, but look­ing for­ward to what 2010 has in store. You can count me in with the lat­ter group.

Good in = Good out

Regard­less of which group we fit into, we still look at a new year as a chance to “get things right”. I refuse to look at 2010 as a way to fix real or per­ceived wrongs. I pre­fer to look at the glass half-full and tend not waste time wor­ry­ing about things I can­not change.  It seems to me that we as humans are bound to do things that work well for us as well as things that do not work out well. The best thing we can do is applaud our suc­cesses and make a con­certed effort to mod­ify the behav­ior and deci­sion mak­ing that was not successful.

Seems sim­ple enough, right?

Do more of the things that are good for us and less of the things that are not good for us. By doing those two sim­ple things our life should be golden. Sure, except for the fact that we are human and not robotic in nature. There will be cir­cum­stances good and not so good that will affect our deci­sion mak­ing. Which over the long haul will once again result in some folks shak­ing off 2010 and look­ing for­ward to 2011 and so on.

So what is a human to do?

To begin with rec­og­niz­ing that we are human and will make good and bad deci­sions is key. Just because the cal­en­dar has changed doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily mean that our world has changed. We still live in the same place. We still have the same friends and busi­ness asso­ciates. We still have the same food in the fridge. Our health and phys­i­cal fit­ness lev­els are still the same at 12:01am on Jan­u­ary 1, 2010 they were at 11:59 on Decem­ber 31, 2009.

Hope springs eternal

Let me reas­sure you this is not a doom and gloom post. Quite the con­trary, this is a post of hope. Here are a few things that can help make far-fetched res­o­lu­tions and goals obtainable:

•  First of all, be kind to your­self. The list of res­o­lu­tions and goals you have made are won­der­ful. In a per­fect world we would all be able to check them off in a man­ner so effi­ciently we would be the envy of every­one we know. In our imper­fect world we’ll be lucky if our res­o­lu­tions last through the month.

•  Sec­ond fig­ure out what exactly con­sti­tutes suc­cess for you. Sure we all want to loose weight, but we could mod­ify this by instead stat­ing, “I will walk for 30 min­utes 3 days a week and eat salad for lunch 2 times a week.” Stat­ing this as a goal seems more man­age­able and cer­tainly health­ier for us in the long run.

Walk­ing for a few days a week and a slight mod­i­fi­ca­tion in a cou­ple of meals doesn’t seem like a huge change, but I will bet that after 30 days of doing this you’ll feel a dif­fer­ence. Maybe not in pounds lost, but in energy gained. Plus isn’t a fit­ter more ener­getic ver­sion of our­selves some­thing we would all like to see?

•  Third, take peo­ple on your jour­ney with you. It may be a sur­prise to you that there are other folks who also want to lose weight or become more orga­nized or ______________ (insert your goal here). Mak­ing a change with oth­ers is like hav­ing a help­ing hand. Being part of a group dynamic means that not only are we in this together but we have one another to lean on when the going gets dif­fi­cult. We can rejoice in the suc­cess and encour­age one another through the challenges.

“Slow and steady wins the race” - Tor­toise from The Tor­toise and the Hare

One Step At A Time

My goals for this year revolve around orga­ni­za­tion, fit­ness, faith and fam­ily. The fastest road to fail­ure would be for me make an extreme change and attack these goals all at once. Since I have always been a fan of the Tor­toise method of thought, I have opted to slowly add the steps that will help me accom­plish goals. By mak­ing small changes that will over the course of time lead me to make a last­ing change.

I would love to hear the things you have done suc­cess­fully or maybe not so suc­cess­fully.  What are some of the small steps you are tak­ing to make those res­o­lu­tions turn into a last­ing change?

image by Milo Win­ter

Tags: 2010, goals, new year, resolutions