A Year Without Resolutions...

Interesting how I am following up with this blog as the one before (January 1, 2011 A Time for Thinking or A Time for Guilt?) seemed so inspiring and positive that you would’ve thought that I would’ve been ‘chomping at the bit’ (so to speak) to make some New Year’s resolutions…however I didn’t.

After showing just how easy it was I wasn’t sure if I even needed to make any resolutions this year. After 25 days of no resolutions, I decided that yes the freedom to not worry about breaking them has been awfully nice. But the feeling of actually sticking to them is even better!

I decided that I would come up with a few resolutions of my own to see if that would motivate me a little more. Oddly enough they were very simple to come up with and somewhat achievable. The first one was to join a gym again, check! The second one was to work out more often, check! The third one was to read one book a month, check!

Once I got the hang of it, it was pretty straight forward and almost inspiring. It’s almost like I needed to have the resolutions in place to motivate me...it’s odd I know but once I got those bad boys down on paper, I actually felt like I was more inspired to complete them.

Once I used my new found knowledge of how to actually make a New Year’s resolution that was actually achievable, I ran away with it. The three resolutions that I have listed are not the only resolutions that I made. In fact I think I made about 8 in total…all realistic and achievable. They are listed below:

• Join a gym
• Workout more often
• Read a book once a month
• Wear a skirt to work once a month
• Keep in touch with family members outside of the province
• Work on my 'To Do' list
• Take more pictures
• Eat less take out food

They seem pretty reasonable and not to narrow, you would think that not having resolutions would be more appealing to me. However here I sit writing them down for all of the world to see, so maybe I will be much more motivated.


So get off your butt and make some resolutions so that we can all be motivated!

A Time for Thinking or A Time for Guilt?

We all know what day this is…this is the day that we go back to look at the New Year’s Resolutions we made last year and feel guilty for all the ones we didn’t keep. We then torture ourselves a little more by adding those same resolutions to this year’s list, insisting that we’ll uphold them this year. Despite not having fulfilled them time and time again we try to fool ourselves into thinking this year will be different.

So why is it we torture ourselves this way? How do we break the cycle? Well there is the obvious, stop making resolutions OR we can make our resolutions realistic. I think if we made the resolutions closer to something we can achieve, we will actually be successful in fulfilling them.

I decided to do just that, I made a resolution that was more realistic. Initially the resolution was ‘get a whole new wardrobe’; I tweaked it to be that I would ‘purchase one new item each month.’ Believe it or not I actually did just that; I think the reason I stuck with it was because I didn’t find the task so daunting. To find one classic piece of clothing to add to my wardrobe really wasn’t that hard.

I found that if I made the task smaller, it didn’t seem completely unattainable. This tiny task has helped me to get closer to my overall goal. This is how I think that we all should make resolutions; we might actually follow through with most of them. I think if I continue to make my resolutions like this I will continue to feel a sense of accomplishment.

I’m almost excited to get started on this year’s resolutions!!