New Year's Resolutions are destined to become February's Failures.
The concept of New Year's Resolutions employs dangerous inverse manifesting - the insidious language mistakes you make when crafting messages that result in the exact opposite of your intentions.
Look at what the Name really says...
Two of the problems with writing New Year's Resolutions can be found in the word choice of the name itself:
1. Beginning or Ending - Which is it?
The word Resolution is a form of the verb to resolve.
Resolve and resolution are about endings and conclusions.
- Do you traditionally focus your resolutions around the undesirable behaviors you want to stop?
- Or do you create a list of new positive behaviors you want to begin in the New Year, yet refer to these as resolutions?
Clearly, there is a major conflict between beginnings and endings. Mixed messages abound, confusing your intentions.
2. TimeFrame - When, exactly, are your intentions happening - and for how long?
The term New Year's sets too narrow a scope - limiting the time-frame of the intentions you wish to manifest to the beginning of the year.
- At what point is the year no longer new?
- How far into the year does the newness extend?
- How long after January 1st are people wishing you Happy New Year?
The natural point at which this sentiment loses its relevance probably coincides with the end of the effectiveness of your resolve.
Do your Resolutions focus on negatives?
If your resolutions are built with endings and negations of bad past behavior, you are actually energizing the very things you want to remove from your life, and attracting more of them to you. Remember, that the Universe makes no distinction between A Thing and not-A Thing. In both cases, A Thing is alive and well, sitting right smack in the middle of your intention.
By stating a negation of A Behavior, you are still focusing on and resonating with A Behavior. You are essentially bringing A Behavior along into the New Year. What's even worse, you are empowering fear of A Thing, as opposed to giving Love to its alternative.
In addition to the simplicity of these negatives, New Year's Resolutions have implied, unrealistic expectations - defining or stating an end to A Thing does not automatically create solutions. "Stop smoking" does not detail any alternate actions or empower a healthy opposite behavior - you're left with nothing but the word Smoking, the negation is irrelevant.
Are you focusing on the What or the How?
Perhaps you take a more positive approach to your New Year's Resolutions, writing them as statements of the positive, alternate behaviors you intend to introduce. This leads you into the most common pitfall of attempts to Manifest - overly focusing on the How instead of the What.
To create an effective Thoughtform, focus on visualizing What it is you want, with as much detail as possible, making every effort to experience What it is in the present tense, embroidered with emotion.
Leave How it will happen in an open-ended state. We have a tendency to be very vague about What it is - exactly - that we want, and skip straight to analyzing the specifics of How this could possibly happen - or, in most cases - NOT happen.
If you're doing this, you're inverse manifesting - unweaving your creative intentions, strand by strand - and programming your awareness to recognize the signs and pathways that lead to failure.
Condition your consciousness to spot signposts pointing to success.
Place your order with the Universe and have faith that it is on its way to meet you - your goal is to raise your vibration to match the end result.
Think of you and your Goal as magnets - the force that ultimately draws you together is invisible, powerful, and constant.
When two magnets are moved closer to one another, there is a certain point at which the force that brings them together will pop - once that threshold is reached, with a snap the speed of attraction escalates to almost immediate completion.
An alternate metaphor - think of your manifested intention as a visitor you're going to pick up at the airport. You don't have to arrange your friend's flight, pack his bags, and fly the plane - you just have to get to the airport somewhere around the time his plane lands - and, most importantly, be prepared to spot him in the crowd.
When do you stop looking for something or someone? Once he's in your physical sight, you totally switch into the mode "He's here." Mission accomplished. Even though, technically, he still may be 100 yards down the concourse from you when you spot one another, but at that point, the physical meeting is inevitable, only seconds away.
When do you continue straining and searching and wondering if he's going to arrive after you've seen him walking toward you? Do you still fret about whether or not the meeting is going to happen? No, you reach that snap - the threshold that's close enough.
By studying who this wonderful visitor is, meditating on what he looks like, and learning how to recognize him when you see him, you can successfully go pick him up and bring him home when the time comes. In the meantime, you prepare yourself and your environment to play host - you don't prepare his itinerary.
