Are New Year's Resolutions Pointless and Depressing?

How to Create a Powerful, Achievable New Year's Resolution

It’s the end of 2008 and no matter how wonderful or awful it was I encourage you to open your heart and embrace the opportunity for great change for 2009 and beyond.

The tradition of creating resolutions for the New Year can be a daunting task. We want to do better, look better, feel better, be better. But the process of deciding what we are resolved to do can actually have a negative effect, which undermines the point of making a resolution in the first place.

Allow me to elaborate; if you reflect on the past year in a way that emphasizes all of those tasks and goals that did not get accomplished, you are setting yourself up to fail in those same tasks and goals for the new year. Brow-beating yourself for what didn’t happen creates a negative vibration which etches the negative emotions and disappointments in to every cell of your body.

It’s no wonder so many people get depressed over creating their New Year’s Resolutions.

How are You Feeling Today?

On the simplest level, the Law of Attraction is dictated by the Law of Vibration. What you think about creates feelings in your body, literally on a cellular level. The higher, more positive thoughts create a higher more positive vibration. Therefore, since like-attracts-like, the higher your vibration the more positive experiences and people you will attract. Conversely, the lower more negative thoughts create a lower, negative vibration. This either keeps you stuck where you are or worse, attracts negative people and circumstances your way.

What should you do now? How can you even begin to create new resolutions without thinking about what hasn’t already happened in a negative way?

Unfortunately, just writing down what we want to have happen or thinking ‘happy’ thoughts isn’t quite enough to create positive and permanent change. You must become emotionally involved with the commitment of what better is for you. Not what someone else thinks it should be for you, but what it would genuinely mean to you.

:WARNING:

Continue reading, only if you are serious about making a significant positive change for yourself. This takes a little courage, some thought, about 30 minutes and the ability to love yourself (or at least a genuine desire to want to love yourself).

Grab your journal or a notebook, find a comfortable private spot and give yourself the gift of yourself.

1) Forget about the New Year for a moment. Close your eyes, take a deep breath and think about one (or 10!) great thing(s) you did accomplish this past year. Write it down!

2) Close your eyes again, take a deep breath and think of one small thing you accomplished yesterday. Write it down!

3) This time visualize someone in your life that loves you and imagine them telling you why they love you. Write it down! (do not skip this one)

4) Now visualize someone that you admire and/or love (anyone – alive or not) and imagine yourself telling them why you admire them. Write it down!

5) Take another deep, cleansing breath and read aloud what you just wrote from steps 3 & 4 using your own name (even if you don’t believe it-yet).

6) Close your eyes and see yourself in your mind’s mirror as the loved and admired person you just declared yourself to be (even if it’s just for a moment).

7) Fast forward to this time next year as the loved and admired person you are. What was your greatest accomplishment for the year? Who has acknowledged you for this accomplishment?
Now that’s a Goal worth Achieving. Write it down!

This is your New Year’s Resolution!


Embrace the Next Highest Version of You

If you find it difficult to acknowledge yourself in this way, I invite you to consider the fact that any time you recognize or admire greatness in another it is because you have the seed or even the roots of that same greatness in yourself.

You would not be capable of envisioning an exciting goal for yourself if you didn’t already posses the ability and fortitude to make it a reality.

This exercise works because it aligns you with the truth that you already do accomplish many wonderful things every day of every year – great and small. When you allow yourself to celebrate the small along with the great you begin to associate with the positive returns in life.

When you go to bed at night and thank yourself for all that you did this day, you will wake eager to do more the next. If you go to bed worried about all the things that did not get done and are waiting for you tomorrow, you will toss and turn and begin the new day full of dread and anxiety. You choose.

When your goal or resolution is exciting enough to pull you out of your comfort zone then you will find positive changes begin to take place in all the other areas of your life as well.

One great goal is far more powerful than 5 mediocre resolutions. With mediocre resolutions we can’t stay committed. If we blow one, we throw them all out together, (if we can even remember what they all were in the first place).

I promise, if you will take 30 minutes to complete this whole exercise and then read it over once every day, you can change the entire course of your next year from mediocre to GREAT.

Now, if you find yourself wondering how to accomplish or even begin this next phase of your life, I urge you to contact a qualified Life Coach. A good coach can be an invaluable thinking-partner to help you unleash the rich creative genius that you are ready to express!

Give yourself the gift of your own true potential to become the Next Highest Version of You!

Many Blessings for a Happy & Prosperous New Year!

Schelli Whitehouse / Professional & Life Coach
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