With the Best of Intentions

Every New Year, nearly everyone of us start with a good intention or even a list of intentions.  A single or a list of things that we are going to start or stop doing.

The New Year feels fresh, exciting and we all finally decide it's time to stop messing around and the time has come to be the person that we’ve always wanted to be.

At some point in the year, the shine wears off and we start to go back to old patterns and behaviours, Unfortunately some of us even write off the entire year if we’ve failed at our new years resolutions by the time we hit February!  Often we decide to try again next year, holding on to the idea that a new year somehow magically makes it possible for us to do better. 

This little trick we play on ourselves, it’s a way to opt out of truly engaging in our lives. We’re effectively cheating ourselves and switching off because it’s too hard to keep showing up.  When I was younger, I used to do this nearly every year.  I would set myself impossible goals for New Year and than when I failed I would call Game Over.  I was though practically setting myself up to fail. 

I would make ridiculous resolutions like having no chocolate ever again and then not only eat one but the entire box. I then would decide that I’d “broken the seal and might as well carry on eating,” I then would declare that resolution out of date and postponed it to the following year.

You often see people commit to going to the gym, set up a direct debit when they know in their heart that they are not a gym person, and then spend the first six weeks of the year finding reasons and ways to talk themselves out of it and never go once.

My intentions would often fall outside of my circle of influence. I have always been so hard on myself, expecting that somehow, I’d magically become this healthy eating, exercise obsessed, creative and brilliant me just by deciding to do so on the first day of the year.

I wouldn’t acknowledge that I was probably already a creative and brilliant being, who just needed to unlock these qualities from within herself, because I was too busy scolding myself for not maintaining a streak or meeting impossible goals.

Over the years, I had noticed that if I told somebody else that I was going to do something there was a little more gentle pressure to actually do it. It’s not that the other person would be judgmental if I didn’t, but that I had verbalized and created this intention outside of myself.

One of the main reasons I give up on things is that I don’t have a plan for when things go wrong.
If you have not planned for the possibility of something happening, then you are not equipped to deal with it.

Like in life, sometimes things happen that you’re not prepared for and you act out of alignment with your intentions, but then you can look at why it happened and you plan for next time.  There will always be scenarios you haven’t considered!

I have always thought that, if you remember your why, you’ll find a workaround that motivates and keeps you going.  I always used this when I was exhausted from practising deep in winter in the cold and dark afternoons. 

In life, it’s not about whether this is my year. It’s about the fact that this is my life.