Have you achieved your last New Year’s resolution? Do you even remember what it was? Most likely, you have tried doing it for a few weeks, a month or two, and then it became too hard, other things took priority, you missed out once, then a few times, and then you just gave up on it. This is what tends to happen to most of our resolutions.
Because a resolution means you have to resolve something, solve something, you’re running away from something. Perhaps as your new Year’s resolution you have chosen something that you think you’re supposed to want, or that will be good for you and that you have not had the courage, so far, to put into place. And you think that making a resolution will help.
Well, I have news for you: it won’t!
You want to lose weight, or stop smoking, or give up complaining. It’s an “away from”, rather than a “towards” value, and as soon as you are a little away from it, you have implicit permission to stop. So you revert to you old, well-known habits and in addition, beat yourself up for not keeping your commitment, for failing once again, being weak and with no will-power.
A resolution is a goal we want to achieve, and a commitment we make to ourselves; but more often than not, people use goals to measure how they fell short, rather than what they’ve achieved. If the commitment is made at a low level of energy, of just “wanting”, it is easily broken. Your commitment must be made at a high level, the level of your identity, of “being” the person who no longer smokes, or who cares about their well-being and appearance.
So I encourage you, even if you have already made your New Year’s resolution, to change it to an “intention“. An intention is more experiential, it doesn’t have to have a tangible result, although it may. It holds a feeling that you can bring up into your conscious awareness at any moment regardless of circumstances or people – you feeling good, powerful, successful, up to the challenge; feeling able, capable, or willing. The beauty of an intention is that you can be fulfilling it at any and every moment of the day. You can experience any feeling you want, by just turning your thoughts to an event or circumstance in your life that held that feeling – or even imagining one.
An intention is always going towards something, and you can always keep reaching towards something bigger or something better, so you never stop. And in the process, you become the person you want to be, whether it’s the person who no longer wants to smoke, or the person who always works out, or the person who no longer sees anything to complain about. And who you have become, will of course accomplish your intention, because it’s who you now are. It’s your identity.
You will no longer be the person who wants to accomplish something from a place of not having or being it; you have become the person who has accomplished it!
