Goals for the New Year

“Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let each new year find you a better man.”
—Benjamin Franklin

The end of the year is often a time of reflection for many of us. We may look back on the previous twelve months with regret over having not achieved the goals we set at this time last year.

If we tried our best to do what we set out to do at the end of the year, but somehow fell short, we don’t need to berate ourselves; we simply need to continue our efforts since giving up surely won’t get us anywhere.

Whether we call them New Year’s resolutions or goals, the things we set out to do in the coming year are important to us and worthy of every effort we can put forth. It helps to write down what we hope to achieve since somewhere along the way we often forget what it was we set out to do, and because there’s something almost magical about writing things down that helps the process of achievement.  

One goal we can set that will help with everything in our lives is to operate out of love at all times. It’s much more difficult than it seems. When we operate out of love it means we don’t gossip, or judge, or treat people unkindly, even if sometimes people probably deserve to be treated that way. It also means we are completely honest with others. We don’t enable bad behavior or coddle adults who may need tough love. It also requires us to love our self.

If we set that one goal — to do everything from a place of love — and hold true to it as much as possible, our lives will transform. Often we do things from a sense of fear. Love and fear are opposites and fear can lead us to poor decisions and actions. Love can never lead us wrong. Love, not lust or control, but real love will always guide us to right action.

Just remember that whatever bad habit we wish to do away with and all of our goals for the coming year can be achieved if we truly want them to happen. If we have tried before and didn’t succeed, then some would say we just didn’t try hard enough.

Make it your goal to live the next year from a place of love and see you life change for the better.

Learning By Doing

“As one goes through life one learns that if you don’t paddle your own canoe, you don’t move.”
—Katharine Hepburn

No matter how spoiled and coddled a person is in their childhood, or some even as adults, real life experiences both with successes and failures, are what propel us through life, growth and recovery.

We may lament every time we perform at a level less than we expect of ourselves, but for every supposed failure we learn and grow. We don’t gain wisdom or strength through other people’s lives and experiences. We learn and grow when we attempt and fail and even when we do something with success because we did it.

Just as an athlete cannot become a professional or set a world record simply by watching how someone else did it, neither can we live our lives and make it on our journey with only observation as a tool. We learn what we can from others, sometimes we may avoid certain failures when we see another experience them. But as a rule our growth is ours from doing rather than seeing.

We may feel as if we paddle upstream at times. And perhaps we want others to do for us, but in the long run we gain much more wisdom, strength, and growth through our own actions. Even when the going gets tough, we can rest assured that we will come out on the other side of it with the experience that taught us something.

Even when the current is rough, you must paddle if you want to get through it.

Understanding Our Power

“Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.”
—Art Linkletter

Fighting what is can be a very frustrating thing to do. When we want something to be one way and it goes another way, acceptance is the best solution.

And so it goes when we have difficulty with other people. We may want a romantic relationship with someone who only wants to be our friend. Or it’s possible to work with someone who we cannot seem to get along with no matter what we do. We only have the power to change ourselves, or to accept the situation. What we cannot do is make the other person change or behave in the way that would make us happy.

Prayer is power because if we have faith we believe that God can make the changes or put us in a different place. Letting go helps since we really have no other option. Insisting that things are bad and will never get better won’t solve anything. It’s best to think in a positive vein, to believe that we have the power to change a situation by moving forward in our lives, and not attempting to force someone else to be a certain way.

Making lemonade when life hands us lemons is how we deal with those things that are out of our power and control. Understanding what we have power over and what we don’t is how we are able to make lemonade.

Do what you need to do to make your life better without expecting someone else to do it.

Patience in Progress

“Patience is also a form of action.”
—Auguste Rodin

When we are on a journey through recovery, or simple acts of life for that matter, it is difficult to be patient with our progress. We made a decision to change a behavior, to grow in or emotional health, perhaps we are mending financial errors or a relationship, and it does not happen overnight.

