Sandra Yeaman

New Year’s Resolutions? – Do you or don’t you? Why or why not?

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions. Why not? Because I haven’t figured out the secret of selecting meaningful resolutions that will end with success.

If I can succeed at following a resolution all year long, it is likely something lacking in significance. Like, I resolve to get out of bed every day this year.

For someone else, this might be a meaningful resolution. But for me, chances are nothing will interfere with my ability to keep it. So it is insignificant.

If I set a meaningful resolution, I will likely fail. At least now and then. Like when I resolved to give up smoking. It didn’t matter that I only slipped up now and then and lit up a cigarette. Even a single instance of doing so meant I failed. In the end, I gave up smoking, but it wasn’t because of a resolution. It was because of a significant emotional event: I met my husband who had never in his life put a tobacco product into his mouth. OK, so maybe there was a resolution involved, but what worked was the fear that failure would mean he might not want to stick around. And I definitely wanted him to stay with me.

I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions because significant emotional events, the prompts for resolutions with meaning, don’t schedule themselves on a calendar. They happen when they happen. When they happen, I look anew at what changes in my life will bring greater meaning into my life. And then I resolve to make those changes.

Gif from Giphy.com.