Tired of New Year’s Resolutions? Try This Instead

While chatting with a friend last week, the topic of New Year’s resolutions came up.

“So, how about those new year’s resolutions?” I asked her. “Umm, well, you know… they never stick,” she replied.

Yep. Pretty much the same response I get from most of my friends.

I recently read a social media post by a young man who explained how New Year’s Eve was the time to “mentally delete” all his bad habits from the previous year. He felt that by erasing his mista­­­­­kes, he might be freed of them.

While I understood his perspective, I didn’t agree with his philosophy. Bad habits can’t simply be deleted, but they can certainly be replaced.

So, what gives? Why is it so hard to keep our resolutions? Because with resolutions, we focus on actions and not intentions.

Intentions are on a higher plane than actions. Intentions are about changing our core behaviors and the way we view ourselves from a deeper perspective. We can accept our mistakes as lessons and learn to focus forward instead of looking backwards.

A few years ago, I made the decision to stop creating New Year’s resolutions and, instead, set intentions. To me, the word resolution implies the “resolving of problems” — and going back over my last year to clean…