It’s Smarter to Make ‘Thanksgiving Resolutions’
Have your New Years Resolutions faded away? Well you still have time to make Thanksgiving Resolutions — but you’d better get started now!
It was late December and my friend, Gary Weldon, and I were standing in line to order hot gumbo. Gary is a Habitat for Humanity organizer in Georgia — he’s an activist. He turned to me and advised, “Tell people, ‘Don’t make New Year’s resolutions.’ They never work and they get people frustrated.” He went on to say, “It’s smarter to make ‘Thanksgiving resolutions.’”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“When people make New Year’s resolutions,” he explained, “they focus on the act of changing and not on the results. When they don’t change fast, they get discouraged — and quit. This makes people feel stressed and feel like failures. So I tell people in January to visualize what they want to accomplish by Thanksgiving. I tell them to figure out what they need to do in order to have it come true 10 months from now. They need to give themselves time. And they have to plan on sticking with it. By the time Thanksgiving comes around they can celebrate. At Thanksgiving they’ll be glad they stuck with it. It’s more deeply satisfying.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“The food made me think of Thanksgiving.”
As I drove home I decided I’d skip New Years resolutions this year and instead think about Thanksgiving Resolutions. I also thought of some wisdom written 3000 years ago in the Old Testament, “As a man thinketh, so shall he become.” I set my thinking on what I’ll be like at Thanksgiving.
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