Thinking about New Year’s Resolutions this week?  Taking steps to Better Health, perhaps?  Exercise?  Healthy Eating?  Better Job?  Travel?  Volunteering?  Charity Work?  More Family Time?  Reading More?  Planting a vegetable garden to grow your own produce?  Learning a new musical instrument or foreign language?  Finding time to paint or a hobby?  Finally write that novel in the back of your mind?

Whatever your resolutions may be, when developing your list of annual New Year’s Resolutions this week, please be sure to put a completion date on them to help stay focused and on a timeline.  As they say– things with deadlines get done.

Also, please remember to be specific.  It makes all the difference.  Being specific forces you to clearly identify what it is you want to accomplish with the goals, helps to visualize in helping to bring them about, and makes them more quantifiable and easily measured to monitor your progress towards achieving them.  It’s very important.  Be specific.

For example, I am in growing need of an assistant in the workroom, so asked Santa to please bring me a Pug for Christmas this year.  To help with smaller tasks, help keep me motivated and moving.  I was not specific in my request- male, female, young, old, black, fawn- didn’t matter.  Any friendly little helper in need of a new home would be fine.

Or, if Pugs were in short supply, fully appreciative of the fact that children should come first on the Christmas Gift List, I asked Santa to please bring me a St. Bernard in need of a good home, instead.  To help with the bigger tasks around the workroom.

Again- I was not specific- male, female, puppy, young, older, short hair, long hair, color- did not matter.  Just a helper.  A big one.  Now here’s the point.  Again, I was not specific in my request.  Here is what Santa brought.

So, yes.  Now I have a St. Bernard.  A very cute, fuzzy, little St. Bernard– Toy.  Quiet, great disposition and temperament, but not very helpful beyond being cuddly.

Now, I admit to having tweaked Santa Claus a bit this year in a few blog posts, all in good-natured humor and fun.  Maybe this was the Old Boy’s way of getting me back.  Lighter to carry than the traditional lump of coal, perhaps.  On the other hand, maybe it is because I was not specific and clear in making out my Wish List.

I asked for — “a St. Bernard.”        I got — “a St. Bernard.”

Santa brought what I had requested and checked me off the list.  Job done.  But not at all what I had in mind when making the request.  So being specific is important.  More so with Santa Claus than I had imagined, apparently.

Good luck setting your goals and resolutions for the New Year.  And wishing you the very best of luck and success in achieving them all.  Please remember to put a date on them and to be specific.  It really does make all the difference in achieving your goals.

Thanks as always for reading!– Jim (and Red!)