Yearly Resolutions versus Continual Reinvention

Happy New Year!!

Resolutions

The statistics say that 80% of new years resolutions fail by February, our experience in the cookie business does nothing to dispute this number – we are just not sure it actually takes a full month, lol.

At this time of year, Gina and I are usually recovering from long hours of hard work during the holiday cookie season.  After 10 weeks of people gorging themselves for the “HOLIDAY’S” (the holidays now include 2 weeks before Halloween until January 2^nd of the following year), the gyms fill up with people looking to loose weight, eat healthy, and vow to change their habits in the coming year, and the cookie biz grinds to a halt.

It is a 2-week respite before its time to jump back into the bakery and get things fired up for Valentines Cookies, and before the will-power wears off and reality sets in for countless numbers of people that promised themselves things would be different this year. 

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Most of us revert to those ‘bad habits’ before the snow melts– and ignore the one brief moment of truth when we were honest with ourselves and reflected on what we wanted to improve about ourselves for the coming year.

Psychology Today lists 4 reasons New Year’s Resolutions Fail – they are:

1. Goals are not clear
2. You feel overwhelmed
3. You feel discouraged
4. You are not ready to change

You don’t keep your resolutions because you don’t believe in them, you have other things more important to you, you have a shitty attitude, and you are complacent.

The biggest reason is that CHANGE is a process that requires specific steps if we are to be successful, and new year’s resolutions do not address this process.

Reinvention

In contrast, reinvention is the continual process of awakening to become the wonderful person you have always wanted to be.  It is the process of shedding that which no longer fits to expose the inner qualities that are already there, with the objective to create fullness and excellence in your life.

To reinvent yourself you need three things:

1. A vision of who you want to be
2. The Knowledge of how to make change in yourself
3. The courage to do it.

Starting and stopping yearly resolutions is easy, reinventing oneself takes much more effort.  Resolutions are short lived – reinvention lasts a lifetime.

Reinvention is permanent resolutions are temporary.

Too often our well intentioned resolutions are simply adding fuel to a fire and complicating an already chaotic personal life – the process of reinventing ourselves requires that we clear away that which does not matter and set our sights on fully integrating our values into a plan that will excite and expose the best parts of ourselves.

We can’t choose the time and place we were born and lived, but we can determine what it is we put into our lives.  The adventurer will experience it according to the measure of their courage.

We began the outward process of reinventing ourselves when we decided to sell the bakery after 10 years in business, the actual process started much earlier but existed only in our heads.  Prior to that we reinvented ourselves from corporate employees living a ‘big life’ to cookie bakery owners living a much simpler existence.

For the past 6 months we have driven some 16,000 miles in 3 countries, and visited 22 states in the U.S. Our plans for the fist half of 2020 will take us to new countries and new states.

If you have made a new years resolution or two, we hope that you reach your goals.  We will not be joining you, instead, our plans include creating a new reality, a new existence that meets our current needs and wants. 

We don’t do resolutions – we do reinventions

We are looking forward to the process.