One way to remember to be patient with progress is to realize that whatever we are trying to move away from, or grow through, or recover from did not get the way it is overnight. The damage we did to our lives with drug addiction, overeating, alcoholism, anger issues, and on and on, did not just suddenly happen. And so it goes with turning our lives around. It is a process and it takes time.

If we are in debt because we didn’t work or spent all our money on drugs, it would take the lottery to get us caught up in one fell swoop. It’s the same when we hit bottom in addiction, it’s going to take a lot of small steps to get out of that hole; baby steps or crawling, and time.

e want what we want when we want it. That’s just how most of us are, but it takes patience and persistence to get where we want to be. We can take the small actions as they come to us and in the long run all of those will get us to where we are going. Most of the time we really don’t know our destination, we may think we do, but during the process things change, we change and our destination may not even turn out to be as we thought it would.

As we move through our lives and recovery we can know that each and every step has value, even when it’s two steps forward and one back, we are making progress. Patience with this may be hard most of the time, but it is a valuable tool.

Patience helps us deal with the time it takes to get where we need to be.

Thoughts and Actions

“We can act ourselves into right thinking easier than we can think ourselves into right acting.”
—Anonymous

It’s very easy to get ourselves into a tizzy over things when we think rather than act. Sure it is good to think things through, but sometimes we can get stuck thinking about a problem or issue until we feel crazy and upset. We lose sight of the issue because we have spun ourselves into a worrisome mode.

We can act our way through something by taking the actions that we know are right and treading easily with those we aren’t so sure of. We don’t have to tackle a whole issue when it can be taken in small steps. Usually things aren’t handled in one big action anyway.

Maybe we’re stuck in a job we don’t like. It’s highly unlikely that we’ll just call someone up and after talking a few minutes step into our dream job. Most likely there will be a search for the right job, then an application with resume. Next we’ll set up an interview, then actually make the appointment. Following that will be more phone calls or interviews and maybe we’ll get the job or perhaps we’ll start the process over again with another potential employer. None of that will be done with one swift action.

We can’t just sit at home and think about the job we want, we can’t even simply pray about it. We have to take the action to actually find the job, apply for it, and follow through all the steps to try to get it.

Everything we do requires action. Praying is an action too it just needs to be followed by some legwork as well. Sometimes we judge where we are against others or even where we wish we were. We can’t get from here to there without doing what it takes to succeed in our dreams no matter how much we think about it.

Taking action is the way to get where we want to be.

Doing Things Differently

“To reach a goal you have never before attained, you must do things you have never before done.”
—Richard G. Scott

There are times in our lives when the desire to grow and move forward is a powerful force that cannot be snuffed out without doing it. We may not see that in order to reach a new goal or destination that we may have to look outside the box and do things in a way that we have never before done them.

If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, then we certainly know that we don’t want to follow that route so we must try things a different way. Most likely we will need to seek help in some way to do this. We may seek information from books, the Internet, or people, but if we don’t know how to proceed out of our routine it’s a good idea to seek such help.

Sometimes we get stuck in the rut that says “my way is the best way and it’s familiar so I will keep doing it.” Getting out of that mindset and trying something new and different can be a scary area to pursue, but well worth the rewards if we do it and reach the goal we seek.

We won’t get very far in life if we hide behind fear and “I can’t” thinking. What we will get is a safe existence for the most part, probably full of regret and envy of others who have forged ahead and found new experiences in their lives. Many times what we do in life is a risk of sorts; changing jobs, beginning or ending a love relationship, having or adopting a child, all these things require us to think and do something different than we did yesterday.

Do something different and see where it leads.

Opportunity

“You’ve got a lot of choices. If getting out of bed in the morning is a chore and you’re not smiling on a regular basis, try another choice.” 
—Steven D. Woodhull

Life is full of choices. If we are unhappy in any situation we have opportunities to get out of it. Sometimes that takes more work than at other times. And we may have to face many fears to make things different, but life is too short to stay miserable in a situation.

If we are in a job that we dread going to every day, we owe it to ourselves to find a new job. It’s very unlikely that we have no other options. It may seem that we don’t have a way out at times, but usually if we look closely there are other opportunities for us.

