Establishing New Habits for the New Year

• Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies
• She looketh well to the ways of her household

It's that time of year again, when we all purpose that this year will be the year that we get it all together.  This year will be the year that we lose the weight, eat healthier, exercise, read the Bible through, spend less, earn more, start to do this and finish doing that.  We make resolutions, set goals, purpose in our hearts, make up our minds-whatever you want to call it.

Most of our resolutions start well, or are at least well-intentioned, but at some point it all gets to be too much.  We bite off more than we can chew, or we try to do too many new things at one time, and eventually--we fizzle-, fade-, or just wear out.  We look around and realize that it's been days, maybe even weeks, since we flossed, exercised, had our quiet time, read our Bible, or whatever.

I've come to the conclusion that while I may have lofty goals it all boils down to habits.  Good habits vs. bad habits, poor habits vs. non-existent habits.  Scientists at some point determined that it takes 21 days to create a new habit (and probable much longer to break an old one!) So instead of setting my sights too high and crashing and burning, I've decided to start small this year. And instead of working on breaking my bad habits, I'm going to work on establishing some good ones. 

I have a lot of areas that I need to work on, both spiritual and physical, personal and public; but the one I am using a representative of all of the ways I'm hoping to make some changes, is making my bed. I have to confess, I don't always make my bed.  Oh, I do at times, sometimes even several days in a row.  But I often go weeks that the only day the bed gets really made is the day I change the sheets. Gasp.

 Day 1

So the first habit I'm going public with is this one--to make my bed, every single day.  I started yesterday, and I plan to take a picture every day and post it to A Virtuous Woman's facebook page. (I can take a quick picture with my phone and upload it to facebook in a matter of minutes, but posting it here requires me to leave the house and go some place with high speed internet. Which means I'd have to leave the house, which means I wouldn't be at home, working on my other habits!)

I'll keep you updated here on how I do on this habit, as well as some I'll be tweaking, and some other new ones I'll be adding.

What new habits are you working on this year?

You can read the other parts of this series here:

 Make New Friends (Habits), But Keep the Old

Making New Habits--Sometimes Success and Failure Go Hand in Hand

Making New Habits and Tweaking the Old

Making New Habits--Sometimes You Just Gotta Go With the Flow

Until next time...