Sunny with a Chance of Sprinkles

I decided to try something a little different with my resolutions this year to see if it would help me stick to them.  Every year I come up with a list of 5 or 10 resolutions and every year I fail at nearly every single one.  I’m pretty good at not beating myself up about it and the silver lining is that I can carry my unaccomplished resolutions with me into the next new year.

This  year, however, I would like to take my resolutions a little more seriously and actually make some positive changes to my life.  That is why this year I’m deciding to focus on creating habits instead of making a list of things that I will have forgotten about by February.

There are a lot of reasons resolutions can be hard to stick to:  often they are too general, they aren’t measurable, they haven’t been broken down into simple enough steps, etc.  But two of the biggest reasons that I’ve read about is that we often take on too many things at once (which is overwhelming) and we don’t give them enough time to become habitual parts of our routine (and we fall off the wagon, so to speak).

Many people suggest that in order to make something a habit you have to do that thing every day and you should come up with some sort of “trigger” for doing that activity.  As I was thinking about my own daily habits the first one that came to mind is that I tidy my bedroom every day (the rest of my home is a different story).  My trigger for this habit is showering.  Every day after I’m finished showering and getting ready I go straight to my room, clean up any clothes that are lying around, and make my bed.  I never think about it.  I just do it.  Similarly, I would like my resolutions to become habits that I do naturally.

For 2012, I’m going to focus on one habit at a time.  I’m starting with flossing my teeth.  I know, it sounds kind of silly, but I’m always thinking about how I really should floss my teeth every day for better  health.  It’s just so easy to put off until tomorrow or next week or before St. Patrick’s Day.  Also, I think it’s a good idea to start with something small.  Once I notice that flossing my teeth has become a normal daily habit, I’ll move on to the next thing.

I’m hoping that this focus on creating habits will help me check off some of the resolutions that turn up on my list year after year, and maybe next year my resolutions list will be much smaller or look completely different than it has looked for the past few years.

I have a tradition every New Year’s Eve.  I write a letter to myself with my intentions for the next year, seal it up, and don’t look at again until December 31st the following year.  It’s a tradition that’s become very important to me because it forces me to reflect on the past year, my current state of being, and what things I would like to nurture or bring into my life the next year.

When I first began doing this a few years ago, I called it a resolutions letter.  But I’ve come to realize that the things I write about aren’t quite resolutions, which I also make at the beginning of a new year.  My letters are intentions that help me set a focus for the year ahead and should help guide my actions and choices to move me closer to the kind of person I want to be and the kind of life I want to have.  For instance, the first year I wrote an intention letter I was coming off an especially difficult year and was very nervous about what the next year would bring.  I wrote about how I wanted to focus on bringing calm back into my life and I let that idea of calmness guide me during the next year.

Yesterday when I opened my letter from a year ago I was surprised to find how poorly I did at bringing the things that I had hoped for into my life.  In fact, one of my intentions was the opposite of what my life actually looked like this year.  The problem wasn’t that it was a bad year.  Basically, I wrote my intentions and forgot about them–completely.  I had no idea what I was going to be reading when I opened my letter.  It doesn’t do a lot of good to write about the things that you want most in your life and then forget about them.  The other problem was that I had adopted such a negative attitude this year and felt so stuck in a rut that it was unlikely that I was going to have a great year because my mindset was all wrong.

This year I’m making a commitment to keep my focus on the things I’m hoping for.  Hopefully when I look back on my letter I will find that I was able to attract many good things into my life in 2012.