Welcome to the New Year!

As always Sydney started off the new year with quite a bang.

Most people have put last year well behind them and are looking to make this one better.  Well here’s my little secret. Last year was a great year for me. I did a lot of things I hadn’t expected, met some fabulous new people, started this blog, went to two countries I’d never been to before both of which had been on my wish list for a long time. It was a year of adventures and I learned a LOT of things.

How many of my resolutions did I succeed with? None. Not one. Nada.

Why?  Because I don’t make them anymore.

What? Nope. No resolutions. (Pardon the pun).

No Resolutions

I stopped setting resolutions several years ago. The reason for this is that I never held to them. Ever. And they were always the same. Get my house organised. Lose weight. Exercise. You know. The same resolutions that we all set year after year.

Don’t get me wrong. I have goals but I set them for a set time and for a specific purpose.

What’s your Intention?

Every New Years Eve, regardless of what we are doing, my best friend and I call each other up and we talk about our intentions for the new year. not Resolutions. We like to have a theme.

Last year my theme was “Let It Go”. You’re singing the song in your head right aren’t you?  🙂

So I spent the year on letting go of stuff, limiting ideas, fears, even relationships. Anything that was holding me back.

Having a theme, writing it down often to reinforce it really helped. So, I sang the song to myself when I de-cluttered to remind myself not to hold on to things. Finding a way to help the process of letting go “stuff”  made it easier. Paying attention to things I was mentally and emotionally holding onto as well. I noticed thought patterns that only served to hold me back or bring me down and deliberately replaced them with better thoughts.

Look, I won’t lie and say it was a piece of cake because it wasn’t. Would I consider it done? No. But then Intention is not an item to cross off your To Do list.

Harder than getting rid of physical stuff was the mental stuff. Changing how you think is hard work. All of this has led me to my theme for this year.

This year’s theme

This year’s theme? Be Mindful.

Over the last few months, I’ve been reading a lot on Mindfulness and Intentions. For me, it boils down to this. Pay Attention.

I’m a bit of a dreamer. I’m easily distracted. I move from one project to another and often I don’t complete any of them. Sometimes I’m more focussed on taking photos of whatever activity is going on rather than participating. Like many people, I often pay no attention to what I’m eating. I throw on whatever clean clothes I see first. I go from day to day barely remembering what I had done the week before.

My poor memory is also likely due in large part to not paying attention to what is going on.  If you are thinking about one thing and doing another, you aren’t fixing the memory into your brain. This is problematic if you are studying or playing with your children.

This year my aim is to spend more time focussed on is going on at any given time. That will be less fun with my day job but I am expecting it will improve my work and help me achieve some goals I have there. When I take my nephews for ice cream, sure I’m still going to take a couple of photos – they won’t be this cute forever after all. But then I’ll put the camera down and just eat ice cream with them.