Welcome to the new friends who are following me and thanks to all of my loyal followers for your love and support. Now that we have our heels firmly planted in 2015, I want to ask each of you: What is your intention for 2015? Research estimates that even though more than 40% of Americans make resolutions, only 8% of us actually stick to them. Why is that? The reasons are many: we tackle too extreme a makeover for our lives, we do not set tangible goals, or we keep our resolutions to ourselves. Whatever the reasons, some people are finding the word “resolution” to conjure up negative feelings. So what are we to do?
What if instead, we each set an “intention” for 2015? Before we get to the daily steps that we need to take to reach our goal, we have to know why it is that we want to get there. We must connect with the feeling state that we are trying to move towards. When we talk about parenting, we may want to yell less this year, but why? What is it that we really desire by yelling less? Perhaps, we are sick of feeling guilty at the end of the day when we think back to how much we yelled. Perhaps we feel a distance between us and our child. Perhaps our child is beginning to yell just as we have shown him/her. But focusing on what we do NOT want will not get us there either. Instead, let us focus on what we DO want. In this example, maybe our intention would be to connect more deeply to our child. Maybe our intention would be to feel the pure, unconditional love we have for our child more deeply and more often. Once we know what our intention is, we can then put steps into place that move us closer to that intention.
My (parenting) intention for this year is to continue on my conscious parenting journey and to deepen my understanding of what it means to be conscious as I relate to my children (and others, really) so that I can move even closer to being that parent that I have always dreamed of being and that my children truly deserve. If you feel moved to do so, please think about it and share your Intention for 2015 here with us, and we can all help each other to move more closely to that relationship we have always dreamed of having with our children.