It’s January, which means it’s a new year and a new year brings on New Resolutions to aspire to keep, no doubt evolving us into better people for the next year.  Of the 10 resolutions  (some of them repeat from previous years) I made in 2011 I kept 8 fully.  Not bad, but just as every other year that has passed I resolve to meet all ten next year.  In the grand scheme of planning for the year ahead we can never vouch for the unexpected or factor in enough time for things we’d never guess are coming our way. Instead of blocking blessings and lessons we have to accept them and sometimes, those situations push aside a goal or two I had resolved to conquer by year-end.

This year I asked myself HOW I could plan ahead to keep ALL my resolutions this year. Quite easily I was able to come up with a plan of action focus on while attempting to keep all ten.

• Aim High but be vague: If one of your resolutions is learn a new language, while keeping that in mind alter the goal  to “Learn Something New” which leaves the door open for a variety of things to possibly learn throughout the year just in case you never get around to taking that language class.

• Be realistic: The hardest person to fool is yourself, know what your limits are as well as your habits.
• Along with be realistic- Never make a resolution that requires more than YOU to complete: You can only control your own will and intertwining that with another’s is a recipe for an unrealized resolution.
• Give yourself time increments: Instead of vowing to loose 50 pounds by the end of the year, aim to loose 10 pounds by Spring and so on. That way you see progress along the way and there isn’t a mad dash at the end of the year to drop a large amount of weight in a small amount of time.
• Share resolutions with a friend: Usually the people closest to you have similar goals, while both persons resolutions need not be exactly the same, both can inspire one another to stay on the right track, if even just by asking each other “how that resolution” is going every couple of weeks.

Keeping these tips in mind will hopefully help me to knock all ten out of the park well before year end.

Be Inspired!