Successful Blog

New Year’s Resolutions, No! How to Make Positive Changes that Have Meaning and Stick

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Never Made One Yet

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The first time I encountered the term, New Year’s Resolution, was in the comic strip, Peanuts, by Charles M. Shultz. I was 8, maybe 9, years old, and Peanuts was the top comic in the Chicago Tribune. As I went through the comic strips that day, making resolutions was a recurring theme in them.

I found the idea of New Year’s Resolutions curious, and I wondered why I’d never heard of them. I sought out the only available expert I knew. I asked my mom.

My mom answered, “Because most folks make resolutions and forget them the very next day. That’s just not how most people change.”

I can still tap into the relief I felt when she said that. My imagination had made this ferocious picture of what a resolution was. I had seen myself climbing into a splintery, wooden shipping crate labeled “FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE WITH NO HOPE OF EVER GETTING OUT.”

Thanks to that conversation about New Year’s Resolutions, I’ve never made made one yet.

New Year’s Resolutions a New Approach

On Open Comment Night December 5th, the subject of New Year’s Resolutions came up. We agreed that they don’t work as a list. Christine Kane explained her approach was to choose a word. Ben took that idea back as the Absolute Best Way and described it on his Instigator Blog.

Boy, I sure like their ideas a lot!

But I need more than that to execute — if I want to make a positive change that will stay with me. So if Ben and Christine don’t mind, I’m going to expand on the spirit of their ideas, knowing they already “get” it.

How to Make Positive Changes that Have Meaning and Stick

Changing habits is hard to do. The hard part is getting the new ones to stick. It’s easier when we approach our habits the way we approach our tasks and our skills — knowing our goal, not taking on too much, and making use of the “do over” rule when we need it.

Here’s how to make your positive changes stick.

  1. Choose one thing to change. One thing done is always better than 12 things started. If you’re working on gratitude, you might narrow it to saying thank you and meaning it. If you’re working on snacking you might replace one snack food with a healthful one or one time that you snack with another activity.

  2. Write your choice down and define it as an objective. I will say thank you out loud and give a brief reason for my gratitude when folks do things simple for me, such as listen to my ideas, and I’ll note their response. Now you know it is that you’re going for and you’ve got a clear objective.

  3. Make it measurable and make a measurement goal that increases. The measure can be simple. It might be how many smiles a day you get. Without a measure though, a goal is easy to lose track of or forget. How will you know if you’re getting better without a measurement?

  4. Check in at the end of the day to see how you did. Record your measurement and compare it to yesterday. Plan for tomorrow, but don’t think about next year — that’s a lifetime away.

    Forgive yourself when you slip or have a bad day. Everyone does that. Don’t give up — with that response no one ever would learn to bicycle, skate, or be a leader in any sense. Pick up where you left off, knowing the practice you already have will make the forward momentum that much easier.

    Celebrate your successes when you have a great day. When you live up to the change you are going for, let yourself know that by doing something really cool with a friend, taking in a great movie, CD, or book, or whatever else feels like a reward.

  5. When the change is fully a part of you, go on back to choose another positive to add to what you do.

Changing habits is like taking on new skills. We need to make room to learn, see progress, dust off our mistakes, and celebrate our successes. We’ve been doing that since we went to school. It’s what learning is.

Take a word from Christine and Ben, don’t make a resolution. Make a change that is meaningful.

When you make a positive change that sticks, other positive things will happen too. You’ll also be changing the world just a bit.

New Year’s Resolutions. Positive changes in the world. Have you thought about this? The quickest way to change other folks’ behavior is to change our own?

Thank you for that.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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SOB Business Cafe 12-29-06

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SB Cafe

Welcome to the SOB Cafe

We offer the best in thinking–articles on the business of blogging written by the Successful and Outstanding Bloggers of Successful Blog. Click on the title shots to enjoy each selection.

The Specials this Week are

Writing White Papers returns with the Best Posts From the Best Writers.

Life Beyond Code poses thinking question in a Quought Series.

Writing Great Ezines and Blogs does some coaching on how to fill up a remarkable e-newsletter.

Be prepared to shake hands with Mike Sansone in 2007.

A useful ubuntu guide

Related ala carte selections include

LiewCF has some useful places to see.

Wyome getst mushy for some fun blogs.

Sit back. Enjoy your read. Nachos and drinks will be right over. Stay as long as you like.
No tips required. Comments appreciated.

Have a great weekend!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

What Is He Talking About? Chris Cree on Facing Our Hidden Prejudices

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“No matter how horrid a person may appear on the surface, if you dig deeper, you will find some nice, unexpected little quality.” —Brooke Astor

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One of the biggest causes of conflict in this world is the snap judgments we make about people based on ridiculously limited information.

As we go through life, it is only natural to lump people into categories instead of treating them as the unique individuals they really are. And, when left unchecked, that mental lumping together creates a fertile ground for prejudice to blossom.

It is especially easy when someone rubs us the wrong way. The next time we see people who seem to fit into a category as the one who ruffled our feathers, we are much more likely to ride in with shields up and guns blazing. But all that does is further their stereotype of people like you.

Snap judgments only add fuel to the fire which can have a tendency to flare up from time to time.

