New Year, new plans

"We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives... not looking for flaws, but for potential. ~ Ellen Goodman

The new calendar year is a good time to set new plans / goals of your own in motion; you know, take advantage of the momentum created by everyone thinking, talking, and doing the same thing. Of course, when other appropriate times for reevaluation come up (more on this over the next several months), putting things off UNTIL the new year is just making excuses and giving in to fear or complacency.

As promised, today and tomorrow I'm going to drop in here an article (in two parts) I wrote for my company newsletter. It's pretty standard goal-setting information, but hopefully you can glean something helpful from it...and feel free to leave questions in the comments section.


New Year’s Resolutions: Making a list and checking it twice?


It’s like an annual curse we visit on ourselves: we make our new year’s resolutions, then follow it up with the promise that Santa’s also “making a list” to check up on us.

Never mind that Santa is just as mythological a figure as the successful new year’s resolution (that is, the odds seem to be against his/its existence, although there are claims to the contrary).

The numbers: 40 to 45% of American adults make one or more resolutions each year. Top resolutions include weight loss, quitting smoking, saving money, and paying off debt. After six months, fewer than half the people making resolutions are sticking to the plan. And yet, the same studies show that people making resolutions are 10 times more likely to attain their goals than people who don’t explicitly make resolutions.

Okay, maybe a slightly-less-than-half rate of adherence isn’t all that bad. But how can you up YOUR odds of being one of the successful ones?


What would I do over?

First, psychologists say to recognize that what you’re doing is making a change. Duh. You knew that, right? But it seems a lot of us act as if change happens to us, not by us. Change is hard. It requires the repetition of the new behavior many times before the change is set—perhaps six months down the road. We get set in the old behavior. It’s comfortable to us, and even if we know it’s not good for us, even if we really, really want to do something different, it’s tough to create that new pattern of behavior.

Second, some suggest that looking deeper than the behavior you’re changing can help. For example, say you want to quit smoking. One way to look at it is all the good things you’re creating in your life by dropping that habit. Another way is to think of it this way: what do I want to be different? One psychologist uses this with clients about to undergo plastic surgery, because it really targets the motivation. Back to smoking. What do I want to be different? Or, as Miller does with her clients, what do I wish were different from my past? Did you start smoking to be cool, as so many high schoolers do? Stress relief? If those are still valid desires, can you replace the smoking with healthier options? (Yoga is very trendy, and accomplishes both at once! And I can guarantee you, you can’t smoke and do a hot yoga practice at the same time, what with the whole breathing thing.)

Navel-gazing not for you? Think about things you’d like to be doing, and why, and how they do or do not fit in with what you’re doing now.

Take some time over the next few days--just a break from the holiday bustle--to think about where you'd really, really like to be this time next year. Tomorrow, we'll jump into some tips for successful goal setting and achieving.

Too much to do: exploring your passions

I have what I like to call an empty calendar allergy. It's stronger than an aversion, more like a compulsion. Even as I'm spinning in circles (like a Sufi dancer, I hope--enlightenment / ecstasy to be obtained in the process), hoping for some downtime, it's almost impossible for me to accept HAVING it.

There's too much to do, so little time. As Lynnette pointed out in her comment yesterday, we can have quite a laundry list of 'passions' to occupy us....and how do you know what the 'one' is? Maybe it's like knowing 'who' the one is when we meet him? Maybe it requires trusting your intuition to pull you in the right direction, no matter where that direction leads, accepting life as an exploratory adventure as much as a well-lit path with a certain destination.

It's not about drifting. It's not about learning to like something. It might be about trying something, just to discover it consumes you. I gave rock-climbing a try last month. I'd been dying to do it for years--I loved the memory of clambering up rocky hills and bluffs as a kid, loved living near the Rockies as an adult--mountains within reach, so beautiful it almost hurts to have all that rising up in you and in front of you. I truly love mountains. Although apparently not enough to move to one. Same with forests. Love being amid the trees and rocks of a northern woodland. Not crazy about hanging out in the woodlands of Florida (remember that fear thing? I really am okay never facing how I feel about reptiles. They have their place in the world, and we / they should not be occupying it together. Just sayin'). Yet, I live in Florida, because of all the things I love and want to do / be / whatever...most of them sit here. If I won the lottery (I understand...playing increases those odds substantially), I might not live here, so I guess part of what I care about is my job.

