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Over the next few days millions of people will honor the age old tradition of making resolutions for the new year. Shortly afterward they will engage in an equally time honored tradition of breaking those resolutions or forgetting them altogether. My husband really enjoys observing this time of year as the gym parking lot suddenly fills up, and for the first two weeks of January you can’t get to the treadmills or free weights. The Food Network will feature a heavy rotation of healthy cooking themed shows, and Paula Deen might only use one pound of butter per recipe instead of two.
Then January 15th will roll around and there will be less congestion at the gym, and the Food Network will begin airing shows espousing the joys of chocolate. By the end of the month everything will be back to normal, signaling the end of the New Year’s Resolution season. It doesn’t have to be that way.
New Year’s Day is a perfect time to hit the reset button on many areas of your life. This holiday carries tremendous psychic power with it and, if you act appropriately, you can harness that power to bring you happiness and success in 2009!
Review the Past Year
Before you can decide what you want to do differently in the coming year, you need to figure out what wasn’t working for you in the past year. Get out a piece of paper, or your journal, and begin making a list of everything that didn’t work, went wrong, or could have been better. Yes, I know we’re not supposed to dwell on the negative, but you can’t go around pretending everything is perfect and expect anything to change either. So make your list.
Now on a separate piece of paper write down these categories:
- Family
- Personal
- Spiritual
- Health
- Financial
- Professional
Go back to your first list and assign the appropriate category to each item on your list.
After you have done this count up how many items needing change you have for each category. You may find that you have more in some categories than others. That information will be useful when you set your resolutions as you will want to aim for more change in those areas and less in the others.
Set Limits
Do not set yourself up for failure by making a list of more than ten resolutions. The technique that Bill and I have used for years has been to sit down with the categories listed above and choose our number one in each area to resolve to change, which gives us a total of six resolutions for the year. That doesn’t mean that you won’t work on the other things, but this is going to be your priority list. [click to continue...]
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