Have you broken any New Year Resolutions already ?

The earliest New Year’s resolutions are said to have been made by the ancient Babylonians, around 4000 years ago. They were also the first to hold recorded celebrations for the New Year – although their new year began in mid-March, during the crop planting season. During this time, they made promises to the gods to pay their debts and return any items they had borrowed. It’s widely believed that these promises were a precursor to the New Year’s resolutions that we know today.

Then, in ancient Rome (in 45 B.C.) Julius Caesar changed the calendar so that New Year’s Day fell on January 1st. January was named after ‘Janus’ – the two-faced god of new beginnings whose spirit lived in doorways, gateways, and arches. One face looked back towards the past and the other looked forward to the future. The Romans offered sacrifices to Janus and made promises of good conduct for the coming year.

Ever since then, the first day of the year has become the traditional occasion for looking back at one’s past mistakes, and resolving to do better and be better moving forward. Though, instead of making promises to the gods, many people make promises to themselves and tend to focus on self-improvement.

Perhaps it's a little early to ask about broken resolutions already, but by mid-January, some of us will enter a period of self-loathing because we gave in and accepted that slice of cake, or perhaps we looked at the howling weather outside and decided that perhaps we could stay indoors and walk further tomorrow!

I'm not saying that we shouldn't set ourselves goals, of course we should!

If we want to improve our life, our health or our business, we need to take action. We need to move forward with our dreams but to me, New Year Resolutions are too heavy a commitment. If eating that one chocolate means that I've 'failed', then I have to wait another eleven and a half months before I can try again... so I may as well have another chocolate!

Hence I haven’t made any New Year Resolutions.

Of course I have set targets and goals to reach in my Brand photography business.

But in my personal life, I haven’t yet decided whether to keep my existing fleet of classic and vintage cars – which I enjoy the challenge of driving – or to cull them from 11 down to a more sensible number, perhaps upgrading to a few more exotic toys (but which ones should I let go of then, because I won’t be able to replace them later if I change my mind ?). However, I have promised myself to continue getting my garden ornaments mobile (MOTed, taxed and insured). Since this time last year, I have gone down from 4 to only 2 garden ornaments, so maybe I can reduce this number to 1, or even 0, during the coming 12 months ?

What are the most important resolutions of all?

Be kinder to yourself and those around you. Resolutions should be goals, something to strive, for but we have to accept that sometimes we won't live up to our own high expectations. That's OK. Accept it and try to do better next week. Whatever happens, celebrate the good days, pat yourself on the back for what you do achieve this year, and keep up the good work.

What do you think? Did you make any resolutions this year? Did you keep to last year’s resolutions? I would love to hear from you below :D