"Focusing" on a New Year

I was trying to find FB posts today from my friends and family on their New Year Resolutions and was shocked to find that almost everyone has come out and said that  they are against making New Years Resolutions.

How everybody pretty much feels about New Years Resolutions:

I hear ya. It's pretty easy to start listing all the things we're going to do, but with no real plan of action of how to accomplish them. So we begin the year all gung-ho and make it for about five weeks on sheer determination before real life becomes too hard and we putter out. It's happened to me many times.

So it seems that since New Year Resolutions have become synonymous with starting a goal only to quit a few weeks later, people have decided not to make goals at all.

I'm not sure that's really a good thing... but that's for another post.

I too am not making any real New Years Resolutions this year. But a friend of mine, Delores Fossen, a highly successful (USA Today bestselling) author for Intrigue, and mentor to many of us Intrigue newbies, mentioned that although she doesn't make New Years Resolutions, she does try to pick a word that she uses to guide her year. Here's what she said:

Last year my word was ENJOY, as in taking time to smell the roses. This year, it's FEARLESS because I want to try some things with traveling and writing that I don't usually try.

She encouraged us to come up with a word of our own. I think that idea is fabulous. So what's my word?  

FOCUS.

I can already see, based on it having been 2014 for fifteen hours already, that this year is going to be crazy for me.

Part of the craziness:
Writing and editing four books in eight months - check.
Training for an Ironman triathlon - check.
Raising four kids, one of whom has become a teenager, and is already wanting a tattoo - check and #@$%!.

Just to get through 2014 successfully -- based on commitments I've already made, I'm going to need to have a great deal of focus (and probably Xanax). There's not going to be as much time available for non-essential activities and people as there has been in the past.

And that's okay.

I'm ready to make better (and sometimes harder) choices about where to put my time and energy this year. I'm choosing to give my undivided time and attention to the people and activities that I know are important. And cutting the rest loose, at least for a while.

Focusing on the good, not the bad. Focusing on strengths, not on weaknesses. Focusing on who and what is important. And letting the rest go.

It's kind of like this:

(Which, by the way, was not said by the Greek philosopher Socrates but by a gas attendant named Socrates in the 1980 book Way of the Peaceful Warrior. But whatever, it's still true.)


New year. New focus. I'm ready.