New Monthly Resolutions

I thought you might be interested to know that, according to British psychologist Cliff Arnall, the saddest day of the year will be this coming Monday, 20 January. Arnall has created a formula to predict the year’s saddest day that involves six different variables such as salary, weather, debt, etc. Interestingly enough a big part of his formula is the breaking of New Year’s resolutions which most people do by the third week of January.

As I was considering my own New Year’s resolutions for 2014, I read an article that gave a brilliant idea for achieving successful resolutions. The premise of the article was that a year is just too long and that we instead should make only one resolution for the year. That one resolution would be: “I resolve to make monthly resolutions all year.” In this way your goals are smaller, more manageable, and set for just a month at a time. If you should break one, you can always choose to make that resolution again at the beginning of the next month. Instead of only making resolutions once a year (that are frequently broken by the third week of January!), you can resolve to accomplish your goals each month. Hopefully over the year you will achieve some of your monthly resolutions and therefore be more successful than the once a year, all or nothing, cycle most of us follow. It’s an interesting idea that we might want to consider trying this year.

As we begin this semester I thought I might suggest a few New Year’s resolutions that would be worthwhile for our students (and us adults as well):

1. Get more sleep.

2. Grow in your faith.

3. Show appreciation for your parents in tangible ways.

4. Appreciate your teachers and dorm parents more often.

5. Spend less time messaging and chatting and spend more face-to-face time with friends.

6. Cut back on junk food and soft drinks.

7. Play fewer video/computer/online games.

8. Commit yourself to doing something charitable and sacrificial.

I imagine you have plenty of suggestions that could be added to this list! Feel free to let me know what you’re resolving to accomplish this year/month.

Welcome back and Happy New Year to each of you!