The start of a new year is a time of rebirth and self-direction. It’s a good time to reflect on our continuing personal evolution and focus on optimizing our lives before we get swept away by all the day-to-day demands of life.
What do want our lives to stand for?
What areas of our life would we like to transform?
How can we best focus our energy this year?
Many of us start the year recharged and motivated to make the new year a great one. This motivation is a powerful energy to manage and harness. Unfortunately many New Year’s resolutions seem to fizzle and die after a few weeks or months. Effective resolutions that are rooted in actual personal inspiration and purpose can help us maintain and even build the energy and momentum that we carry into the New Year.
Optimizing our lives takes a bit of reflection and strategy but it’s difficult if not impossible to do this if we are not deeply connected with our inspirations and sense of purpose. Our most inspiring lives will require us to continue to develop and learn so we should direct attention to how we can do this effectively and how we can hold ourselves accountable. Examining the inspirations and personal struggles throughout the course of our lives can help us clarify our sense of purpose. When we are clear about inspiration and purpose it can become easy to let go of thoughts, desires, and energy-draining practices that don’t support us and drop the problems that don’t actually need to be solved. In all of these ways, we can optimize our lives.
It is somewhat common in our culture to put off our personal fulfillment until the future, and this form of procrastination may be one of the reasons that some of our most well-intended dreams fail. A fairly typical life strategy involves first earning plenty of money or climbing a career ladder with the intent of later going back to do what actually inspires or fulfills us. I believe this is a flawed life strategy that can separate us from our inspiration and purpose. It can even have us working to reinforce institutions or causes that we don’t support in our hearts. Deferring life doesn’t make much sense because there may be no tomorrow for us. Each day is an opportunity to work towards aligning with inspiration and purpose and train to live more powerfully. Every little step counts.
Furthermore, prioritizing financial gain or career advancement for its own sake often leads us to abandon the development and maintenance of our bodies and minds so that if we ever move on we will not find ourselves ready to act powerfully. We may no longer have any idea what our inspirations are. A big bank account can never be a proxy for being who we want to be. If it makes sense to delay certain substantial steps that we want to take in order to pursue inspiration and purpose (and there is a lot to manage in life, so sometimes it does), we can always still maintain a training practice that helps get us ready for when our moment comes.
Here are a few considerations for making training-based resolutions:
Giving attention to inspiration and personal development in the face of life’s other demands and obstacles is a trainable skill in and of itself. Immediate demands are like the mythical hydra with its nine regenerating heads. There will always be more immediate demands no matter how many we fulfill. If we always focus on them instead of the pursuit of inspiration our lives will not be able to transform. A simple resolution to devote just a little time every day to do something to support our highest inspiration will probably have a more powerful effect than a very specific training goal that is not clearly linked to inspiration.
Many exercise-oriented resolutions are often rooted in dissatisfaction with ourselves and a desire to change our bodies. Such resolutions do not appear to sustain effective habits as well as resolutions that are clearly linked to the pursuit of our actual personal inspirations. As soon as we hit a frustration or a competing priority, a practice that is rooted in disrespect for ourselves will often fail.
When are living with purpose we are able to better appreciate our bodies and minds as vehicles to strongly carry out a mission or realize an inspiration. When we maintain a clear connection in our minds between our training practices and the fulfillment of purpose or inspiration, our training practices will grow stronger.
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