When we make a decision that turns out to not be a good thing for us, it’s never too late to turn it around. Maybe we made a bad choice in a relationship; this does not mean we have to stay in it. Hopefully we learned something from it and we will decide to move on. At other times we may have chosen not to act when given an opportunity, and while that situation may never come around again, we will be more open the next time.

Regardless of where we find ourselves in life it’s never a good idea to stay in a miserable situation. Life is short and the world is large. Living life in a place that keeps us unhappy is not living at all.

“You’ve made your bed, now lie in it,” is not a real option for those who know they have choices. But if we choose to stay in that bed we can; that’s an option too.

There are vast opportunities so staying in a bad situation is one we should avoid.

Taking Action

“If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.”
—Nora Roberts

It all sounds so simple when we think about it, but we tend to make life more difficult by over thinking and worrying about what could be.

We never get anywhere if we are always stuck at a crossroads unable to move left or right or forward. We must make choices and take risks at least daily, but usually many times each day. Every situation offers us the opportunity to sit silently in fear or to move forward. We may face real risks or imaginary ones, but we only fail when we don’t act.

We can choose our battles wisely. We don’t have to go skydiving or take a dangerous whitewater rafting expedition to say we’ve faced fear. Some of us fear a job change, ending or beginning a relationship, or some other simpler decision.

Indecision can become a block in our lives. We may need to ask questions, research our next move, but stating that we don’t have knowledge of what to do is not an excuse that will get us far in life.

Most of what we fear is the unknown. Sometimes this unknown can be scarier than being stuck in a bad situation, but we must face it if we wish to move forward in our lives. In order to get where we want to be we will likely face many challenges and must make a lot of decisions. Occasionally we’ll make the wrong one, but that’s not reason enough to give up.

Taking action is what gets us to the next place.

Waiting it Out

“Patience and delay achieve more than force and rage.”
—La Fontaine

Pushing and forcing an outcome is usually a bad idea. When we force our will upon a situation before the time is right for it to work out, we do little but cause more delay and sometimes anger and other issues.

Sometimes waiting is the answer. We do our part, but we don’t push, and we wait. We may have to sit on our hands at times to stop ourselves from sending an e-mail, or dialing the phone, but in the long run we will find patience and waiting are often the best actions.

Forcing a situation in our time would mirror trying to rake the leaves on a gusty day or trying to put an elephant in a paper cup, it’s just going to bust and fail. We cannot force a thing before its time and the harder we push the farther away it will get. This is not an excuse to sit back and never do anything, it’s a solution for some instances, those that need time and space to move forward.

Sometimes we need to step back and get a bit of clarity about an issue before proceeding. Delay does not always mean we will be denied something. But pushing and forcing something will usually cause it to go away or end. And if not that, it may cause even more friction and possible delay.

Patience is difficult, but its rewards great.

Cynicism

“Better to be occasionally cheated than perpetually suspicious.”
—B.C. Forbes

Many of us have become jaded over time by the treatment we have received from other people. Lies, manipulation, cheating, unfairness, and other things can cause us to become cynical about relationships.

We continue to punish ourselves if we let the past dictate today and tomorrow. It hurts when people treat us wrong, but we don’t have to let that hurt continue. We can move on from the person who we have lost faith in.

When we continue to carry these issues as a chip on our shoulder, we miss out on lots of opportunities to meet and love other people. We will get hurt again because people are human, just as we’ve been hurt, we have hurt others. From time to time we’ll put ourselves out there and find ourselves getting kicked in the face. But hopefully we will also find love and friendship in other relationships.

We must choose to frame things in a positive way. We aren’t going to get very far if we constantly lament about how bad someone treated us. By being suspicious we close ourselves off. Instead we can say, “I was hurt by that person, but that does not mean that everyone is out to get me.”

The truth of the matter is that most people are not intentionally trying to cheat us, or hurt us, or cause us any kind of pain or harm. Maybe we just need to toughen up and realize if someone is an unkind person we really don’t want them in our lives anyway.

Living a suspicious life only keeps you from finding good.