The Problem With New Year's Resolutions

Happy New Year! This time of year everybody seems to want to do New Year's resolutions. I have a bit problem with those. The problem is that I never seem to follow through on them. If you are like me, you set New Year's resolutions because you want to improve your life a little bit in the coming year. How many of us actually follow through on these goals?

A friend of mine posted an article on Facebook from CRACKED.com titled 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person (thanks, Rex!). It spoke about how people don't really care what education you have or what kind of person you are, they really only care about what you can do for them.

The other day I listened to Dr. Matt Woolley, a licensed clinical psychologist practicing in Sale Lake City and an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Utah, speak about this same subject... how New Year's Resolutions are "lame". They are lame because unless you really care about the resolution (or goal), you are not going to follow through on it, that just sets us up for failure. (By the way, you can catch Dr. Matt's wisdom on The Shrink Show website and podcast, and he is also a frequent guest on 101.9 The End's morning show.)

The trick is to make your goals achievable, to write them down, to really believe in them, and most of all to FOLLOW THROUGH! It's the following through bit that I generally have problems with. That said, I'm still going to try.

This year I have decided not to set any New Year's resolutions, but to actually DO something.

So, in answer to the question "What are my New Year's Resolutions", I resolutely say "none". However, I do have the following goals for 2013:

• Keep an active blog with a minimum of one post per week (how am I doing so far?)
• Learn a couple of new patterns for knitting or crochet
• Learn Adobe Photoshop (I already have the program)
• and the big one, Get a better day job