But back to rock climbing. I wanted to climb. I could see myself doing it, even though heights terrify me. This, perhaps, is key--if you are willing (or anxious) to try something despite your fear, and not because of it (in other words, it's about the doing, not the facing of the fear), that's a good sign it's something you should do more of. But that doesn't make it a passion--makes it something worth doing. Rock climbing? I liked it. Will do it again. A passion? Not to the extent of consuming my life. Not something I'd take vacations to do, although I might make it part of one spent doing something else. See the difference?

I think we'll be looking at this more deeply--it seems like a lot of people have a lot of things they care about, and spend a lot of time doing...and it seems to divide their energy. Some of the people I admire most have one or maybe two deep passions, and it consumes their life. Not saying that's good or bad (might depend on the person), but it's definitely worth talking about.

Fiscal Sanity

Here's the goal: financial independence, which to me means the ability to do what I want, when I want, how I want. I discovered a couple of years ago that in a sense, money=power (to me, at least). Not in a power-grab way, but in that when I have plenty of money, I feel like I have options. So I worry less (probably a holdover from a tight-money childhood), and in general things go better. One of my real challenges, though, has been in not spending everything I have due to a perceived lack of "stuff."

I think, though, over the past year, I've changed a lot in terms of how I see that "stuff" and how much is enough of it. Books, though, will probably continue to be my failing....at least from a "don't buy that" perspective. So I've built into my upcoming budget a certain weekly amount for fun that includes books, movies (not that I go to many of those. In fact, I've got a pair of tickets a friend gave me a year ago that I still haven't used).

Looking at my budget through the end of the year, though, I see that while I can certainly pay the bills on time (as long as I stay in my budget and don't think this week's extra cash is really extra instead of committed to something happening two weeks away), accelerating the getting-out-of-debt goal is going to be a challenge. I've set myself a schedule of sorts for accumulating money. It looks something like this: I don't have to pay rent in November (I've been given the opportunity to use this month as a "get ahead" month, because I'm used to paying rent weekly and starting with January--or maybe December--I'll need to go back to paying it at the first of the month.) so I'll build the bank account to pay the November bills (which include two overdue October bills--both of which will actually be paid this Friday), then December's rent and bills, then January and February the same. I figure, if I get that much ahead, I'll be able to pay off one of the smaller debts without worrying that I'm going to put myself short on the rent.

Setting aside my own skepticism re my ability to set aside a month's worth of anything, much less three. Right now, I'm looking at the budget and I can see that at the end of November, based on standard income and outgo, I have enough to pay the December rent if it's the half-month that I assume it will be, and have a touch left in the bank. The challenge then, is that starting in December, I'm about a week's pay ahead on actual "got to pay it now" principles (and this is actually a HUGE improvement), but I'd like to be a month ahead already, because that would be evidence that I'm bringing in enough more than I'm spending to actually make some headway.

More income and less outgo are going to be required. Fortunately I'm spending the better part of the weekend working--some card reading gigs thanks to a wonderful friend who's giving me the opportunity to work with her again, and working in a friend's metaphysical shop on Saturday, filling in for an absent assistant. This is all good and will probably put half of December's bills in the bank by the end of November. A couple of the expenses I've anticipated for November will be at least partially reimbursed. Also good. Crossing my fingers I haven't forgotten anything. Friends and family will be getting my love and maybe a short story for Yule gifts. No cookies this year, probably, or anything else material while I pay attention to other priorities. There is some additional extra income coming along, just not sure the amount or the exact days, but it's already committed thanks to the handy list I've made of financial priorities for this next year. Hopefully by the end of December, these extras will actually have me up to that point where I'm paying next month's bills out of this month's money.

I did a lot over the past twelve months to bring my outer life in alignment with my inner life. The next twelve will bring even more into alignment, so if nothing else, I'll enjoy looking back a year from now to see how things have changed.

Master plan

Digression: why is it always a 'master' plan, and never a 'mistress' plan?

This week's horoscope from Rob Brezsny tells me this is an excellent time--astrologically speaking--to initiate my "five year master plan." Which seems to be great advice, especially considering that I wrote in my journal (my sporadic journal) a couple of weeks ago a whole host of thoughts on that very topic.

Serendipitous.

I'm not only a fan of Rob Brezny's, I'm a big fan of synchronicity and serendipity.

This blog is part of that whole urge to create a new level of commitment and passion in my life. More synchronicity and serendipity.

I can sum up my 5-year plan in a few words: live better, love better, create better. Live more, love more, create more. Stop drifting. Commit to what feels good. Live consciously. Live sanely.

The beauty of that is, as long as I keep those in my sights, I can't help but meet the goals.