I can be guilty of it myself. Interestingly my one big prejudice that I’ve had to work to overcome doesn’t have anything to do with skin color, nationality, religious alignment, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, economic status, or any of the other major categories that we tend to lump people in.

As a result, for many years I deluded myself into thinking that I wasn’t prejudiced at all. But my prejudice was more subtle and as a result much, much more insidious. [Read more…]

Net Neutrality 12-29-2006 — AT&T Gives Way On Net Neutrality

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Net Neutrality Links

I’m adding this link to the Net Neutrality Page.

AT&T compromise may get merger approved

WASHINGTON — AT&T Inc. has offered a new set of concessions that are expected to satisfy the two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission and lead to approval of the company’s $85 billion buyout of BellSouth Corp. Approval by the full commission could happen as soon as Friday.

AT&T filed a letter of commitment with the agency Thursday night that adds a number of new conditions to the deal, including a promise to observe “network neutrality” principles, an offer of affordable stand-alone digital subscriber line service and a promise to give up some wireless spectrum.

Final approval still requires a vote of the commissioners, which can happen at any time via computer. The proposed deal is the largest telecommunications merger in U.S. history.

[ . . . ]

Among the promises made by the company:

_An offer of stand-alone, high-speed Internet service to customers in its service area for $19.95 per month. The “naked DSL (digital subscriber line)” offer would allow those who live in AT&T and BellSouth’s service areas to sign up for fast Internet access without being required to buy a package of other services.

_A greater commitment to network neutrality, or nondiscrimination involving Internet traffic. AT&T said it would “maintain a neutral network and neutral routing in its wireline broadband Internet access service.”

_To freeze rates for “special access” customers, usually competitors and large businesses that pay to connect directly to a regional phone company’s central office via a dedicated fiber optic line, for 48 months.

_To “assign and/or transfer to an unaffiliated third party” all of its 2.5 GHZ spectrum currently licensed to BellSouth within one year of the merger closing date.

_To “repatriate” 3,000 jobs that were outsourced by BellSouth outside the U.S. by Dec. 31, 2008, with at least 200 of those jobs to be located in New Orleans.

Ben Scott, legislative director for Free Press, a reform group that has fought the merger, said the network neutrality provision was a “big step forward for the supporters of an open Internet.”

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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NET NEUTRALITY PAGE

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

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Connecting to the World

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Look in a scrapbook. Look in your wallet. You’ll find written messages. Diaries, wedding invitations, resumes, love letters, even our names are written as words. Yet, the best writer — the most prolific, the most proficient — is never finished learning, never finished becoming a writer. We are apprentices every one of us. We’re all in the process of becoming.

We’re all apprentice writers — part ego and part self-doubt. It’s the ego that helps us face down that blank page to say what we have to say. It’s the self-doubt that stops us from casting the movie about what we’ve written.

In this age of noise and clutter, we all need to be writers. Writing and publishing are the way we connect to the world.

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

We write to record our thoughts . . . and by recording them we think them through, rearrange, and re-organize them. We make our ideas clearer. We make our thinking stronger and more easily understood. We carve a path that a reader, a listener, another person can follow from our minds to their minds, from our hearts to their hearts. Writing is a connection waiting to happen.

Publishing makes the connection more natural and accessible.

Here are ten reasons that writing (and publishing) every day is important.

  1. Writing every day makes us better thinkers. It takes our thoughts out of our heads and challenges us to express them in understandable ways. Effective writing is the opposite of seat-of-the-pants thinking.

  2. Writing every day teaches us how to work with words in print, to construct a meaningful message. Like playing a guitar or doing math, writing takes practice.

  3. Writing every day helps us develop a voice that is natural and consistent, strong and confident, and attuned to readers. Everything we write has an audience. Even when we write for ourselves, we go back to read, listening to what we wrote. We question. We consider. We critique our choices.

  4. Writing every day improves our ability to craft remarkable prose that people want to share. Every time someone shares something that we write they add value to our ideas — when they change them and when they don’t.

  5. Writing every day gets us comfortable with the conventions of writing and the conventions of writing give our messages credibility. The credibility is how society finds the appropriate place for our ideas.

  6. Writing every day lets us find our personal writing process. We lose our fear of flying and learn our way around our creativity. We get familiar with what to do when we need ideas, how to know what we want to say, what is always going to be hard, and what parts are worth looking forward to.

  7. Writing every day teaches us how to tell our internal editor to be quiet until we need feedback.

  8. Writing every day makes us better, more thoughtful readers. We bring the insights and appreciation of a writer to what we read.

  9. Writing every day connects us to people. We meet more people in print than we can ever possibly meet face to face. Many people will know our written voice as well as they know our names.

  10. Writing every day makes us architects and builders. We record our history, and we imagine the future. We inspire and motivate, both ourselves and others. We make something that changes the world, something lasting. We make a unique contribution that others might use.

Everything written is inherently personal and at the same time dynamically social. In a noisy world, it’s the way we communicate across continents, across living rooms; with folks we just met and with every generation of our families. We write our dreams, our business plans, and ask questions. We read. We respond. We get the ultimate first impression.

Each time we write our voice becomes clearer, more focused, and stronger, until our writing is inseparable from our voice. Everything we write is written about us.

Publishing is how we talk to the world and how the world hears us.

What have you told the world today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related
See Power Writing on the Successful Series Page.