2014 New Year’s Resolutions

My kids love this game.

It’s mid-December and time to begin thinking about New Year’s Resolutions. I don’t typically get too involved in those. Usually, my resolution is to simply try to be a better person overall. I like to think I am slowly evolving into a human who is at least somewhat better than she was just a few years ago. This year, I’ve decided to be a little more specific about my goals for 2014. I have two:

Be more fun.
Stop complaining so much.

Lately I feel like I am already being a lot more fun than I used to be. I used to hate playing board games and such. I think it had more to do with the company I was keeping than it had to do with any specific bias against games. The past couple of months, my kids and I have been playing Skip-bo literally three to five nights a week. And I am enjoying it. I want more of that in 2014. So much so, that I asked Santa to bring my kids several items that we can enjoy together as a family.

As for my second goal, well— I don’t want to be known as a complainer. I don’t want people to constantly avoid me because of my negativity. This year, I have heard a lot of people in the blogosphere saying, “Be a fountain, not a drain.” I like that idea.

Like my first goal for 2014, I have already started to lay the groundwork. For example, I have stopped posting to Facebook all day every day. I noticed that half of what I was posting was complaints about one thing or another. Who wants to read that? I mean, aside from the other complainers on Facebook who want to complain right back at me. I had found that I was constantly having these negative conversations that would just spiral out of control and leave me wondering how we got to this point. And then I would read back and realize that I started it. I hate looking in the mirror and realizing how ugly I can be.

So lately, I am keeping my complainy comments to myself. Or at least, I am trying to. At least once a day, I find myself deleting a negative comment that I posted twenty minutes or an hour ago. Complaining is a habit, and a hard one to break. But I have found that the more you complain, the more you find to complain about. Conversely, the more you tell yourself you are grateful for what you have, the more you find to be grateful for. So why not go that way instead?

Instead of waiting for January 1^st to start on my New Year’s resolutions, why not start today? What are your goals for 2014?

~Amanda L. Webster