Screw Making New Year’s Resolutions

What to do instead to have a great new year

We all know New Year’s resolutions don’t work. So why the hell do so many of us keep making them?

The very moment you break one, which generally happens during the first week in January, you feel guilty. You get down on yourself. You might even do something to deliberately derail what you resolved to (or not to) do.

What a lousy way to start a year.

Why not kick off 2022 in a much more empowering manner? Rather than making promises to yourself that you won’t or can’t keep, why not focus on what you want to create in your life?

Don’t resolve. Manifest.

OK, stay with me here, even if you think the concept of manifesting what you desire is a crock.

For the uninformed or not yet totally anti-woo-woo, manifesting means the ability to create a tangible outcome by focusing one’s thoughts on a desired goal. Other ways of describing manifestation include the law of attraction or, simply, thoughts become things.

But wait. Manifesting isn’t just thinking about what you want and having it magically appear.

The thinking part is merely step one. A vital, critical step, to be sure, because nothing happens until you think of it. But manifesting is more than wishful thinking.

It also involves creating what you want. And creating requires action.

Take, for example, the invention of the first four-legged chair.

Someone, somewhere along the line, got tired of sitting on the ground. Or perching on uncomfortable boulders. Someone actually envisioned a device that would allow humans to plant their butts on something more comfortable when they needed to rest or eat. But that person didn’t just hold a picture in his or her mind to turn that idea into reality, right? The inventor of the chair had to bring that vision to life by building one. That person’s thought became a thing.

That’s manifesting at its finest.

I have personally manifested many things over the years, even before I realized what I was doing.

As a lonely, overweight child, I yearned for friends. My best childhood friend, two years older than me, outgrew me in grade school and moved on to have friends her own age, leaving a huge hole in my life.

So every night, I began to pray for friends, kids I could play with and talk to. Laugh with and do good things with. Learn from and be creative with.

But I didn’t stop there. I started a Barbie Fan Club in my own neighborhood with other girls I knew had Barbies. I helped neighbor kids organize a fundraiser carnival for Muscular Dystrophy one summer. I joined a local Camp Fire Girls group, convincing my parents to let me go to summer camp even though I wasn’t particularly outdoorsy, and later volunteering to a be a camp aide.

In other words, I took action — both then, and on into my adult life. As a result, I have been blessed many times over with the most wonderful friends a person could ever have.

Now you might say, but see? You didn’t conjure friends out of thin air. There was no hocus pocus manifestation-thing going on.

You’re right, I didn’t. I manifested them. Like the inventor of the first chair, I had to envision them first. I had to really want friends first. But then I didn’t stay in my room and wait for them to come to me. I took action.

In the same vein, my sister and I dreamed of traveling to Ireland for years. Neither one of us had a ton of spending money or savings, and neither of us had ever been outside of the U.S., so how could we make this happen?

I started by adding a picture of an Irish castle surrounded by lush, green countryside to my vision board.

Then I began to research Irish tours and, simultaneously, how to aggressively cut my debt load and increase my savings.

It didn’t happen overnight, but our trip to Ireland became a reality.

Know what you want. Envision it. Take action. That’s what manifesting is all about.

In 2022, I want to build my readership. Connect with other writers for our mutual benefit. Create a level of income through my writing that will allow me to do more traveling once this coronavirus is firmly in our rearview window.

To manifest these goals, I will continue to write.

So what do you want to create in your life in 2022? Do you know? Because it starts with knowing exactly what you want.

Then go ahead and manifest it. Let me know how it turns out.

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