2 reasons to NOT make a New Year’s Resolutions

(2 minute read time)

New Year’s Eve is upon us.  Many of you are thinking about 2019.  Thinking about what you want to achieve and accomplish.

Many of you might also be thinking about how great life will be once you have achieved that goal.  You imagine how wonderful it will feel once you get the promotion or lose 10 pounds or pay off the bills from the holidays.  

As Debbie Downer as this may sound, it won’t be better.      

Here’s how I know.  

1. Achieving a goal does not create happiness.  Happiness, like any other emotion, is a byproduct of our thoughts.  Thoughts create emotions, not completed goals. If you agree with me on this then accomplishing a goal is not required to experience happiness, pride or a sense of self-worth.  We have the capacity to experience happiness now – even with the goal in it’s unfinished state.
2.  Achieving a goal does not make us better people.  Consider for a moment that there is no human who is “better” than another.  What if we were all equally worthy? I pose this question to my clients often – and I take it to the extreme.  Could Jeffrey Dahmer and Mother Theresa be equally worthy? Most of us would say NO. I say YES. If there is some system to rank the worthiness of humans it only exists in our minds.  And if that is true, where do you fit in? Do you fall closer to the saint or serial killer side? We can’t operate in a world with a ranking system and not rank ourselves. I vote to eliminate the fictitious ranking system instead.  

All of us create the lives we have based on what we think.  The results we have are no coincidence.

The problem is that no one ever really teaches us how to choose thoughts consciously.   Instead, we live at the effect of unintentional thinking. Often this causes us to create unintentional results.      

Clients they often ask me  “If I am not going to be better or happier why should I bother setting goals at all then?”.  I am a HUGE fan of goals and I am so excited to answer that question in the next post – stay tuned.  Until then, think about the goals you want to set for 2019 and think BIG!