Chris Heidel, owner of Libra Fitness, wrote a good post the other day about New Year’s Resolutions. While I do believe in the power of setting intention and having positive goals (which is really all that setting resolutions is), I’ve found that doing them once a year in early January isn’t for me. I’d like to share with you what we do in our house instead.
We get together for a special family date, with paper and pencil, and spend time remembering and recording all the things we accomplished in the previous year. We “brainstorm” the list–so everything that’s said gets written down. The list covers both personal, familial, and professional sucesses, and no success is too small. (We always include our vacations–those are the result of hard work!) We love remembering all the good things, it’s fun to review the year and see how far we’ve come. Remembering some successes reminds us of how things are better now than they were–a reassuring feeling. Some successes mark the culmination of lots of hard work, and other remind us of a time or two where we just got lucky. I save the lists, too, and when we’re done with the current year, we sometimes go back and look at previous ones.
So, what can you give yourself credit for in 2009? Did you tweak something in your parenting that has had a positive effect? Pay off the car? Go for a walk 3x a week? Lay on the beach for a week? Leave a comment with one of your successes, I’d love to congratulate you!