Tag: forming good habits

3 Steps to Keeping Your New Year’s Resolutions

On By Anna EastlandIn PonderingsLeave a comment

It’s almost mid-January, and as we struggle to get back into the routine of the New Year after the Christmas holidays, it can be easy to get discouraged about our New Year’s resolutions. Perhaps, like many households, you’re been hit with the flu (yup, us, too) and have been living in your pajamas for a week. This is not the time to be harsh with yourself! It’s been a “put your money where your mouth is” challenge to my desire to be more aware of my mood and conscious of being happy, but just cause I got a little grumpy around 5 pm a few times doesn’t mean it is time to give up. The only real failure is giving up forever!

I think that rather than seeing January as the beginning of a race to a ‘new me’, it should be seen as a month of reflection and planning for a great year. December is way too packed already to plan then. Furthermore, as Maria, a young woman I know put it, “Making New Year’s resolutions while you’re stuffing yourself with Christmas cookies just feels stupid.” So I propose we see January as the time to dig deep and see where we could make our lives better, happier, and more joyful by improving our habits and character. If happiness is a project, it surely requires some planning!

Here are three steps to help you make good resolutions and keep striving to achieve them:

  1. Reflect: What makes you happy? What drains you of joy? What would you like to change? How can you become a better version of yourself, more truly you? Author Gretchen Rubin says that “to be happy, you need to consider feeling good, feeling bad, and feeling right, in an atmosphere of growth.” Being reflective helps us open up to positive change.
  2. Plan: Break down your goals into concrete, doable steps. Be specific so you can easily measure how you’re doing with them. It’s better to be faithful to a small resolution than to periodically do something huge when you feel like it. So “I will eat a salad every two days,” rather than the vague “I will eat more healthy food.” Or “I will turn off my iPhone at 10 pm,” rather than indeterminate “I will get more sleep.”
  3. Be accountable: To a friend, a group or yourself. I have a few close friends I check in with to every few days to discuss how it’s going.  But especially if you’re going it alone, make sure you have a tangible way to keep yourself on track, like a resolution chart, with some fancy gold star stickers you hope to put on most days. Have something or someone outside yourself so there is a kind of consequence if you stop trying, and also an encouragement to continue. It’s easy to give up on goals because we simply forget…make to harder to do so.

Rubin wrote a book called: Better Than Before about making and breaking habits, and in researching it she discovered 4 basic ways people form habits. You can take her quick and easy quiz to see what kind of habit former you are, and get her tips on how to help yourself succeed in building the habits you desire: Four Tendencies Quiz. If it peaks your curiosity to know them, the options are Upholder, Questioner, Rebel and Obliger. I found it really helpful to know that there are different ways people respond to internal and external pressure to change…maybe I am not a terrible new habit former after all, I just haven’t been approaching it the right way! Hope!

Why good values alone aren’t good enough in parenting

On By Anna EastlandIn Family Life, Ponderings2 Comments

My husband and I went to a really great parenting talk last week by educator Andrew Mullins from Australia… I liked it a lot, and not just because of his charming accent, which made everything sound so friendly and hopeful! It was very positive and practical, and focussed on 15 specific parenting tips or goals to consider in helping prepare your child for adult life.

One of the things that struck me was that he emphasized the need to help your children build specific good habits, or virtues, that put together would give them strength of character and the ability to live well as adults. Rather than focussing on trying to make them happy now, he encouraged parents to look ahead and help kids acquire the skills they will need to live as happy adults…things like honesty, courage, perseverance, generosity and a spirit of service.

These virtues aren’t aquired simply by parents having good values themselves, although of course that’s important, too. But values without specific expectations to live up to them are like good intentions…nice but not necessarily effective. “I meant to finish the dishes…but I got distracted…” So it’s important to let your kids know what you expect and to follow up and make sure it happens. Inspecting their work makes sure it gets done and also gives kids a chance to feel proud when they’ve done it well and impressed you. It can be a lot of work to get kids to do chores, but feeling useful actually makes them happier in the long run.

Habits, Mullins explained, are formed by repeated actions, so if you want your kids to acquire them, you need to help them practice those good actions (like making their beds, completing a task, helping others) over and over. It’s also good to explain to them why these things are important, so they can make their actions their own, and form their minds. So the key combination is a solid explanation and many opportunities to repeat the good action. Whether or not they like this action, for example helping with the dishes, doesn’t matter that much. What matters is that they get used to it, so that later, when they grow up, getting them done will be automatic.

Good parenting, explained Mullins, requires a balance between being affectionate (very important) and being sufficiently demanding. Usually we can lean more towards one or another, but a balance is important here. We want to help our kids grow and strive for greatness with a lot of affection and support, knowing how to help them do their best…without being either harsh or overly indulgent.

Mullins, who I believe did his thesis in neural development and virtue acquisition, described how mirror neurons in young children help them learn by copying or mirroring what they see. He joked that to see our kids worst defects, we had only to look in the mirror! But this goes for their virtues as well. Kids will copy what they see, therefor it’s of utmost importance that we strive to live well ourselves, and to do it with a smile!

I really encourage you to check out his book, which has many more helpful tips, written in short, straightforward chapters for busy parents! My husband and I have been reading this book a little at a time together, and then taking a few notes about a concrete way we could apply this advice in our family life. We even had a family meeting to talk about it and make a plan together.

Parenting for Character: Equipping your Child for Life

Perhaps some of you were also there at the talk…what did you find the most helpful? Or what is the best parenting advice you’ve been given…whether there or elsewhere?