The hubby and I often enjoy having conversations about improving our health and lifestyle. Of course I utterly enjoy the fact that he shows an interest in my area of work (being so different from his) and provides me with a critical perspective to counter-balance my sometimes possibly biased opinions. So, this makes planning our family’s future together even more exciting and fuels my motivation amidst our chaotic lives, to find the balance that works for us.
Have you ever found yourself making mental notes to make changes to your life that you think would do you some good? And, that focus lasts about an hour or until the next morning, when you’re back to your usual fire-fighting mode to take on the challenges brought on by a new day. Well, we constantly find ourselves in this mode which is only getting more hectic as new responsibilities pile on. The good intention for positive change and efficiency is all there, but that’s about it.
To tackle this vicious circle, this time we decided to draw on a ‘united focus’ and list out some common resolutions that we find important to work on for our family’s well-being. As we discussed the regular culprits that challenge us repeatedly, we found that most of these revolve around the basic need to establish certain habits that would, with time and by nature of their complexity, help us achieve those overarching resolutions. So that’s, what we did. We listed out our resolutions to bring focus to essential habits that we need, to achieve these resolutions. Now that wasn’t so hard!
A little bit of this, and a little bit of that, to keep our resolutions in focus.
Now comes the hard part – to actualise those essential habits! Yes, those multiple teeny tiny habits that by sight and sound are so alluring but turn out to be a nightmare to implement. At this point, I would add a disclaimer, if you think building habits for yourself is hard, think again. Trying to get my family on board and work on building these essential habits together has been like going to boot camp. I decided I needed to search for ways to make this fun for all of us and this meant diving deeper into every habit and creating smaller goals. But soon, the list of habits and goals grew and over two months of staring at our resolutions list we were no where closer to achieving them than we had been all the previous years.
I started to consciously reflect on our reality everyday, and the one missing ingredient that jumped out at me from my very list of resolutions was personal and family ‘resolve’. And this resolve needed a support system of a mix of other essential values, virtues and life-skills. Many of these, although already inculcated in our childhood and youth, had somehow managed to get buried under all the constant stress of expectations, deadlines, parenting challenges and today’s fast-paced life. We had buried some key life skills and virtues under all this un-useful clutter in our attempt to keep up with an unrealistic rat-race. The 2020 outbreak-related social lockdown forced us all to take a step back; to let go of things that were not within our control. This particularly helped us with re-orienting our outlook on achieving our goals. We discovered a little bit of patience, gratitude, laughter, positivity, creativity and love are essential accompaniments to the resolve, perseverance, motivation and organisation that’s needed to make achieving our resolutions a reality. And some of these need a little bit of work. For more on these gems do read my next post: Some goodies to stock up on before tackling family resolutions.