MONDAY, JANUARY 1, 2024 - NEW YEAR'S DAY

 NEW YEAR’S DAY - JANUARY 1, 2024

HERE WE ARE - A NEW YEAR

A familiar expression is “New Year, New You”. Are you going to change this year? Do you have New Year’s Resolutions?

Are you going to lose weight? Exercise more? Be more loving? Be forgiving? Go out of your way to help others. Put other people first?  

Studies have shown that most New Year’s resolutions are over quickly. To make a resolution stick, you need this:

• Start with small goals. You may feel motivated and excited about your goal, but keep your ambition from leading you to an unattainable level...

• Make it measurable. ...

• Be realistic. ...

• Make a plan. ...

• Stay positive.

Now, this is almost the same as SMART goals:

Specific, 

Measurable, 

Achievable, 

Relevant, and 

Time-Bound. 

A third mechanism is to check your attitude. Is your goal something you are really serious about? What is of top importance in your life?

And, a last concept - is to make the goal so wonderful and the current situation so terrible that you HAVE to leave your current situation.

Let’s take an example:

You want to stop smoking. Maybe you just vape a little. “No big deal”. After all, vaping is much less dangerous than smoking - right?

The Canadian Lung Association says, “Breathing in the harmful chemicals from vaping products can cause irreversible (cannot be cured) lung damage, lung disease and, in some cases, death. Some chemicals in vaping products can also cause cardiovascular disease and biological changes that are associated with cancer development.”

Find a hospital that treats smoking. Visit with doctors and patients with lung cancer. Look at the various X-rays of healthy lungs and unhealthy lungs.  

Talk with people who smoked for many years and find out what diseases they are fighting - lung cancer, tongue cancer, emphysema, and more.  

*****

Example 2:  

You want to lose weight. What issue might you have if you don’t lose the weight? Heart disease, shortness of breath, diabetes, obesity, etc. Find a clinic with obese patients and see what happens to diabetic patients.  

*****

Example 3:

You want to write better, you want to play the guitar, you want to be a better granny basketball player.  

The main thing here is PRACTICE, PRACTICE, PRACTICE.  

TB stays after our practices for the granny basketball players and shoots baskets for at least thirty minutes. JL also stays after and practices shooting three-point (“granny shots”) baskets.  

Contrary to popular opinion, you can’t get to be a good guitar player by just listening to guitar pieces. Listen - and then practice. Malcolm Gladwell has a 10,000-hour theory on excellence. He says you must work ten thousand hours to get good at something.  

Wanting to do it is excellent, and having SMART goals is excellent - but the reality is that you must practice.

*****

I write about love. I’ve also used this statement - LOVE is spelled T   I   M   E.  If you want to love your spouse, spend quality TIME with them.  

I put LOVE into all that I do.

*****

LOVE WINS
LOVE TRANSFORMS
LOVING ONE ANOTHER IS A GREAT GOAL

(you can work on the little things - like learning to love your neighbor who swears, smokes weed, drinks beer, and doesn’t shower - learn to spend time with that person and walk in his (her) shoes.  

KAREN ANNE WHITE, ©, January 1, 2024