Are you tired of setting New Year's resolutions because of not being able to follow through on them for more than a few months or a few weeks or perhaps your resolutions only lasted a few days or a few hours? Don't feel discouraged. Just the fact you're considering making a resolution or wanting to improve suggests that there's a recognition in our heart that change is needed and that there is a desire to make the change. Having aspirations for change is a success even if the change only lasts a couple of days. So, go ahead and set those resolutions for 2017! Below are some items I am aspiring for.
1. LEAD by example
This is important for everybody but especially for those individuals who are in some sort of a leadership capacity over others. It's easy to tell others what to do but often times hard to follow through on that same advice. So let's be mindful and try our very best to follow the advice we give to others.
2. Differentiate NEEDS from Wants
During the holiday season and throughout the year, companies are going to try and convince us to buy their product because we "need" their product and that we'll be much better off with it. So, every time you feel the itch to buy something you think you "need", take a step back and take a few deep breaths. Then, before spending that hard earned money, analyze again if it's really a need or a want.
3. Reduce our carbon FOOTPRINT
The land, air, water and even the space around the earth has been polluted beyond our wildest imagination. In 2017, let's take a serious inventory of the products that we use in our daily lives and see how we can use less plastics, less chemicals, reduce the amount of carbon emissions from all the meat that is produced and begin the process of healing and earth.
4. APPRECIATE the contributions of others
Finding the faults of others is easy. We've been doing it our entire lives. Let's start the new year with this aspiration that we will try our very best to appreciate the small and big things that others have done even if we were in competition with them.
5. Eat MINDFULLY
Are we eating foods that have a gazillion chemicals in the ingredient list that we can't even pronounce? Do we even stop to think about how these chemicals might impact our health and well-being? For our own sake and the sake of our family, let's try to eat naturally, organically, and as many non-GMO foods as possible.
6. ACCEPT the inevitable
There are some things in life that we can change and many things in life we can't. Let's try and develop the maturity and wisdom to accept the things that we can't change and work hard to change the things we can.
7. MEDITATE Mindfully
Believe it or not, not all Meditation is done mindfully. It's completely natural for our mind to run around like a two-year-old. However, if we're not at least endeavoring to focus it, especially when we meditate, then our Meditation can also become mindless. It is almost impossible to keep the mind focused on any one thing for more than a few minutes or even a few seconds. The more we meditate, the more we realize how out of control the mind is and how randomly it jumps from thought to thought and from the past to the future. For 2017, lets not just do Mindful Meditation, but try to Meditate Mindfully.
I hope you'll join me in making a few or even one resolution and trying your best to follow through on it. Good luck and Happy 2017!