Happy New Year!
We’re about two weeks into the new year, and I’d like to ask: how are your new year resolutions going?
If you’re like most people, you started off strong, and now, a couple weeks in, you’re finding it challenging. Resolutions are tough. They tend to be an all or nothing proposition: I will lose 10 pounds. I will be home for dinner three times a week. I will cut out all sugar from my diet. I will meditate every single morning for 30 minutes.
It is extremely easy to break a resolution. We tell ourselves that when we make one mistake that it’s all over.
I stopped making resolutions a number of years ago, and started making intentions instead.
Intentions are very different from resolutions. Intentions are very much aligned with growth across the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of our lives. They tend to be much broader and encompass a variety of paths to get there…which means that it is much easier to keep them and see changes in your life. So, for example, setting the intention to take better care of yourself could include losing weight, but could also include making time to have fun or choosing to eat more fruit or learning to love yourself or any other variety of things. Or, setting the intention to spend more time with your family could include being home for dinner three times a week as well as making date nights with your spouse, planning a family field trip…you get the idea.
What I like about intentions is that they tend to get to the true desire of what it is that you want to cultivate in your life. Last year I decided to continue my intention from 2017 because I had had so much fun – and learned so much about myself in the process! – living that intention. It was to live my life with authenticity: bringing in passion, unapologetic fierceness, courage, freedom, love and joy into all aspects of my life.
This year I have a new intention: to balance and combine the spiritual and “practical” in all aspects of my life – work, personal, volunteering, etc. I’ll let you know how it goes. 🙂
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2 Comments
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Intentions vs. resolutions makes so much sense! It does not hold you to one task in which you are totally uninterested except for its promise of health benefits or some other sort of gain, such as maybe you hate to exercise, but you will make yourself use that exercise machine in the basement every day. That’s a sentence of boring bother, whereas an intention lets you pursue a range of possibilities toward your goal, such as in the case of exercise, you could take a walk or ride a bike in different enjoyable places or choose any manner of pleasant activities which involve movement. I vote for intention!!
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Me too! Let me know how it goes!
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