New Year’s Resolutions. Ick.
When I was younger I would take a few moments at this time of year to make a list of changes. Hindsight tells me my lists simply confirmed what I thought was lacking in my life and somehow putting them in a list would help to make me better. What a depressing tradition!
No one likes having weaknesses and slight faults and failures staring back from the page, challenging us to do better! I’m sure we can all attest to hitting roadblocks in our resolutions. These roadblocks should be named for what they are: dead-end self-judgements. They are nouns and adjectives with the power to halt our personal progress.
Being a goal-oriented person, I can’t shake this yearly list-making, but I now approach the tradition differently. I’ve changed the way I think about goal-setting, focusing more on awareness and less on an end goal. Instead of listing ways to change and improve, I take time to look closer at what’s working for me and what doesn’t feel quite right for my progress. Having moved away from typical resolution-making, I’ve found that becoming a verb in the direction of my goals is success itself. Taking small steps and small actions build the skills and resilience needed for any goal or success.
Paying attention to what promotes expansion and movement towards that growth or conversely, what has us contracting and turning away, builds awareness and brings us closer to our highest potential. Taking small action steps — being a verb in your preferred direction — allows for greater awareness to feel things out and make adjustments for success. Better yet by choosing movement towards what feels right, roadblocks can be spotted miles away and adjustments made to avoid them or to blast through them at high speed with an explosion of celebration confetti.
By changing how we think about goals, our progress can be broken down into a process of little learning opportunities, setting sustainable habits that benefit physical and mental health for expansion, growth, awareness and success.
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