THREE WAYS TO HAVE A BETTER YEAR by Michael Josephson

The tradition of making New Year's Resolutions reflects one of the best qualities of human nature - the desire and ability to improve, to make plans to make our outer lives and our inner selves better.

There's certainly nothing wrong with setting goals to improve your job or financial situation, to lose weight, and exercise more, but the changes most likely to improve your life are about relationships, attitudes and values.

1. Think more and do more to improve your important relationships. For most of us, the quality of our relationships - with coworkers, friends, and, particularly, family - has the most impact on our personal happiness. Our interactions with others have an endless potential to produce pleasure and pain, joy and misery. And of the categories of relationships, by far, your core family is most important – your parents, your children and your siblings.

So, if you really want to improve your life, resolve to pay more attention to the people in your life. Acknowledge the things you say and do that annoy, embarrass or hurt others – and resolve to restrain yourself. Remember how you make people feel is far more important than your intentions and even your conduct. Tend to neglected relationships and do what needs to be done to fix broken ones.

2. Assess and adjust your attitudes. The most impactful mindsets are positivity and gratitude and their opposites, negativity and entitlement. Take a hard, unflinching look on the past year and identify your controlling attitudes.

Have your thoughts and actions been dominated by a default mindset of negativity. Have you become victim to self-fulfilling pessimism and its children, anxiety and unhappiness? Has your pessimism caused you to be cynical about the character and motives of others and the real possibility that you can make your life, and the lives of others better? Resolve to think, act and speak more positively about your coworkers, your family members and yourself. Give more compliments and less criticism. Remember, you don't have to be sick to get better and the biggest room in the world is the room for improvement.

Have you really, truly taken the time to count your blessings and experience a sense of gratitude for all the good things in your life and the bad things that didn’t happen. Instead of focusing on the annoying habits or insensitive conduct of your parents or children think how much worse your life would be without them. Stop obsessing over the troubles you have and the things you don’t have and acknowledge that you are not entitled to a trouble free life or to get everything you want and that your life is so much better than millions of others.

3. Ask yourself whether you have been living up to your best values. You have a good idea of right and wrong, what’s really important and what’s not and a vision of your best self. Take a close look at your calendar and checkbook and ask yourself whether the way you spent your time and money is consistent with those values.

Conflicts in what you want and what you should do are unavoidable. It’s only human to suppress your better instincts in favor of what’s easiest, most convenient or less stressful. But it’s also human to take a harder road in pursuit of emotional and spiritual fulfillment, to live a worthy life everyone who cares about you can be proud of. Resolve to follow your better angels and continue to become the best version of yourself..