My Six-Year-Old's New Year's Resolution
Happy New Year!
The New Year is always an exciting time where many people love to reflect and refresh, with hopes and plans for a fresh start with a fresh calendar year. In the past, my New Year’s Resolutions have ranged from basically doing nothing to completely revamping my entire personality. 🤣 Needless to say…the sweet spot is typically somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, and, more about this another time, but nowadays, small habit building is where it’s at in my book. 😉
The Year 2020
My six-year-old daughter actually made a New Year’s Resolution this year. I had asked her and her four-year-old brother, “what kind of person do you want to be in 2020?” in hopes of introducing the concept of being intentional, or goal setting, or something like that. 🤷🏼♀️ My daughter immediately replied, “Someone with a clean room for a whole year.” Mind you, this was the same day that I had spent HOURS helping her clean and organize her room full of COUNTLESS toys, trinkets, trash, you name it, in (more) hopes of helping her have a fresh start and clean slate before going back to school. Before you start thinking too highly of my parenting skills🤞🏼, I’d better mention now that my four-year-old son declared 2020 would mean “more Nintendo and treats” for him…both of which I had been enabling at a rapid rate. 😅
I have to note that my daughter is a little entrepreneur in the making. Seriously. She attempted to set up a store in order to sell all of her unwanted Halloween candy for 50 cents a pop, stating, “We need to make it cheap, Mom, but not too cheap.” 🤔 I ran with the clean room person-of-the-year goal. My daughter decided that for each day she maintained a clean room, she would draw a big red star on the corresponding square of the 2020 calendar she made us in school. Well lo and behold…come day 5, little miss independent started making a couple little excuses and ended up with a starless blank square on her calendar. Although I would say 5 days is pretty darn good for her age, she was appalled. She was so disappointed to see a tainted record. She didn’t like seeing a broken streak or lack of progress. Her reaction was to throw in the towel.
“Noooooo” I thought to myself, envisioning a future of dirty laundry mounds and another spewing of Frozen 2, Barbie, LOL, Lego madness. So I snuck my own red star on the calendar. HA. Kidding…but what I did was attempt to teach one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned so far and then accidentally force myself to take a good look in the mirror.
Keys to the Kingdom
“Here’s the thing,” I told my daughter. “Blank spaces do not matter. What matters is that there are stars after a blank space. That very first star you put after a blank space is pretty much worth ten regular stars.” Boom. When you really think about it…isn’t that the truth?
It’s taken me so long to really know this lesson in my soul. We’ve all read a thousand times that the key to success is to “never give up.” It’s not about falling down, but “getting back up again.” But I never really applied it other than as a cute little motivation swimming around in my head.
For those of us perfectionists, we know that ending a streak or momentum can be paralyzing. For me, I always simply declared it the end of a venture, and shut the book. Even if I decided to dabble in whatever the project again, I would want to call it something different. I would want to have a fresh, new start, with a “clean record.” To swallow my pride and just be an “on-again-off-again” person felt embarrassing to me.
My daughter was pretty pumped by this concept. And I had to revel in the data it was providing me. Starting again and being okay with an imperfect streak is an act of courage! And now, she’s starting again with one lesson already under her belt: namely that if you secretly wash all your toys in the bathtub and lay them all over your room on towels you’re not going to want to touch them at 8 PM. 😂
#StrongerBetter
That’s the beauty of getting back up again in “real life” too though. You’re a little wiser. You’ve got a little more muscle. You most likely have a couple “what not to do”s under your belt. Segment 2 is a little better. Excerpt 3 is a little more polished. Trial 2,457 is some of the best work you or anyone has ever done!
So I took it to heart and started back up a few things I had just been putting off…and putting off…and putting off…because the more blank spaces I saw on the calendar, the more pointless and awkward it seemed for me to suddenly just start again! But I did it. I started again. And I started with a full arsenal of tricks and what-not-to-dos and a renewed sense of hope and purpose!
Being a parent is the hardest job I’ve ever had, but what a rare blessing to be able to break down the hard stuff and look at it through the eyes of a six-year-old. Sometimes it takes 100 times hearing the same thing before you get it.
Resolve in 2020
What’s something you once started or worked on that you just…stopped? Can you imagine just starting it back up again without rhyme or reason…just because? What if that’s truly the secret to getting it? To success and fulfillment in whatever it is you’re trying?
What if you decided 2020 was your year to “re-solve” things you’ve attempted in the past? Let me know what unfinished business you’re going to pick back up again! I guarantee it will get you closer to your Flourish Factor.