New year’s resolutions

It’s this time of the year! The Christmas and New Year’s break is an opportunity to take the time to reflect about our past year and the one ahead of us. Well, at least I do so. A friend always asked me to draft and share with her a list of my favourite moments of the past year. I have a few in mind already.

Otherwise, on the resolution front,  here are some early January thoughts;

• Starting to volunteer. I had done so a few years ago but ran away after the first time as soon I discovered it was a (very) Catholic organisation. It’s a personal choice and respect other people’s choice but me personnally I would like to keep my life as religion-free as possible. Anyway, I chose the organisation for 2020, and my husband is also on board, I just need to pick a starting date!
• Every year since a while I include in my new year’s resolutions “avoid snapping at people” (mainly my relatives), “be nicer”, “don’t be too sensitive”, “be more understanding of others”. Besides the obvious fact that I have not being good at improving myself, since I set myself this same goal every year, now I think that the way I approached this is wrong. I was trying to improve myself by forcing myself to be nicer, less sensitive, more understanding and so on, but has that ever worked for anyone? It might in the short term, although by doing so I repress my feelings, I hide and contain the reason(s) for acting like this. The result? Feelings and reasons will come out eventually. No way to avoid that. If repressed, they get out strongly, through snapping, oversensitiveness… All this to say that instead of including “being nice(r)” in the list, this year I will include the following;
• Study better and apply principles of non violent communication;
• Understanding the reason(s) behind the behaviours and the relationships I would like to improve;
• Continue to use my free time to learn, in different ways, be it online courses, workshops, conversations, language courses, books, and so on;
• Reading almost every day.

Older resolution I kept so far;

• eating better, I have been and am eating better #success.