Dear Lifelines;
I am stressed about New Year’s and how many resolutions I’m going to break this year, so I wonder if I should even make any.
Signed,
New Year’s Party Crasher
Dear Party Crasher,
Making commitments to change yourself can be a challenge, so why not switch it up a bit this year? Maybe find one thing about yourself that you can learn to accept. Reflect on this one thing about yourself – maybe a behaviour or physical trait – that has been bothersome in some way to you in the past. Set your goals for this New Year to learn to embrace this trait and move towards acceptance. Just like any other goal – there doesn’t have to be an immediate change. Try and imagine if it was your child or loved one with this trait and how you would want others to respond. Attempt to mimic this desired behaviour when thinking about your own situation. Try and lighten up your attitude and take steps to forgive yourself for not being perfect. Make a point of accentuating the positive and give yourself permission to have wrinkles, to have imperfect teeth, to have that limp from an injury, that scar across your belly or that thinning hair.
If this seems like too daunting a task, another option for a change on the typical New Years resolution is to try to learn to accept other people more in the New Year. Perhaps you can select one person that rubs you the wrong way or that you have had conflict with in the past. You can set the goal to find some positive characteristic in them – everyone has something you can identify like a sense of humour, a nice smile, a gift with creativity, being able to chat, being a good storyteller, being realistic, having good posture, being good at manipulation…no matter how far you have to reach. In identifying and changing your focus to being more positive regarding this person, you will undoubtedly find your interactions with them to be more positive and rewarding. Keep track of your interactions and see how your involvement with this particular person evolves. Make it a game that entertains you and aids in eliminating the stress and tension that sometimes surfaces when engaging with particular people.
Life gets much easier when we simplify and reduce the amount of stress we continually cope with. At this time of year there’s a significant amount of stress created when trying to improve ourselves – sometimes we tend to bring ourselves down by focusing on the negative in our lives. We all have to deal with tension and stress and it serves us better as human beings to be able to develop the skills to be adaptable, flexible and more accepting.
Happy New Year!!
Lifelines
“Change the changeable, accept the unchangeable, and remove yourself from the unacceptable.” Denis Waitley