Farm Fresh: Have you kept your New Year’s Resolutions?

Think back to the end of December.  Did you make any claims to change your life for the better?  20 days later… how are you doing with those goals?

I am a goal setter AND I’m a dreamer… which means that over the years I’ve had my fair share of failed goals.  Just last week, I was looking over my journals and it seems that I have a few goals that are still on my list even after 4 years of not succeeding.  Start a web portfolio.  Teach myself Drupal.  Write every day.  Read more non-work related books.  And so on.  Do you have goals that you make every year and still have yet to reach?

Here are some things that I’ve discovered affect my own goal making:

Negative Goals:  “I will not eat meat.”  “I will avoid sugar.” When I set a negative goal, the goals intention is to limit / deny an impulse that I have. For me, it’s all about intention.  I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go through life constantly living with “I can’t eat this and I can’t eat that.”  That negative energy will send my day into the gutter.

Goals like this put all of my attention on the wrong aspect of what I’m trying to change in my life.  When I say ‘I will not eat meat’, what I am really trying to change in my life is that I want to eat more vegetables and grains.  So… if I want to put my attention on what is the desired outcome (rather than the temptation), I should set my goal as “This year I will eat more vegetables and grains, especially when I go out to a restaurant.”

With negative goal setting, there is a reward in losing.  For me, 2009 was to be the year without Pizza. I broke my own advice on New Year’s Eve (I had been drinking) and I made a negative goal!

When I told myself at the beginning of the year that I was going to not eat pizza for the whole year, I set myself up in a predicament.  I had two choices – spend a year without pizza or break the goal and reward myself with the very thing I desire.  And every time I drove past a pizza boutique here in Austin, all my focus was on pizza, because that was the subject of my goal.

Seven days into 2009, I was eating my first slice of pizza in the New Year!

Now… if you’ve already broken your New Year’s Resolutions, it does not mean that they need to stay broken.  I’ve already changed a few of my resolutions into something that is more achievable.  Instead of ‘not eat pizza’, now I will “look to healthier options when I am being lazy about cooking.”  Just the other night, Nicole and I decided to make batch of miso soup instead of going across town to get Chinese food.  It took me less than 10 minutes to get everything in the ready, and we had a meal that was completely satisfying.

If you find that you’ve already lost track of your New Year’s Resolutions, don’t let them go.  Making a goal for this year stems from a good impulse.  Trust that impulse.  You can make a new goal at any time!  And when you do, aim the focus on the desired outcome, not the roadblock.