Here I am again. 750Words.com it’s been a while.
I am sitting here starting to type, after having had a week or so off. I have previously done over 100 days since first joining in September 2014, with only having missed 2 days in 3 1/2 months. I had bashed out over 85k words.
Each day that has passed since I decided to take a break has left me feeling a little less keen about restarting. Then the other voice has said to me ‘taking a break is good – it freshens things up’.
This is a dilemma that we face with most things in life, taking a break from any regular activity is definitely good, however, consistency and keeping the momentum going is also good.
Life is full of these pro’s/con’s situations and at this time of year, we are not only bombarded with diets and holidays offers, but we are inundated with self-help guru’s and experts.
They all have the magic formula for success and they all have their different ‘pearls of wisdoms’ and different takes on the same old things.
Wow that’s 176 words done, I guess the break has rejuvenated me and starting this again isn’t anywhere near as hard as I had built up in my mind it would be.
So what is the answer to all this annual ritual of New Year resolutions?
The answer is don’t make them, don’t have them and don’t set yourself a tsunami of new things you’re going to change this year. Don’t set yourself all these silly goals that you will run out of steam on within a month or so.
The answer is make changes in life all the time, but make the changes that are needed at the right time and take one thing at a time. Make life changes or life resolutions.
Don’t set them all at once, don’t set ridiculously huge changes and set yourself realistic expectations and realistic timeframes.
For example, I lost 7 1/2 stone, but I lost it over 4+ years and I didn’t do it via a fad diet, I did it in a series of small steps, changing habits and sticking to them. The changes I have made, have been life changes. The habits I have broken took years to break, that’s because, like most habits they took years to build up in the 1st place. Things take time.
Other changes I have made to other habits have equally taken years and some I am still in the process of changing and I know that I am still slipping back on some of them.
Here is the other thing, it’s OK to slip on them, I am human and in the past I would have beaten myself up about it, then not felt happy with myself. Then that would have triggered the things that created or made the habits worse in the first place.
Life isn’t about success or failure, money, achievements, etc. Life is about happiness. Happiness is a difficult thing to define, it is very woolly as a concept. It is subjective, as what ‘happiness’ means to me, is different for you.
Happiness is really about positive emotions and things that create well being within us.
We are all conditioned to think about working hard on goals, jobs, projects, relationships, New Year resolutions etc…We believe that once we achieve all these things, then we will be happy.
The most successful people (fill in your own bits here as to what success looks like to you) are the ones who are happy first.
If you are happy with positive thoughts and emotions, you will do happy things, others will want to be around you and you will create with them more happiness/wellbeing etc. When you do happy things it energises you and again it is what you define as happy things, you can’t read a book on it and become happy.
Today, for example, I gave some money to a regular homeless person I see, that made me feel happy. I then found £10 dropped outside the hub and found who’s money it was and that made me happy. I walked my daughter to the station this morning, as she was getting the train to school for the first time and was a bit nervous and sad that the holidays had ended. That made me happy to spend time with her and help her to feel happy. So today has been a great day at work, why? because I feel happy. I am typing this with a smile on my face – it feels good.
Success in what ever shape you want it to come in, comes to those who are happy.
So the only resolution you should have, not just on the 1st January, is to have a life resolution to be happy.
That is it, job done for the rest of your life. It is, like all things, very easily said, slightly less easily written and requires effort and the right mindset to achieve.
Whatever number of grains of sand are left in mine or your’s ‘egg timers’ of life, none of us know, but we are going to have that time, every one of those days. So we can make the choice to approach that positively, with happiness, with a sense of adventure, a sense of fun and with an open mind or we can choose to hope that we can change it all with will power and long list of things we want to change in January, just because it is a new year.
Be happy – the rest will follow.
Philip Dodson 