How Will You Spend Your Time This Year?
After all the preparation and anticipated excitement, the holidays are over. I just finished putting the last bow in the box and the boxes in the attic. Gone 2008 and Hello 2009! I’m sure the theme around our holiday dinner table was similar to those at others tables, what will happen in 2009? The common phrase is “this year I will do it.”! While this is an honorable statement, how many people really follow through and take action to achieve what they desire?
We see each New Year as a new beginning. We enter it with excitement and a sense of possibility that wasn’t there just a day earlier. We make plans, resolutions and promises to ourselves and to others. This year, I didn’t make any resolutions. I guess I have learned that if I really want to do something I will do it no matter what time of year it is or whether a tradition is involved or not. In fact, for the past few years, my family has changed our traditions to making predictions. We predict what will happen with the stock market, who will be elected into public office, what companies will “take off” and which will fail, who will get the next raise or promotion in the group and other predictions, which I guess you could say, have the benefit of some history behind the selection since a prediction is a type of foretelling of the future.
I did a search for the history of the New Year’s Resolution and found that they have been around since the Babylonians some 4000 years ago who were resolute to return borrowed farm equipment in time for the next planting early in the year. Today only 10% of all resolutions are kept. Most are forgotten by July, just a mere six months into the year. The common resolutions are around losing weight, working out, quitting smoking/drinking and improving finances.
So, I guess you could say that when the New Year comes around I look back on the blessings of the previous year, the elements that were instrumental in changes in my live and what I can learn from them. You can’t change the past, and you can only look to the future for possibilities, but today, today is the day that you can make a difference that you have some control over. You can make a decision to use your time to grow and expand yourself or to waste it away on hopes that something or someone will take charge and change things for you. The reality is only you can change and you do have control over more than you realize. You can take any statement that may be stated in a negative and reframe it to a positive. As an example: “No matter how hard I work, I’ll never get the attention of my boss.” to “I feel good about myself when I work hard and do my best. I do it for me.” Reframing is an action that takes practice. You need to catch yourself and others doing things right and focus on those actions. In reframing, whenever you catch yourself with a statement or thought that has a negative tone, reframe to a positive. Your words and thoughts are powerful. Why let negative self-talk or spoken negative words bring you down. Reframe those thoughts and phrases to positive!
I predict that if you do one thing this year, reframe your thinking to a positive and you will have less stress, less anxiety and more productive days.
Happy New Year!
Yep, It is that time of the year again. Soon we all will be flowed with email, flyers and events that ask us to make a resolution to do something. It may be to lose weight, stop smoking, eat better, spend more time with the family or attend more networking functions. Any way you look at it we all have something that we want to take action on and don’t.
