Another New Year - 2019

If you focus on results, you will never change. If you focus on change, you will get results.” ~Jack Dixon ~  Lori Deschene

  

I don’t actually believe New Year’s Day is any different than any other day. I don’t believe a random point in time requires us to make a laundry list of things we need to change or improve.   New Year’s Eve is, in fact, just another day, and the next day is one, as well.

 

I don’t mean to minimize the excitement of the New Year.   What I’m saying is that New Year’s resolutions often fail for a reason, and it’s only slightly related to intention or discipline.

Resolutions fail because they don’t emerge from true breakthroughs. They’re calendar-driven obligations. and they often address the symptoms, not the cause of our unhappiness. 

Some resolutions are smart for our physical and emotional health and well-being. Quitting smoking, losing weight, managing stress better—these are all healthy things.  But if we don’t address what underlies our needs to light up, order double bacon cheeseburgers, and worry ourselves into frenzies, will it really help to vow on one arbitrary day to give up everything that helps us pretend we’re fine?

It’s almost like we set ourselves up for failure to avoid addressing the messy stuff.

We’ll do these things from time to time, and they’ll hurt. In the aftermath, we’ll want to do all those things that every year we promise to give up.  We’ll want to eat, drink, or smoke away our feelings. Or we’ll want to work away our nagging sense of inadequacy.  Or we’ll judge whether or not we’re really enjoying life enough, and in the very act of judging detract from that enjoyment.

So, perhaps the best resolution has nothing to do with giving up all those not-so-healthy things and everything to do with adopting a new mindset that will make it less tempting to turn to them.