Don’t you love New Year’s? It’s the only time during the year that we can wipe the slate clean. Last year doesn’t matter. We all get a do-over at midnight on January 1. Isn’t that the whole point of a New Year’s Resolution? You get a fresh start to change your life.
According to Livescience, the most popular New Year’s Resolutions are:
1. Quit smoking
2. Get fit and lose weight
3. Quit drinking
4. Enjoy life
5. Get out of debt
6. Spend more time with family
Those are all worthwhile goals for sure. But if you look at them holistically, you really don’t need ALL of those Resolutions. You can boil all of the above down to one 1980’s Journey song:
“Be Good to Yourself.”
Pretend for a moment that you are not you. Pretend for a moment that you are someone you love dearly… you may be your child, your parent, your spouse, or your best friend. If your loved one was smoking, eating crappy food and gaining weight, drinking too much, spending more than they make, ignoring their family, and leading a miserable life, would you be concerned?
Of course you would! You’d “Faithfully” go to them with “Open Arms” and offer “Only Solutions” to their problems. Too much with the Journey songs? What can I say? I’m a child of the 80’s…
The fact is, nobody wants to see someone they love lose their groove, especially at that magnitude, and especially when those mojo-minimizing maneuvers can be life-threatening.
Why, then, do we seem to have no problem when that same groove-reducing, mojo-minimizing, life-threatening behavior belongs to us?
Somewhere along the line, we were taught not to value ourselves. The same insidious behavior that pains us to see in someone we love, somehow seems okay… and even commonplace… in our own lives.
But it’s a New Year. So now we get a do-over.
Starting today, treat yourself like you would treat someone you love dearly. Take care of your health because you won’t realize how valuable it is until it’s gone. Enjoy life because it’s the only one you have. Get out of debt because you don’t need more clothes, a better car, or a bigger house to prove that you’re worth it. You were born worth it. Spend more time with family because they are the most important people in the world to you.
Remember, life’s a journey (pun intended). Every morning that you wake up, you get to decide how you’re going to live today. You don’t have to wait until next January 1.
Be good to yourself… no matter what the calendar says.
