smorgan1227’s BodyBlog

I hate New Years Resolutions.  I am determined to not have them.  I love goals.  "What is the difference", you may ask.

My thought of a resolution involves being disappointed with an action or habit and giving myself a start date to make a complete 180.  A resolution says, "Gosh darn it, I can’t believe I have this bad habit, starting January 1, 2009, I am going to put it to rest forever."

Unfortunately, what usually happens is that by January 15th or so, that nasty habit rears it’s ugly head again, and we give ourselves another year to bask in it’s control over us, only resolving to try again in 2010.

A goal on the other hand is something to be obtained.  A new good habit or action that we give ourselves an action plan and needed time to achieve. I love sitting down at the beginning of the year and looking at all the important areas of my life; such as, Family, Church, Friendships, Work, Health.  A goal involves realistic evaluation of the past year and a plan that involves specific steps of action towards improving or changing a particular area of life.  It gives oneself an entire year to make the changes.

I was reminded yesterday when I was helping my 13 year old daughter clean her room. I wouldn’t want to bore you with the details of how dirty her room really was.  However, we will just say that I think small animals were spending their winter hibernation in her room.

As we cleaned the task seemed more and more overwhelming.    I said to Samantha, "Do you know the answer to the question, How do you eat an elephant?"  She said, "No".  I said, "One bite at a time". That is how life is meant to be tackled.  Not as a whirlwind change. But as small daily steps in the correct direction.  As with her room, we need to focus each day on the task at hand.  Not ignore the problems until they are to overwhelming to change.  We need to know where we want to end up, so that our journey is not in vain.  Sometimes a habit is the the A in the A + B = C equation.  Changing our mindset, our goals and our direction is just as important as wanting to change the habit.

No resolutions for me this year, only goals and direction changes.  With that said, I need to go spend some time evaluating my direction and come up with an action plan.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 30th, 2008 at 11:48 am and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.