Keeping the purpose in mind

Dear Reader.

A Happy New Year!

I hope you had great holidays.

Beginning of a new year prompts a lot of people to make goal for the year or new year resolutions.

But, have this happen to you that you started some new habit in hope of making you or your life better, but the habit itself ended up adding more stress in your life? and looking back, you are thinking "why did I do this to myself?" "why am I still trying to stick to this???". Maybe new workout schedule. Maybe weekly play date. Maybe new rule of making fresh cooking dinner most of the weeknights.

For me, it was putting "it has to be perfectly done" idea. Like dieting, laundry, dishes, posting articles on my website, exercising, playing with kids etc.

It is an easy pitfall when you are making resolutions. We come up with what to do before firmly sure about what the purpose you want from doing something new. Why do you want to trouble yourself to start that, whatever it is, after all?. There are so many how-to videos and articles to do anything. To be happy. To be organized. To get rid of PPD. To be perfect parent. To decorate for holidays.

The purposes behind how-to are great. Having purposes keeps us working and improve our life.

There is one step between having these purposes and coming up with what to do to achieve that. That is vision of when you achieve that purpose whatever you want.

Let's take "I want to be happy". Before I jump into signing myself up for workshops or life coach sessions or throwing away clutter in my house or reading up on how-to articles online, I need to examine what that looks like when I become happy.

What happy look like? What would I be doing? What would my relationship with my family look like when I am happy or when I would be happy? How would I be behaving in real life when unexpected negative event happens? You want to take a look at it inside and out.

Because your answers to these questions would be different and unique and reflects your core value, it is very important to know these before picking up what to do and putting it into action.

So, what did you find about you and your value?