“The way we treat people we disagree with most is a report card on what we’ve learned about love.”
~Bob Goff
We are almost at the six-month point since New Year’s Eve. It is time for your New Year’s Resolution Report Card. Have you made the grade? One of the rites of the New Year Celebration is listing all those New Year Resolutions we planned to accomplish during the year to make us healthier, wealthier, skinnier, smarter, or generally more attractive to find our true love. How are your resolutions doing?
How many resolutions have you accomplished? How many changes have you already given up on accomplishing? Do you even remember what your resolutions were, or have you forgotten them on purpose?
It may be time to revisit your resolutions.
When making New Year resolutions, it is important not to make too many to remember or accomplish, or resolutions that are too difficult to keep as a whole in the first place. You want to ensure success. Who wants to start the New Year with a promise that you cannot possibly keep or a change at which you are sure to fail? That is like taking a higher education course that is way over your head or taking an overloaded of courses that you cannot possibly fulfill.
If you have already set yourself up for failure, it is not too late to steer your Resolution Boat into a new direction on the Sea of Life. However, in order to face a new direction, you first need to know where you are.
A technique I use to see whether or not I have met my resolutions is to check my Dream Journal because that is where I usually have my New Year Resolutions written. Just as you keep track of your dreams, you can keep track of your life-changes and desires. You can even incubate a change in your dreams first and then bring that change into your waking world. Set the intention to make your change before you go to sleep at night. Then you can tend your dream until the desire is accomplished in your life.
Dream tending and incubation has been a part of dream work since the time of Ancient Egypt.
Having your resolutions written down gives you the opportunity to stay on the right path by, (1) being aware of your decisions, (2) checking progress, (3) so you can make adjustments to get back on the right path if necessary. It is not unusual to break our New Year Resolutions, especially if we do not remember exactly what they all were, to begin with, so having them available to read makes keeping them a bit easier.
Make sure your New Year Resolutions are obtainable, for success in keeping them.
Old habits are hard to break, like making goals that ensure failure, and that is often what our New Year Resolutions consist of; out with the old and in with the new. Break your old habits, especially if they are self-defeating, in favor of self-success. Take the first step today. Start now by reading your Resolution Report card to make your life-course correction.
Resources:
Barrett, D. (1993). The “committee of sleep”: A study of dream incubation for problem solving. Dreaming, 3, 115-122.
Dreaming Like an Egyptian- Beliefnet http://www.beliefnet.com/columnists/dreamgates/2010/10/dreaming-like-an-egyptian.html
