It Took Two Months to Make My New Year’s Resolutions. Now It’s Time for a Better Me.

Ahhhh, New Year’s Resolutions. They come around every year, at that wonderful time at the beginning of January when we take stock of all the things we’ve failed to do in the year gone by. It’s an opportunity to make amends and change our ways.

Like most people, I take that time to reflect. I look at what I’ve accomplished, what I want to accomplish, and how I can best achieve those goals. I take stock of the kind of person that I was, and ruminate on areas for improvement.

This year, I decided to do things a bit differently. Instead of hitting the gym on January 1 (like I usually do) I chose to take the first two months of 2019 to look at the things that I wanted to accomplish, and more importantly, how I wanted to accomplish them. This is less of a hit list of professional goals, and more of an ethos for how I want to live my life. It’s my hope that taking some time to reflect on these virtues will result in habits that stick.

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT

• Be balanced and strong in all interactions. As a casual devotee of yoga, I always leave class in a better mental state than when I started. Why is that? Because yoga always reminds me to approach everything from a position of balance and strength—to be as strong as I possibly can while maintaining an even keel.
• Act purposefully. I want to fully understand and appreciate my actions in all facets of life—this could be going on a run to clear my head, writing an article that I hope will inform the public, or hosting a dinner for friends because I recognize that community enriches life. I should have an idea of why I do these things.
• Practice social grace. I want to be in a position where I can offer things to others—whether it’s a place to stay, a bottle of wine or someone to listen to a friend’s problem. That requires me to be balanced and to sort my own affairs before I can offer myself to others. In this vein, I’m also committing myself to be a bit nicer—I can have a snarky sense of humor that people don’t always appreciate, and I’m working on using it in the right situations.
• Be an informed citizen. There’s not much excuse for ignorance in the digital age, and it’s more important than ever to keep up with current affairs.
• Be a better communicator. I oftentimes rely on nuance and inference in interpersonal interactions and I want to be a better overt communicator, thinking before I speak and being deliberate with my words.
• Reduce my reliance on immaterial material goods. There is so much crap in today’s world that we don’t need. I want to invest only in things that facilitate joy (believe it or not, I wrote this down before the Marie Kondo craze) and have meaning. I’d also like to start dressing like this—to have less clothes, but the ones that I do have look snappy and befit the spirit of my intentions.
• Spend time with people who charge me rather than drain me. Sometimes you need to surround yourself with the right kind of people, those who help you move your life forward and help you think ahead, rather than live in the past.
• Be my own advocate. I’m very easy-going and go-with-the-flow in public social and professional situations, but that doesn’t necessarily reflect my inner dialogue. I’m going to try to be less agreeable on issues of importance for myself—I’m going to be my own best advocate, and I need to start working towards it.

PERSONAL GROWTH

• Health and fitness are paramount. Continue to eat healthily, walk places, bike when I can and make the outdoors a consistent part of my life. When there’s a chance to use my body, I want to take advantage of it.
• Read as much as possible. I’ve found that I get the most out of well-written, long-form articles, like those published in The Atlantic or The New Yorker. Keeping up with headlines is important, but I’m not going to waste my time keeping up with the latest on the AP newswire. Understand the patterns, not the facts without context.
• Stop eating crap before bed. I’ve started to feel the negative effects of eating sugar, alcohol and carbs before bed in the morning. None of it feels good, and I want to take a more holistic approach to my well-being. It’s simple but easy to forget: what you eat at night affects the way you feel in the morning.
• Yoga and NOLS: I’ve always wanted to train to be a yoga teacher, and to do a NOLS outdoor education class. I’m keeping these things on the radar because they’re activities that fulfill me and which I want to further explore.

PROFESSIONAL GOALS

• Patterns, not facts. I want to write about long, complicated, nuanced issues that are important for the public to understand. I have a background in business, economics, political science and environmental education, and I want to use journalism to tie in these disparate elements and help people to better understand how they can interact with the natural world around them.
• Increase my social media presence. This is a multi-headed hydra: I’m a real believer that social media has a net negative effect on our society, but as a writer, it’s a tool to broadcast my work and one that would be hard to live without. I think of Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and my website as my collective digital business card, and I need to be able to hand it out to prospective clients, job opportunities and business associates.
• Hustle, hustle, hustle. I’ve worked as a photographer in a number of different capacities and I want to establish myself more. That means finishing a how-to digital photography book I have sketched out, marketing myself as a real estate photographer, and taking headshots of friends to build up my local portfolio.
• Find my niche. I work in a number of different capacities: as a writer, a photographer and an educator. While they are different jobs, they all serve the same innate purpose: to communicate information to an audience. I need to make myself highly effective at all three, but I also need to work on finding a specific niche. “Environmental issues” is simply too broad, and I need to drill down on a few areas of topical expertise to find someone to really pay me for my skills.
• Accolades, not accomplishments. You might recognize an achievement of yours as an accomplishment, but you need others to recognize your achievement to gain accolades. Accolades take years of work and true dedication. Think long-term.
• Be more decisive. That which can be done now, do now. Being flexible is a worthwhile character trait, but so is being inflexible. Let’s call it being steadfast—suddenly inflexibility is a virtue.

REFLECTION

• Three principles to live by. I’ve spent a good deal of life exploring and finding out what I like and how I work. Now that I have a better sense of self, it’s time to narrow down the focus and allow my life to be guided by three principles: honesty, integrity and hard work. If I live by these principles, I have faith that things will turn out OK.