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Creative Outlets
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Faith
Health
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Inspirational People
Overcoming Challenges
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Wish Dish Staff Blog

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New Year, New Resolutions

February 2
by
Rochelle Still
in
Creative Outlets
with
.

New Year’s resolutions have always baffled me. You always hear the same things—exercise more, eat better, learn something new, travel more, and stress less. While we all want better health, to be in the know, and to experience the world, creating these broad and generic resolutions often lead to lack of follow through. That’s the running joke, isn’t it? When the “new year, new you” only lasts for a week or so. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

All of our resolutions are made with good intentions and goals in mind, but what they lack is personalization and tangible action steps to make them happen. I’ve realized this year after year as I fail to achieve what I set out for, yet I have never tried to change that. Until now.

I’ve never truly made an effort to create resolutions that I stick to for more than a week or so, but this year felt different. I recently read an incredible book, “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin, and it rocked my world. It transformed the way I looked at goal setting and goal achieving. The premise of the book is that anyone can find happiness with the cards they’re played.

You don’t need an “Eat, Pray, Love” experience across the globe to find happiness and success. Instead, you can start where you are.

Rubin set out 12 resolutions for herself, one for each month, with tangible and specific ways to make every single resolution a reality. As I flipped page by page through the book, I realized how Rubin had created an approachable way to accomplishing those daunting resolutions. For example, instead of just “cultivating friendships”, it became remembering birthdays, no gossiping, cutting people slack, and bringing people together. What she did was break down her big hairy audacious goal, which seemed intimidating, into doable tasks and actions that she could focus on every day. As simple as this may seem, it opened my eyes.

So then the new year rolled around, sneaked up on me as it always does, and I knew I wanted to actually make something out of my resolutions. I looked to see what I needed to do to be more fulfilled, happy, and confident in 2017. As I developed my list, I realized that each one had a story behind it and that’s what made them more meaningful and more approachable, than say the typical “Eat healthier” resolution. I felt a deeper connection to my new resolutions and felt a drive to achieve them that I’d never felt before. It was the stories and the people that inspired them and brought them to life. It is those same stories and people that will serve as reminders throughout 2017 why I am doing what I am doing.

For the first time in my life, I am going to take my resolutions seriously and not just brush it off my shoulder if I don’t follow through. I’m hoping that this year will serve as a foundation for me in the future to help to learn how to create a goal and actually make it happen.

So bring it on 2017, I’m ready.

New Year, Same Me (And Why That’s Okay)

January 8
by
Rebecca Rosen
in
Creative Outlets
with
.

(Written by Rebecca Rosen)

It’s January, that lovely time of year where it seems everyone you know and love (or maybe just know) is setting goals for themselves for the new year; do more, eat less, that sort of thing. There is an overwhelming pressure to somehow be better regardless of how bad or good you thought you were in the past year. I love New Years, don’t get me wrong but the pressure, the pressure is what kills it for me.

It’s a general convention that people do much of their growing during their years at university; college is the place where people really “discover themselves” and “find their purpose.”

But what about those of us who have found ourselves already? I am not the type of person who constantly tries to reinvent myself. In fact for a very long time I was a creature of habit and to stray from that habit would be the worst thing in the history of the universe, ever.

In high school I decided to leave my comfort zone, do things for me, develop interests outside of the ones I had figured would characterize me for the rest of eternity. I learned some very i%tags Creative Outlets Culture/Travel Overcoming Challenges mportant things about myself along the way; music is my everything, coffee is my second everything and black trumps all other colors by far.

Jokes aside, I did some real self discovery in high school, especially over the course of my senior year, and to be candid I’m pretty happy with what I found. I learned what was and what wasn’t
important and have channeled much of my energy this year at university into putting the ideals I developed over my last year in high school into practice. Two years of too much people pleasing, too much worrying about how others perceived me and too little attention paid to what makes me happy made for one extremely unhappy high school junior.

I was constantly anxious, it seemed like there wasn’t a moment when I wasn’t worrying about something and I realized I cannot and will not live the rest of my life that way.

To live my life essentially in constant fear and unpleasantness is not to live at all, it was just existing.

Starting in twelfth grade I finally began to live my life for me. Hobbies I never took too seriously became passions of mine. I threw myself into the things and relationships that I cared about and allowed myself to be completely open and vulnerable for the first time in my life. I stopped caring about what other people had to say about me behind my back and started to prove them wrong through my actions, my words and my choices.

Living my life for me did not come easy and I had to learn that my happiness as a number one priority was more important than those few extra toxic people in my life that would have lingered otherwise. It took me a very long time to accept the following universal truths: a) people change b) things change c) no matter how much a and b frighten you, there is absolutely NOTHING you can do about them. I’m constantly evolving, growing and for lack of a better word changing and that’s ok.

Things I simply thought were important to keep in mind during my senior year are now principles I live by from day to day, the people in my life are ones that want me to be a part of theirs as much as I want them to be a part of mine, life is good.

So really what I’m getting at here is it’s okay to be okay with who you are or what you’ve been working at already. I’ve just started a new chapter in my life hundreds of miles away from the place I call home and I’m expected to set a “goal” for myself to “accomplish” over the next year? Yeah right. I’m just living life.

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