Is Your Guiding Word For The Year NOT Working?

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I’m always amazed at how fast great intentions fly out the window, I shouldn’t be because it happens every year, right around this time.

I use to set New Years Resolutions, the same ones each year. This year, I’m determined, will be different, just like every other year before it.

But instead of repeating the same thing each year, expecting a different result, this year instead of goals/resolutions, this year I picked one word to be my guiding focus.

A focus word is kinda cool, I can’t really fail at a focus word. I could choose to kind of ignore my focus word through, which is what I’ve been doing for the last 10 days.

I really do love the idea of a guiding word for the year, but I could be back next year with the same word if I don’t do the work. Which is the same with setting goals for the year. Maybe you can choose a word that is better suited to doing less work.

This is going to sound odd at first but my word for the year is “Fun”. Having fun, having the most fun I can out of each day. Making each day a 10. Enjoying, embracing, laughing, dancing, signing. Just being able to have fun each day.

I knew that in a round about way I’d have to do things we don’t normally think of as fun, to actually have the most fun each day. 10 days into the new year I reminded that inconsistency creates a lot of un-fun days.

I get easily hyper focused once I get working on something. So it’s not surprising that after working for three hours on meeting my blogging goals for the month, all I wanted to do was keep working on it till I reached them.

Although I really do enjoy blogging and improving my internet marketing. I can’t say that my hyper focus is actually fun when I look back on the time spent working. Actually, I think that if I continued like this, it would in fact ruin my life.

It would seem to me that addiction or over indulgence is often mistaken for fun.

Instinctively if I were to think about having fun, that would mean the removal of rules. Such as eating, if I normally try to avoid junk food, then the idea of fun would probably include indulging in whatever food I want, and although I wouldn’t automatically assume I would over indulge, I know myself and I know I wouldn’t find a healthy balance of junk food and nutritious food.

A friend gave me a box of chocolate. I love my friend. I love chocolate, or I’m addicted to chocolate. I eat to much chocolate.

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I’ve had 10 days of unstructured eating and I can say I didn’t find it fun. I feel yucky. I feel like I need to follow a well planned meal plan so I have the energy and focus I want, to enjoy playing with my kids. The energy and focus I need to have fun.

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I totally let the laundry go these last 10 days. My daughter just asked me if a shirt in the laundry room was clean. I (no joke) asked her which pile did you get it from? There is currently a dirty pile and a clean pile on the laundry room floor.

The two piles have started to touch. I’m gonna have to re-due all that laundry. Re-duing laundry is not fun.

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I have a pile of papers all over my desk, that need to be sorted and taken care of. When that happens there is always a fear that something extremely important is lurking in the pile that I won’t realize until I get a phone call saying I’ve screwed something up or I go through the pile and find that very important thing I’ve totally forgotten. This has happened before. Not fun.

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I managed to pull myself out of this blogging trance and get most of my emails sorted yesterday.

Today we had a number of appointments, Jersey had her speech therapy and then she and my son had pediatric appointments. I slept in just a bit because I stayed up too late reading about Pinterest strategies. This meant we were a bit rushed getting out the door.

It wasn’t just taking Remi to school, but also making sure I had everything for the rest of the day since we wouldn’t be back till it was time to pick Remi up again.

I brought diapers, wipes, phones (our old phones we give to the kids to play on) and toys. I forgot to get Jersey’s health card from my husband and I never even thought about grabbing change for parking. It’s not fun rushing in the morning. It’s not fun searching your purse hoping you have change, it’s not fun paying $11 for 1 hour of parking when I could have parked at a meter for only $2 in change.

If you really want to have the most fun in any given day, you need to get to bed on time, you need to plan your day the night before, you need to get your stuff ready the night before. You need to be consistent with laundry, and house cleaning, and eating good and exercising. All those things we don’t think of as fun, that keep us organized and on top of it all.

Having fun consistently, requires consistency in all areas of life. That on the surface might seem like the opposite of having fun. The problem is that the way we normally think of fun, is in fact causing us to miss out on lots of opportunity for fun.

It’s hard to make the day a 10 when you can’t find clean clothes or you failed to put something on the calendar.

We are only 10 days into the new year, I’m grateful for my focus word this year. Instead of feeling like I’ve messed up my new years resolution, I’m gonna get back to having fun. That means I’m cutting this blog post short and going to bed.

If you haven’t picked a focus word for the year, it’s not too late. I’m not sure if I would recommend the word “Fun” though lol. Having fun is hard work. 🙂