This New Year, Resolve Your Stress…and More!

 

Here comes the new year…already? Wow, is it just me, or does the time seem to go faster each year?!

Each year, many of us make resolutions, promise to keep them…and then…forget them, ugh!!

I’ve written about making a commitment to keep a formal and regular meditation practice to strengthen your “meditation muscle.” Making a commitment, like a New Year’s resolution, helps to insure that your efforts will be successful.

This blog was produced by a group of wonderful nurses!

For this post, I’ve re-posted a community-written article from last year. While the resolutions were for 2014, they’re just as applicable for 2015…or any year! Once again, I’m delighted to share posts by other nurse-bloggers on what it means to make a New Year’s resolution.

There’s an AMAZING amount of information here (12 posts in all!); please take time to visit their blogs and benefit from the ideas and advice presented here.

Each of these nurses write with a different voice and view on how to make resolutions stick. See if any of their ideas work for you.

 

Look Back On Your Year

For our first post, let’s remember to Look Back and Reward Yourself for what you’ve done during the year. Congratulate yourself on what you’ve accomplished for the year. Author Kathy Quan writes, “Take things one month at a time and realize what you have accomplished. Set new goals to continue on that path or even find new paths to excel at what you do best.” Sounds great!

 

Use Your G.I.F.T.S.

In a post titled, Empowered Nurses Use Their GIFTS to Accomplish New Year’s Resolutions, author Lorie A. Brown suggests a formula of “GIFTS,” “G is for “Giving”…I is for “Integrity”…F is for “Follow through”…T is for “Trust” and S is for “Source.” ” It’s a great way to stay on track with any resolution that you make. In fact, keeping up with your meditation practice is very much about giving to yourself.

 

Use Your Emotions Wisely

In a post titled, Emotions Help Blossom New Beginnings… AND Keep Them!, Author and Coach Elizabeth Scala reminds us to use our emotions to check the integrity of our resolutions to insure that we succeed. To do so, she writes, “Next year, and every year going forward, resolve to approach life in a new way. Notice how you feel. What clues are your emotions sending you? Are you moving towards what you want or away from it? How can you let your emotions provide you with the steps for meaningful and lasting change?“

 

Be Accountable

While we’re on the topic of how to make sure that you succeed at your resolutions, check out, How To Make Sure Your New Year’s Resolutions Don’t Fail. Here, writer Joyce Fiodembo suggests that you, “Find someone who you’ll be accountable to. This person should be a positive person who encourages and supports you during those days when you feel like giving up.”

 

Be S.M.A.R.T.

How about a few steps that you can take to keep your resolutions? Writer Sean Dent on the Scrubs.com site, writes a post titled, 5 Steps Nurses Can Take to Keep Their New Year’s Fitness Resolutions. In his a acronym, S.M.A.R.T., he suggest the following strategy:

  • Specific: Be as specific as possible. Don’t simply say “I want to lose weight,” say, “I want to lose 10 pounds in the next six months.” The more specific the better. The details matter.
  • Measurable: It can’t be something you guess at. Making it measurable requires you to be accountable for the results.
  • Attainable: While shooting for the moon is admirable, make your goal difficult but attainable. Don’t expect to move mountains. Start small.
  • Realistic/Relevant: This has to do with you as a person and your life. If it doesn’t have value in your life, then why will you stick to it? I won’t resolve to be a better gardener, because I’m just not that interested in gardening.
  • Time-dependent: This is paired with specific. Give it a timetable so you have to be accountable. No timetable means that you won’t adhere to the discipline needed.

 

Three No-Nonsense Steps

Here are 3 Resolutions Every Nurse (and everyone else) Should Make for 2014. Written by the brainy Brittney Wilson, keeper of the blog, The Nerdy Nurse, this post provides a no-nonsense approach, in three easy steps, to making 2014 a New Year. Become more empowered, become more healthy, and learn more about technology. Brittney, you rock!

 

Tips for Making Resolutions

Since we’re visiting with Brittney, here’s another post that she wrote titled, Tips to Help Nurses Pick New Year’s Goals. Brittney writes that there are, “…a few simple rules to help you create measurable and attainable professional and personal goals.” “Pick Something Specific,” “Write it Down,” “Establish a Clear Deadline,” and “Make Them Count.” Check out this blog too, great advice!

