As dis­cussed around the same time last year, New Year’s res­o­lu­tions are not for every­body. Some stick to that con­ven­tion, oth­ers dis­tance them­selves for var­i­ous rea­sons. I’ll share my per­son­al res­o­lu­tion with you and invite you to try it for your­selves, no mat­ter if you are a believ­er or not.

When­ev­er I am just say­ing some­thing derog­a­tive about a per­son or a thing I will imme­di­ate­ly pause for a moment and I will not say it.

That’s my res­o­lu­tion. Straight­for­ward, sim­ple, but not as easy as the first days of 2016 have shown. But, for the last 60+ hours I have been quite suc­cess­ful. This res­o­lu­tion con­veys a very inter­est­ing aspect: it makes me lis­ten to and observe myself. I have to be quick, very quick. It turns out: speak­ing in a derog­a­tive way hap­pens often, much more often I had been aware of. I’m not nec­es­sar­i­ly talk­ing about plain­ly den­i­grat­ing some­body, but about plac­ing myself about oth­ers in any way. Observ­ing myself makes me more con­scious about my behav­ior, and more sen­si­tive about the pres­ence and reac­tions of others.

Anoth­er first-day expe­ri­ence is the feel­ing of being sat­is­fied not hav­ing said some­thing. When think­ing about the con­se­quences of some­thing derog­a­tive I could or would have said, I feel quite relieved not hav­ing added some neg­a­tive aspect to a con­ver­sa­tion. Addi­tion­al­ly, I’m quite sure that there would not have been any added value if I had brought my neg­a­tivism to the table.

No Neg­a­tivism

From time to time I have dis­cussed this “no neg­a­tivism” approach with some friends. Many of them could not agree with me refer­ring to a “real world” with all the aspects of “good and bad”. Yes. that’s true. I don’t see things through rose-colored glass­es (I stopped wear­ing glass­es at all). But I’m will­ing to test my hypoth­e­sis that con­scious­ly avoid­ing neg­a­tivism will cre­ate a more pos­i­tive atmos­phere, or at least it won’t unnec­es­sar­i­ly pol­lute the envi­ron­ment. This is my per­son­al deci­sion and it has noth­ing to do with the exter­nal world in the first instance. I just stop adding my share of neg­a­tivism and watch the effects.

Please feel invit­ed to test this hypoth­e­sis your­selves! I would love to hear some feed­back: does it work for you as it does for me? What effects do you see?

negativism positivism resolution