By now, if you are like most people, you have let your New Year’s resolutions lapse.
At the beginning of the year, we naturally think about making this year better by improving ourselves. We want to be thinner, healthier and become better people, do more, be more. We set resolutions.
Resolutions can help us meet our goals.
I’m great at goal setting, delineating tasks and mapping out how to get somewhere. Sometimes I think I do this as a distraction to avoid actually doing anything at all. One year I had over a hundred goals. Really. Two notebooks. 100+ goals.
But here’s the deal. For most people, resolutions just don’t work.
Some of my resolutions are based on solutions to problems that I came up with in the past but have forgotten about. I forgot how to do it, or that I was doing it, so when the problem comes up now, I need to solve again. I’ve solved it before and now I need to re-solve it.
Re Solution.
So, I make the same resolution each year. The biggest is to spend more time in the studio and produce more artwork – I’m going to do a painting a week or a painting a day or paint 4000 square inches, or paint a new body of work, or…
Each year I’m distracted by all the other things I do in life and new things I want to do and add to an already overcrowded agenda.
Each year I consistently and spectacularly fail.
I know what I need to do, I just forget in the hot mess of distraction.
This year I have one overall goal: To be incremental in working toward the things I want to do so that they will become routine and I won’t have to re-solve them again.
I’ll be writing more about this later but for now I’ve drawn the following battle-lines.
1. I re-solve to try new things, even things that make me uncomfortable. [risk-taking]
2. I re-solve to eliminate ‘comfort’ as a criterion for decision-making. [discomfort]
3. I re-solve to spend more time creating in the studio. Yes, this again! [consistency]
4. I re-solve to share with you what I learn on my journey. [transparency]
What do you need to re-solve that you already knew?
This year I’ll be sharing what I learn from both my successes and failures, using the blogpost category, “Studio Stamina”. These posts will provide transparency on what I’m thinking about and doing, and accountability to help me stay in the studio. Perhaps it will help you do the same.
If you’re challenged in the same way, always wanting to paint more but somehow not making time for it or finding excuses to delay getting into the studio, I invite you to follow along.
You can read more about this in my next post.