Towards a Better Life: Resolving, and Planning, and Just DOING!

So here we are! It's a shiny new year; a shiny new decade. What are you going to make of it?

It seems to be a time-honored tradition to use the turn of the year to make lots of "plans and resolutions" for how to improve our lives; even how to improve ourselves.

I'm not knocking that — planning and "resolving to do" can be great tools, but for a great many people they are also a path to disappointment and disillusion.

How so? Around the turn of the year we often feel (peer) pressured into saying that "we are going to do and change" a bunch of things we are not really ready to change.

Leaves in the sun

It Has Been a Long Time...

... since I have made any formal "New Year's Resolutions."

I find it a lot easier to just MAKE changes whenever the mood and inspiration strikes me. In fact, I'd say I have something on the order of a 75% success rate, when it comes to changing things in my life... especially when it includes part two of my "strategy:" Don't tell anyone you've made some major change.

I let people notice and discover that for themselves. Or not. Of course, we all have different temperaments, but I have never found it particularly productive to put pressure on myself by saying things like "I'm going to lose 25lbs by next Christmas." It works much better when I simply make it an internal goal that I try to follow through with.

Thistle flower

Making Assessments and Measurements

What I do tend to do, around the turn of the year, is record a bunch of benchmarks for my own edification, so I can refer back to them later.

For example, I may or may not train to run a 10K race in a specific time by this summer... but I will keep a track of what my current time is at the turn of the year, just so I have that information on hand as a "benchmark" to refer back to.

Simply recording some fact or bit of data doesn't mean I am pressuring myself to do something with it... although I tend to be "sneaky competitive" with myself so it often turns out that I'll be glad I had the original information!

Time for reflection...

Self-Improvement: It's About YOU, not about OTHER PEOPLE!

The key concept in so-called "self-improvement" is that it is ultimately about ourselves.

Hence, one of the reasons people so often fail in their New Year's Resolutions is that they take on some "thing" in order to please or impress other people, rather than themselves. And that pretty much always ends badly, because it's the wrong motivator.

Which is why I find the whole idea of making resolutions at a New Year's party rather ridiculous,,,

Anyway, there are definitely some "things" am hoping to accomplish this year, but I'm not going to share what they are! You'll just have to come back at the end of the year and see if I write about "having accomplished" certain things in 2020!

Thanks for reading!

(Another #creativecoin creative non-fiction post)

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment-- share your experiences-- be part of the conversation!

(As usual, all text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is original content, created expressly for this platform.)
Created at 20200102 18:18 PST
1156