Wishing all reading this blog “God’s Peace, Blessings and Prosperity” for 2019!!!! Amidst hearing “Happy New Year” for the 50 millionth time, we are also hearing somewhere in the world someone talking about “New Year's Resolutions.” Granted at this point, some may have already blown their resolutions. Even if this is YOU, you can always start fresh at any time. Who says you can't improve yourself whenever you are READY? This infamous resolution list usually goes something like this: 1. Lose Weight 2. Workout more (or at all) 3. Eat Healthier 4. Be a Better Person/ Be a Better Me 5. Leave the Past in the Past 6. Go to School, Start a Business, etc…… You get the picture right? My question is, what is stopping us from succeeding at all of these resolutions? Let's break it down.... The root word of 'resolution' is resolute which means : marked by firm determination ( https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/resolute). So in order to truly make our resolutions stick, we must possess a firm determination; not fleeting but FIRM. Most of the resolutions we talk about involve dedication and commitment to…….wait for it………...SELF. It is always very easy to review the previous year in hindsight and tell ourselves how we could have made 2018 better. Wasn’t 2018 going to be our year? Didn’t you and I tell ourselves that at 11:59 p.m., December 31, 2017, going into 2018? How can we make 2019 the year that we are living our best life (in my Lil Duval voice)?
“When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” ~Confucius
This quote says it all! Here’s the problem with resolutions, we generally make resolutions out of frustration with ourselves, which can be a motivation for change in some cases, but it’s not a recipe for longevity and sustained progress. The end of a year, or the start of a year, is an evaluative time for us all. We're looking at progress we've made throughout the year, and if that progress has been seemingly little then we can become frustrated with ourselves. This can cause us to abandon the goal. Trust me I understand. I had a goal that I did not achieve fully in 2018. Part of me sees this as a failure in one respect, but I realized, that, I wasn’t quite emotionally ready to take on the goal, though I wanted the end result of the goal, I wasn’t ready for the work involved in achieving the goal. I had to change my perspective on things and do a mental checklist of my mental availability to take on the goal. I literally determined midway into 2018, that I wasn’t ready (and honestly NOTHING could make me ready at that point). The mental checklist was simply me “checking” in with myself with no pretense or expectations involved and asking if I could legitimately do what I had planned to do. I am by no means saying or suggesting that we should ever stop trying to achieve our goal because I want us all to Live Our Life Like It’s Golden and if we haven’t made it to “golden” just yet, stay on "mustard yellow" till you get to gold. What I am suggesting is that we look at our situation and determine how we can adjust our life to fit the goal that we are trying to achieve. Do we need to shift some things like the time frame? Maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t quite time (we will talk about the right “timing” on our goals in another blog article, stay tuned).
Remove the stressful emotions from the goals that you set. This is certainly easier said than done. A lot, if not most of the time, we set unrealistic time frames for achieving our goals. Your goals should take into account, your time, ability and means of achieving your goals. When we can assess what the realistic time to possibly achieve our goal may be, that helps remove some of the extra and generally aggravating emotions centered around our goals. As hard and seemingly impossible as it seems, try taking our emotions out of the equation and focus solely on actual facts, figures and methods to achieve our goal. Emotions won’t achieve our goals; it’s the work that we put in driven by firm determination that achieves the goals. Emotions do have a place and serve a purpose, however, it is not those emotions that put in the work toward achieving your goals.
As we get settled in to 2019, let’s work to create goals for ourselves that are achievable and believable in our life!!
~The Muslim Therapist
