START, STOP, CONTINUE!

Happy New Year!

Did you make New Year’s resolutions? Are they already broken?

If you don’t like resolutions, but you do want improvement in your life, keep reading!

Here we are, at the beginning of a new year.

What does that mean to you?

Are you excited about the beginning of a new year?

Or, are you just glad to be rid of 2011?

I love fresh starts. I love evaluating my life, revisiting my goals and looking at what I am going to Start, Stop and Continue.

I’m not crazy about the word ‘resolution’ in relation to changes I want to make at the beginning of the year. In my observation, when people resolve to do something, and then don’t follow through with perfection, they consider themselves a failure and drop it all together.

I AM a believer in setting goals however. I am also a believer in reviewing my goals a couple of times a year to see what’s working and what’s not. These reviews are where I make changes to goals that may be affected by circumstances around me. I also make adjustments and fine tune my goals now that I have a few months ‘experience’ working on them. Maybe I was a little too ambitious, or not ambitious enough when I set the goal. This method allows me to realize success in my goals and move forward instead of giving it up all together because it did not go as planned.

I ask myself THREE questions in my goal setting process:

What do I want to START that I haven’t been doing in my life?

What do I want to STOP that I have been doing?

What have I been doing well that I want to CONTINUE?

It’s easy for most people to think of a bunch of big goals: stop smoking, start exercising, lose weight, get finances under control, etc.  But don’t discount the small things; small changes have big effect.

START might be something as simple as “get up at 6am every day” or “drink a glass of water before eating anything every morning” or “read one verse of scripture every morning”. I’m sure you can see how each of those ‘small’ actions would lead to a happier, healthier, more productive you.

In my opinion, every day is a good time for a fresh start. The beginning of a new year, the beginning of a new month, the beginning of a new week, my birthday, my anniversary, the first day of school, the first day of a new job, well, you get the idea. But my FAVORITE day for a fresh start is, the day I think of a new goal that I want to incorporate into my life!!

It doesn’t always fall on the first of anything, but it always falls on the FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF MY LIFE!