Preparing yourself to recognize your arriving intentions
When you create an Intention, you've instantly manifested the thing you desire - it's out there, perfectly matching your visualization - your goal is only to nudge yourself close enough for the overwhelming Law of Attraction to take hold - a force that inevitably brings completion to your goal.
A magnet does not require your analysis, understanding - and certainly not your hand-holding or micromanagement of the details - for its force to work.
Affirmations and Action Steps
But you have to do something to make A Thing happen - you can't just sit there and wait for it to come to you, right?
That's what Affirmations are for - preparing yourself to recognize your desire, and preparing your life to host this new desire when it arrives.
By exercising your visualization daily, you program yourself to recognize it. You become extremely familiar with your intentions by imagining them in a future present moment - in exquisite detail. Don't forget to concentrate on the emotions of that new present.
Next, the concept of Action Steps comes into play. You've already created A Thing - your goal is simply to move yourself close enough to the threshold for the invisible, inevitable forces to take hold and complete your rendezvous.
The Actions you take do not define the Thing you want; your actions do not detail 100% of the steps that occur between you and meeting your goal. That's too tall an order; it's too specific a roadmap; the parameters are too narrow.
Let the Universe handle the How - you stay focused on What you want, and raising your vibration - your ability to recognize - positioning yourself close enough for the Law of Attraction to take hold.
Action Steps are not meant to be a road map of incremental steps - it only takes a few actions on your part to send you drifting toward the threshold of the Universal How. When the How happens, it will sometimes seem unbelievable, accidental, serendipitous, coming out of nowhere and just falling in your lap.
Life Lists
A better alternative to New Year's Resolutions is to make a Life List.
Right away, you see that the Life List has an enormous, open-ended scope that is not limited to a particular month, year, or other time frame.
Think: in its own perfect time. Let the Universe handle the scheduling; have faith that All is as it should be. Don't nag the Universe, God, your Guardian Angels, your Spirit Guides - they already received your thought-form; it's coming - remember, the How is not your job.
How to create a Life List:
Writing out the List. The concept of writing New Year's Resolutions is perfect in one aspect - the writing.
Tools:
This is one of those journaling exercises where good old pen-and-paper works perfectly. I've found in past years that a cheap, 1-Subject Spiral-bound Notebook is the best tool to use - once you get going envisioning those details, you'll want several sheets of paper. I also prefer to treat this as its own journal, physically removed from any other writing exercises.
When you create a thoughtform with conscious, willful, positive intention, you enable its externalization by degrees - you get it outside your mind and make it real.
- Thinking is the first degree.
- Speaking it out loud further creates it.
- Writing it down is the deepest - the greatest - degree of physical expression, in terms of language.
Write out What you want in as much detail as you possibly can. Don't write about what you don't want - write about the alternate, positive scenario that you do.
You can't just rip things out of your life - removing something creates a hole - what will you use to fill that hole?
Your brain will reach for something - chances are it will go first for what it's used to - filling the hole with the same thing it has habitually determined to be an easy solution. If you're trying to introduce a new plug for that space in your life, you must decide what that new alternative is going to be.
Make sure you write in the present tense, as if it has already happened - is happening - to you. Make sure you include emotion - how does it feel to have What you want. Express gratitude for having it.
Now, for each item - the What - on your List, write down 3 Action Steps you can take to move you closer to attracting it.
*Note: Again, these are not actions that define or map the entire goal to completion - Action Steps are not How's, they are just tiny little nudges that move you close enough for the greater forces of attraction to take hold.
There may bex-number of How Steps involved - don't even worry about how many there are.
You will find that by taking only one or two Actions, the rest will seem to quickly, automatically, happen to you - in ways you could never have foreseen anyway.
Let the Universe surprise you.
I've personally found that taking one simple little Action Step, say, for item #4, often results in cross-over manifestations - where I look back to see that a chain of events from that Action has ultimately caused items #1, #2, and #7 to find me.
Had I tried to second-guess, predict, or control these connections, I would never have seen the possibilities. Don't get in your own way.
Order what you want, take your seat at Life's Table of Abundance, unfold your napkin - and stay out of God's Kitchen!
Let your Spirit Guides and Guardian Angels serve you - it is their expertise.
You are here to experience all that you can imagine.