 

Your One Wild and Precious Life

Blogger Keith Carlson is a gem in the world of nurse-blogging. For New Year’s resolutions, Keith has provided us with two posts to inspire us. The first, Your Wild And Precious Nursing Career, begins with a wonderful quote from Poet Mary Oliver’s, “The Summer Day”

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

From there, Keith goes on to discuss Resolutions vs Intentions, writing, “I’m never one to make resolutions (since they’re so easily broken). Instead, I set intentions, because intentions are simply the verbalization of one’s desires, not a sacrosanct promise.” Have a look, I think that you’ll find this post inspirational.

 

A Simple Affirmation of Empowerment

An inspirational blog, Exceptional Nurse is a site devoted to the “…grassroots effort to address the needs of nursing students and nurses with disabilities…” What a great service! The blog post, New Year’s Resolutions for Nurses and Nursing Students with Disabilities, shared by Donna Maheady,  and written by Connie Adleman, is a simple affirmation of self-empowerment, as follows:

I use my limitations as an opportunity to grow.
I give thanks that any limitation that I experience is a gift teaching me about myself.
I always focus on and count my possibilities for success.
I have unlimited potential.
I love myself exactly as I am.
 Simple, graceful, powerful. Using one’s “..limitations as an opportunity to grow” is exactly what we do when we learn to meditate. We take everything onto the path, rejecting nothing, recognizing that even difficult thoughts and emotions can teach us so much about ourselves, and about the impermanence of what we take to be real.

 

Jump On the Bandwagon!

In the post, RN Resolution is for RN Evolution, writer and nurse, Jennifer Olin, shared her vision for her upcoming year. Discussing a few of her challenges with past years’ resolutions, she states, “So what’s going to make 2014 different? I’m actually going bigger and using outside forces to my personal advantage and growth. Nursing is all about growth, continuing to learn, to improve skills and to expand knowledge for the betterment of others. I’m jumping on that bandwagon.”

 

A Simple Plan

In a short post on her site, Yoga Nurse, nurse-blogger and yoga instructor Annette Tersigni shares Ridiculously Easy Resolutions for Nurses. It’s amazing how many of us can make grand schemes and goals for our resolution, only to fail miserably and then give ourselves grief. Taking Annette’s advice, and applying it to meditation, you could decide just to practice 5 minutes of meditation in the morning and…be on your way to a daily meditation practice!

 

What’s Your Personal Story?

As a final entry, let’s turn to a video on YouTube titled, Tips to Help You Plan Your New Year’s Goals…and Keep Them. In this video-blog, Caroline Porter Thomas, author of the book, How to Succeed in Nursing School, discusses how to use a vision of one’s goals to insure success in achieving them. Through personal storytelling, Caroline shares how progress can happen through setting goals and accepting that your progress won’t always move in a straight, forward moving, line. Check it out.

 

And Now, Time for Fireworks!!

And so, we’ve come to the end of this post. There’s a lot here! Like I said at the beginning, this post was written by a group of wonderful nurses; read it a few times, check out all of the posts, share the links…get inspired! And for your enjoyment, how about a few New Year’s fireworks!!

 (Video by TexasHighDef)

Meditation Helps to Put Your Resolutions Into Action

My job…no, my mission! is to help you to live a more stress-free and present life. One of the ways that I can do that is to offer you resources on meditation, mindfulness, and awareness. Ongoing research in meditation continues to prove its benefits in relieving stress and in helping people to show up more fully.

Maybe you’ve already got a meditation practice. If that’s the case, great! Keep it up and feel free to use all of the content from this site to support you in your efforts.

If you haven’t started to meditate, begin now.

Many people don’t meditate because they believe that they need to do “something special” in order to meditate, maybe you’re one of them. “Doing something” special isn’t the case. All you need is your breath, and a few minutes of time set aside to begin your practice. Here are some tools to get you started:

  • Meditation audio for using your breath as the anchor of your attention during meditation.
  • Ebook and two chapters from the book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind, on how to meditate.
  • Even though my book was written with nurses in mind, I continue to get feedback from those who have bought it who aren’t nurses that they find it useful in their lives. So, whether you’re a nurse, a nursing student, or someone who appreciates what I’m offering on this site, check out the book, Minding the Bedside: Nursing from the Heart of the Awakened Mind. It’s really written for anyone. You can even buy it in a Kindle version!

This site has tons of tools for learning how to meditate.

I encourage you to look through the HUNDREDS of articles that I’ve written and especially check out my weekly meditation tips and other useful meditation materials provided for your health and well being. And please let me know if you’d like to discuss anything with me, have any questions or need clarification regarding anything that I’ve written about.

Thanks for visiting and have a mindful day.

The Nerdy Nurse: Nurse Blog Carnival