Studies show that we all start off our new year with high hopes for personal growth and change. We are excited about what the future can bring and what we can do for ourselves, our family, our friends, and our professional lives. We always have the best of intentions on December 31st and notice that everything starts to wane a few weeks into January. Take heart, be courageous, and know this is normal: Change is HARD! That doesn’t mean you should give up but maybe you should rethink the way you think about your resolutions.
Here are some simple and productive ways to make your goals come together in 2020:
Focus on what you want.
It doesn’t matter if your mother-father-sister-brother-partner-friend-or-neighbor wants you to change something. What matters is what you really want to change, improve, or get better at.
Focus on the positive and the progress.
Reflect on what you are doing well, what is helping, and what is making a difference. If you make a mistake, backslid, or just plain forget don’t beat yourself up over it. Pick yourself up and get going again. Every day is a new chance to grow.
Remember this simple but important point: change is a process, it is not a single isolated event.
You don’t just wake up different. You go through steps and every step gets you closer to where you want to be.
Many cultures have traditions that help them ring in each new year. In the southern states, one of those traditions is eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day as they are thought to bring prosperity in the coming year. When I was growing up my mom would also put a dime in our pot and the person who got the dime would be granted especially good luck that year. Silly? Probably! But we loved seeing who got the dime each year and believed they’d have all the luck!
Many years later, my husband and I were keeping up this tradition and absentmindedly tossed a dime in the pot and forgot about it. We ate our black-eyed peas that night feeling very smug about our coming year of prosperity and good luck and we totally forgot about the dime.
Until …
Later, I was washing out the big pot, not noticing that the dime was still around and now making its way into my garbage disposal. I flipped on the disposal to the sound of “Oh, no! This can’t be right!”
The dime was clanking away and destroying our disposal. My husband crawled under the sink, messed around with it for several hours, swore often, and finally came out and said, “We’ll need to call a plumber.”
Happy-Freaking-New-Year!
Life is so much about perspective, don’t you think? We could have felt defeated by this minor incident as a “sign” of crummy things to come that year or we could just laugh because in the big picture this was nothing.
Keep the right perspective in 2020, do the best you can, and you’ll be able to achieve whatever you set your sights on! Cheers!!
"I have learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends on our dispositions and not on our circumstances." - Martha Washington -
Kommentare