A New Day, A New Start

From the day we are born, we engage with others and begin to make decisions based on our experiences, our preferences for certain things, and our interactions with other people.  Our personality develops and our lives evolve into a collection of experiences resulting in what is commonly known as a life path.  We acknowledge our personal history, learn from it, live in the present and make plans for the future along this path.  As we traverse this path sometimes we may not like a direction it’s headed in, we decide to challenge ourselves, or feel that it’s time to improve upon ourselves in some way.  It is then that we engage in one of the most challenging things to do in life, creating a new start for ourselves.

The developments of modern technology have not matched the science fiction story telling of books and movies, therefore traveling back in time to accomplish a completely new start is impossible to do.  Yet there’s a natural mechanism we encounter every day that allows for us to create a new start.  It’s called a sunrise.  With the dawn of each day we have an opportunity to chart a new life path for ourselves and the possibility of starting something new when we wake up.

There are of course some life circumstances and the reality that we cannot make a drastic change from one end of the spectrum to the other overnight.  The manageable approach however is to make a conscious decision when the sun rises to do something different than our regular norm to create a better life for ourselves.  It’s easy to look for a conditional “if-then” excuse to try something new, or do something different in life, so let the sunrise and the start of a new day be that excuse.  We need to empower ourselves, dig deep into our intrinsic motivation and decide that today is the day that things begin to change for me. 

If eating healthier is a decidedly new start, then when waking up one day the first thought should be today I’m going to go grocery shopping for a healthier meal option, or I will start doing some research on how to create a healthier diet for myself.  Whether it’s quitting smoking, launching a business, learning an instrument, or even creating better more beneficial personal habits, the chance for a new start begins with a solitary decision to make a difference, and taking the first step.  That first step doesn’t have to be drastic, it just has to be a step in the direction of the new path you want to embark on.  From there, more steps can be taken and the momentum can be built upon as you move forward to that new start. 

The caveat here is not to get lost in the seductive misleading idea that change happens immediately and results will be automatic and significant in a short period of time.  That’s all too romantic of an idea and when results don’t happen as quickly as expected, it’s easy for frustration and quitting to lead into a dead end where progress is stifled.  It’s important to remember that good habits usually take about 21 days by conventional knowledge to take hold.  Time, dedication, and perseverance are the best assets to creating a new path.   But we need to remember that just like a huge oak tree comes from a tiny acorn, big changes come from just the first step, no matter how small it might be.

Farming Your Goals

I found my muse for this week’s post while sitting in a church pew this past Sunday.  Don’t worry, my post is not religion specific, and I promise not to preach to you as my reader.  As always my aim is to stimulate your thought, but you can be assured that regardless of where you fall on the religious belief spectrum, you will not feel disconnected to this week’s post. 

I was listening to the pastor’s sermon about a parable Jesus told his followers about a farmer planting his seeds.  With great intent I focused on paying attention, but admittedly my thoughts immediately wandered into the application of this parable about half way into it.  Based on the definition of a parable, the purpose is a real world application of a story.  Therefore the guilt I felt for day dreaming was very short lived since I was fulfilling the basic mission of parables.

The story talked about how the farmer tried to plant his seeds among various types of soil without harvesting a successful yield.  There were either crows that ate the seeds, the sun shriveled up the plants due to an arid climate, the soil was too sandy without much nutrients, or there were competing plant species stifling out the plants.  Then finally he planted them in just the right soil with the right nutrients away from predation by any natural elements such as birds or environmental factors and his yield was overwhelmingly abundant. 

While in my distracted contemplation of the story, I considered the farmer’s seeds as the lofty goals we set for ourselves, and the everyday objectives that we try to achieve in our lives.  It isn’t uncommon that many of us set out to achieve our goals and objectives but in doing so, we rely on the wrong resources, the wrong people, or even sometimes we are in the wrong location.  Unreliable people, faulty resources and bad locations serve as examples of environmental factors that can prevent us from achieving what we want to, or as the result in the farmer story, an unsuccessful yield.   

Our goals and objectives have to be rooted in situations where they can grow to become accomplishments.  Through the nourishment of our hard work, the right people, the right resources and location to name a few things, we are similar to the farmer who has to put in effort to water, remove weeds, and fertilize his plants to grow so that his crop can have a high yield. 

The farm of life that is filled with the plants of our goals, and objectives is one that sometimes takes time to grow.  A farmer will tell you that not all years in farming are banner years for crops but farmers do not take those setbacks and quit after one bad year.  Therefore similar to life where we are faced with failures in our goals and objectives we can’t quit either when faced with failures in our attempts to achieve certain goals or objectives.  Sometimes those things were not meant to be, and sometimes we need to just replant them, or in other words restart from a seedling again to create a better and stronger plant. 

A more drastic but sometimes necessary measure is completely moving the farm and starting in a new environment because that soil has been depleted of all supportive nutrients for the plants.  A new beginning in new soil is necessary sometimes.  This can easily be translated into a new job, a new work environment, a different city, or even a certain state where we may need to be in order for our goals and objectives to become more attainable.  Also crucial to this scenario is planting the proper crops or setting appropriate goals and objectives.  Going from a couch to a CEO might not be a direct manageable goal, but starting out with going for a supervisor role, then a middle management position, moving into an upper management role and then working into a CEO role is an example of planting the right seeds at the right times.

Whatever our goals and objectives are, it’s important that we are mindful that we are planting the right seeds in the right soil.  It’s also important that we are nourishing those goals and objectives with the hard work necessary to make them come to fruition.  While paying attention to these factors and removing the weeds, or the roadblocks from our lives holding us back from success, it is only a matter of time before our goals and objectives progress and sprout into attainment.