Let me share a secret with you. I hate New Year’s Resolutions. I find that I make a resolution and it instantly feels destined to fail. Once the resolution fails, I feel like a failure and what a great way to start the year; with a sense of failure hanging over me!
So I don’t make resolutions anymore and wow, what a difference it makes. Now before I go any further, I don’t want you to think that I’ve got everything nailed in terms of what I do instead because, let’s face it, I’m only human. But I do find that making intentions instead of resolutions does make a difference in how I feel about the whole thing.
The thing is, when you make a resolution such as ‘I need to lose weight’, the moment you go off course whether it’s because you’re out and about for the weekend and therefore don’t stick to ‘the plan’ or you’ve had a bad day at work and feel like immersing yourself in a packet of Jaffa Cakes (other cakes/biscuits are available!), you immediately feel like you’ve failed and therefore, by default, are a failure.
By making an intention, you immediately take a much softer approach. Try these two sentences out and notice how they feel:
- I need to lose weight
- I’d like my clothes to feel more comfortable, have more energy and get out and about in nature more.
Hopefully you noticed that they feel different and that’s because the second sentence is about how you want to look, feel and be rather than what you ‘need’ to do to get there. When you focus on the outcome rather than the process, it becomes easier to maintain the course without the pressure.
You can use this for any intention that you want to set yourself for 2020. Getting fit can become have more energy and enjoy doing more with your family, getting out of debt can become feeling more in control of your finances and watching your savings grow, quitting smoking could be having clear healthy lungs and improving your health in general (top tip: if your intention for quitting smoking is purely finance based, it’s less likely to be successful so make it really personal).
These intentions may not sound right to you because they’re just suggestions and you need to find what works for you; what resonates to fit in with how you want to look, feel and be. When you set your intention, your subconscious mind switches into gear to connect to anything that relates to your intention so you’ll start to notice opportunities and information relating to your intention.
You can take those intentions to wherever you want to. You can keep them relatively contained or let them grow to any size you want to. Be clear on where your intention will take you and allow your mind to really experience the end outcome so that it knows exactly how to guide you there.
When you look at your dreams and goals in this way, you can avoid the sense of failure because it’s about a process and feels much kinder and nicer than, ‘I’m going to do this, I didn’t stick to it so I’ve failed’.
Now sit down with a cuppa, let your mind dream and wander and start to make a note of what intentions you’d like to set; notice the elements of how you’d like to be when you’re on the right track and think about how you’re going to take the next step.