Imagining Your Resolutions… Your Words…Your Questions

At the bottom of this post, you will find a gift to inspire 2013.

On Monday, January 21 at 6PM Eastern, I will be giving the first Finding, Knowing, Becoming teleseminar: Inner Goals, Inner Design, Inner Budget. I will share some great ways to help you be richly successful in finding, knowing, and becoming yourself.

I am very excited to be offering this program – the content addresses the three key elements for shaping your inner work and the workbook guides you to a true sense of your own process. Please register here for this free program.

YOUR INNER GOALS FOR 2013
Get a start on your Inner Goals through working with your resolutions, symbolic words, and questions. This post offers three ways to shape your coming year as a timeframe for fulfilling your goals: resolutions, symbolic words, and questions.

TIME SEGMENTS – A YEAR OR LESS

We always think in terms of a year, but the three ways can be used for any time segment: a season, a month, a week, a day, a special occasion. We evolve in any measurement of time.

PARTS OF YOU & THE ROLES YOU PLAY

And I strongly urge you to do these exercises for your personal life, your professional life, your relational life. Clearly, there are many parts to your life, paying attention to each one will help you deal with the times when your different roles conflict with each other. Your professional life may conflict with your creative life. Being a mother may conflict with your meditative life. Your goals as a writer may conflict with your goals as a gardener.

I define a role as an expression of devotion, a focus for your thinking, your feeling, and your will that matters to you. Before you contemplate on your resolutions, words, and questions, make a list of your roles.

It’s complicated being you. Resolutions, symbolic words, and questions will help you find yourself, know yourself, become yourself.

What are your resolutions?

Learn the history of yearly resolutions here.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_resolution

Resolutions are about your will to achieve, to improve, to be better. Making resolutions clarifies your determination to fulfill particular goals.

Keep it simple…no more than three resolutions. No more…for each part of you!

It’s a wonderful feeling to be resolute! To make I-will-be-different statements with confidence, even with just hope, give intention and motivation to your life.

And it is wonderful to take the time, consider your goals, write them down. It’s mid-January, if you haven’t made your resolutions for 2013, take 15 minutes, think about yourself and your roles, and write down three resolutions (if you are stuck, try humor!). Every time you write an I-will statement you get a little bit more embodied. Notice I said write, not think. You have to be embodied to write. Thinking doesn’t require embodiment…so write it down to your bones.

I just got an ahha… I am throwing away all “to do” lists. From now on I am keeping “I will” lists. Machines do. Human beings will.

Resolutions live in and focus your will on conscious goals.

What are your words?

I have noticed a number of bloggers I follow have been asking their readers to come up with three words for 2013. This is a great creative challenge and again a way to focus your intention and become more self aware. What word or words feel right to you?

Let me make a suggestion to deepen the process. For each role of devotion, imagine seven words: 3 nouns (naming the gestures, focuses or results ), 3 verbs (the actions you will take) and 1 preposition (how you relate to the role).

These words express your feel-right pictures of your year and will live in your heart and your breath.

Here are my words for my year as a writer

My 3 nouns: attention, process, courage
My 3 verbs: organize, complete, celebrate
My 1 preposition: in

Here are my words for my year as a grandmother

My 3 nouns: joy, responsibility, time
My 3 verbs: laugh, attend, teach
My 1 preposition: with

What are your questions?

Here’s the best from my perspective because I love mystery and I love wisdom and both dwell in the realm of the question. Being aware of your questions sustains and deepens the consciousness that recognizes meaningful, often surprising, answers and supports your growth, development, and creativity.

Your questions are what you will be working on for one-third of your year – the part of the year when you are sleeping (8 hrs out of every 24). What do you want to sleep on?

You go to sleep with your questions and you wake up with your answers. Important questions may take many nights before the answer dawns. Just remember your answers may be wiser questions.

To determine your questions, write down as many questions as you imagine. Set a timer for 3 or 5 minutes and just start writing questions, do not pause, do not think about the question you just wrote or the question you will write. Just write question after question. Use your resolutions and your roles to inspire your questions. When the timer goes off you can reset it for another 5 minutes or you can stop. When you stop go back over all your questions and circle the ones that seem important – the ones you would love to have the answers to. Then choose 4 questions. Write them down and keep them by your bed. Read them every night before you go to sleep.

As you wake up to your answers, write them down. The Inner Year Journal pages include spaces for New Thoughts, New Feelings, New Deeds, New answers and New Questions.

Keep returning to your list of questions when you need other questions to take into your sleep.

Always go to sleep with a question – do not waste this creativity living in your soul when it is asleep to the material world of the senses and awake to the mysteries and wisdom of the spirit.

Shape your imagination of 2013 with goals, symbolic words, and deep questions. You will feel much stronger, focused, and creative as you live through the year, day by day, thought by thought, feeling by feeling, encounter by encounter, deed by deed.

Click here for your gift to inspire your inner work throughout 2013. Print it out on photo paper and hang it up where you can see it every day – I have it hanging in my study. It is a great resolution for every day.

If you need a compassionate and creative conversation to support your process for determining your goals, designing your process, and budgeting your time, attention, and money, please schedule a 30 minute conversation with me. It will cost you $60 and you will receive at 20% discount coupon for any Imagine Self program in 2013 — worth $25.40 to 17