It's so easy for my mind (and yours?) to go there: "You're a failure. You work on these things every year. How many times will it take to get it "right?" There's something wrong with you. You're a fraud. You should give up."
Here's the big news: Not everything you think is true. In fact, I'd venture to say a lot of it is not true. It's never the right time to give up on yourself. We do learn from our successes but the real growth opportunity is in our failures. It's in trying and not succeeding that we find out what are our "provided thats," and what are our stumbling blocks. On our next attempt, we have a chance to factor those "provided thats" into our new plan.
Are you confused yet? Here's an example:
When I look at my resolutions from last year, I see that I did not completely fail. Ha! Take that mind-talk. That said, I immediately notice a resolution I did not keep 100%:
"Take time each day to meditate, reflect, process, choose and -- the biggy --be grateful."
I made this about 50% of the time. Why not? 2 reasons: 1) I had a hidden "provided that" and, 2), once I got off track, I had a hard time getting back on track, even completely forgetting for days at a time.
The hidden "provided that" was "provided that I got a reasonable amount of sleep (6+ hours) and I wasn't sick." Whew.
Now I have to decide if I want to factor in my "provided that" into my plans. Having 5 kids means that someone is having a crisis a LOT of the time. And it turns out that kids and crises and sleep aren't good friends. So between lack of sleep and occasional illness, I would probably be hitting about 60-70% of the days. That's actually not close enough for me.
Mid year, I decided to amend my resolution based on what I'd learned: "Take time to meditate (etc) at least 5 times a week." This was an acceptable compromise to me and allowed me a couple of days for my life to interfere with my plans.
I haven't made my 2016 resolutions yet. When I do, however, I will spend a little more time plumbing out my "provided thats" at the beginning to increase my odds of success through the year.
What are your resolutions?
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