Vision Clarity is my Habitat

Making New Year’s Resolutions may be a good things, but recent studies suggest that you should’t tell anyone about them. While we might think that the accountability of sharing your resolution would increase your change of changing, this research suggests that sharing our resolutions gives us a “premature sense of completeness” and therefore actually decreases our chance of changing. Click here.

Simply stated, there is a part of every one of us that is happy to mistake talking about doing a thing with the actual doing of the thing.

This is why I think about New Year’s Vision.

Last year, I declared that 2013 would be the Year of Fun for my family. I saw a year for the family filled with fun. While talking about fun is part of the fun, we made decisions all throughout the year about what to do or not to as a family based upon the Year of Fun. Again, the decisions included talking, but more importantly, we made consistent real decisions based the prioritization of this agreed upon shared value.

Six examples:

• We attended concerts as a family because it was the year of fun.
• We had discussions around the dinner table answering the question, “what was fun about your day?”
• I took my daughters to movies because they are fun (both my daughters and the movies).
• We said “no” to meeting expectations others places upon us that weren’t healthy…and therefore, not “fun” in the long run.
• I convinced my children to stop fighting with each other on several occasions because “fighting is not fun!”
• We celebrated Christmas on a island because it was the year of fun.

These may not sound like revolutionary happenings to you, but these are all things we might have talked about but not actually done if someone hadn’t used the “year of fun” card. Obviously, we didn’t do everything just because someone said, “but its the year of fun,” but it did help tilt the scales toward fun activity together.

A single, focussed idea (such as the year of fun) can gain momentum over the year to change your life for the better toward God. Honestly, I had no idea what the year of fun was going to practically mean for us at the beginning of the year-but I could see that we needed some more fun in our lives. In the middle of the year we decided that Christmas on an island would be fun and by the end of the year we were really beginning to catch the spirit of it.

As we launch into yet another year of fun, I can see the culture of my family changing as we more naturally make healthy decisions.

A sustained focus on a single vision will change your future and your culture.

Three Principles for of a New Year Vision:

1. One big idea for the entire year that would, if it came true, make life better toward God.
2. Reinforce the big idea by using it as the basis for real decisions that actually matter (big and small, daily, monthly, and yearly.
3. Trust God to do his part while you do everything you can to do yours.

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