New Years "Evaluation"

As a teacher, parent, adult and citizen I often want to make sure I can articulate new ideas and and better ideas to students and fellow educators to help push best practice along. With this said I really started thinking about the new year, 2014.  I want so much to offer not just good, but extraordinary advice to everyone who is willing to read. Therefore parents, teachers, and students alike I would like to share my thoughts on The New Year's Resolution:

Every year, we speak so much about the "resolution."  "What is your New Years Resolution?" we ask everyone from Dec. 28th to about Jan.13th because we all have been taught it is time to consider change and a renewing of the life we live. Let us consider a different approach.  I call it the New Years Evaluation. Pause for a moment and consider what you have been doing, and what your goals have been for the last few months or year.  

So often we are in a race to change or recreate ourselves in some attempt to do better than we have in the past year.  Why?  What if the possibility of viewing yourself as a well developed person is the better way of looking at the end/ start of the year?

Make a New Years Evaluation.  Determine what you are doing well, what you could improve upon, and what you hope to improve on.  It is not time to change everything you love and do, just so you can declare January is the month of the new you.  Really reflect on your strengths and current involvements and see how you can continue to build the loves and interests you established over the last 12 months.  See New Years as a time to streamline your life, goals, ambitions, and loves, verses a clean slate where we declare something new and ultimately may fail because we soon fall back on the life we were working on in the first place.

Embrace this new year with an "evaluation" and continue doing the wonderful things you have already started and put into motion.  Consider avoiding a New Years resolution which ultimately may fail due to the lack of personal interest you have invested until now. Do not get me wrong, a resolution is a wonderful way to achieve the new you, but at what cost and with how much focus and potential failure?

Take some time to evaluate what you have and what you want to do.  It is a new year but it is not a new you.  Do not forget who you are just because one number changes on the calendar.  I challenge you this year to evaluate and continue forward. Leave the resolutions to the gyms, banks, and clothing stores.  Truly they are the one benefiting from the traditions.  Be who you are and move forward wisely and in the direction you are already headed!

Really consider making a better you, not a new you.

-Mike

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