Resolve to be Yourself

December 28th, 2010

New Years resolutions — an opportunity to better yourself or a setup for failure and disappointment?

I don’t know too many people who can manage to keep their New Year’s resolutions for a solid year. Most of us base our annual goals on a vision we have of the person we want to be, not the person we actually are. And while I believe that most resolutions do come from a good place in the heart, they can so often be misguided and, frankly, unrealistic. And then when we don’t meet our own lofty goals, we feel like failures. No bueno.

In other news, my hair is not browny-purple anymore.
Hope all you goth-haters are satisfied now.

Willpower has never been one of my stronger character traits and so I have traditionally not had a lot of luck with New Year’s resolutions. But a few years ago I made a shift in the way I resolve. I decided to start basing my New Year’s resolutions on a metta practice of kindness and self-love. How? By committing only to do things I am naturally inclined to do anyway. You might say that my resolutions are more like things I let myself get away with. But, with the proper spin, they seem like examples of betterment.

Read the rest on Elephant Journal…

 

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