New Year Planning

Somebody asked me to write something about New Year Planning so here goes….

It is that time of year when in the past I would purchase my new Filofax inserts and spend time making plans for the coming year….projecting my earnings and expenditure, organising how I would spend my time, planning how much weight I would lose on my new diet etc  etc.  My aim was to create the perfect life….and to feel in control.

From experience I know that my good intentions rarely lasted beyond early February and life did not go according to my plan.  And that this caused me a lot of unnecessary stress.

There will be no New Year Planning activity this year.   In May I made a decision to just let myself be carried along by the flow of life and to see what happened.   Instead of lots of SMART objectives I decided that may only goals were to live simply and to be kind to myself and other people.  Simple…but not easy!

It has meant letting go of the stuff that used to be so important to me. Most importantly it has meant letting go of the need to control, analyse and make judgements…..and instead learn to enjoy, and learn from whatever arises.  I no longer feel as if my life is mapped out, and backed up by an endless “to do” list.   And do you know what, its working out OK.

I came to understand that underpinning all this planning was a sense of needing to improve myself.  so my New Year Plans always included a lot of self-improvement activities….and then beating myself up when I failed to reach some unrealistic goal.  I have learned to be less self-critical and more relaxed.

By not planning I have created the space needed to listen to my gut feelings rather than the rational mind that does all the planning.  And as a result I have found that I am making better decisions and acting in ways that feel right for me.  I have also come to understand that in New Year Planning I wasted a lot of time and energy trying to control things. I have come to understand that none of us really knows what is going on and things are changing all the time.   I am far more effective in life when I acknowledge that I do not know what is happening, and curiously engage with things as they unfold .

May you be happy in 2012.