The average New Year’s resolution lasts three weeks. Now that those weeks have passed, are you going to beat yourself up for being a failure or are you going to revamp your resolution so that it is actually do-able? Your choice will determine your future.

After all, anybody can quit. When you quit repeatedly, it becomes a habit to quit when things get difficult. It seems to be a pattern in our nation. The average person born in the later years of the baby boom held 10.8 jobs from age 18 to age 42, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. having the shortest duration comes between the ages of 18 and 38 whose time on a job is generally three to five years. Today couples only stay married 7-9 years.

I am not against changing jobs, but sometimes a person changes jobs because they don’t feel appreciated, utilized to their fullest potential only to get to the next one where the same thing happens. So is it possible that something within you brings these scenarios on? Perhaps instead of looking out and blaming others, it is time to look inside and at your generations. Perhaps you have been programmed to fail.

If the only way you received love and approval as a child, was to get high grades or perform perfectly, then you will strive and compete on the job at that same level still trying to win approval. You will be unable to put in a full day’s work and feel you have done your best. You will stay overtime often neglecting your family just to be sure you have given it your all. You are unable to take your peace with any completed project.

Perhaps you are working at a job that you hate, because it pays extremely well. However, if money were not an issue, you would rather be teaching or painting? You dare not simplify your lifestyle in order to satisfy your spirit. After all, what would people think? When we stop caring what other people think and start believing in ourselves and loving ourselves enough to follow our dreams, money becomes less of an issue.

Henry Wright, of Be In Health, asks, “Are you intimidated by people who you think look and smell better than you? Do you find yourself establishing your identity on the basis of approval of another? Have you struggled all your life with comparing yourself to another and you know that when you look into that mirror, you’re not the fairest of them all. Even if you are, if you have an unloving spirit residing within you, it’s going to tell you that you're not. That’s because it’s a lying spirit. And it takes your eyes and turns it. A person who is 85 pounds and anorexic thinks they're too fat; they are a walking skeleton, and they think they're too fat. That is totally, absolutely, delusional. That’s an unclean, unloving spirit that has attached itself to them…one that is not only lying to them, it’s taking their five physical senses and in the mirror, distorting what they're even looking at.”

There is a mind-body-spirit connection. Your brain sends messages to perform the tasks that you think and speak. Our pastor teaches that when you have not been loved perfectly from childhood in relationships with your mother, father, children (or whomever)...you’ve been damaged emotionally, or verbally, or physically or sexually or you’re into legalism (strict adherence) or control, perfectionism or performance. Therefore, you have a fear; a fear that dictates who you are based on what you do, not what is in your heart. You’re in conflict with yourself about God because you don’t feel that you measure up. You’re in conflict with yourself about who you are. You have fear of others because of what they think. You’re constantly comparing yourself to others, not who God created you to be. In all these things, there is no fear in love, so that means you have never been loved perfectly. A type of fear comes. Perfect love casts out fear. Fear has torment. That’s the basis of the mind-body connection.

When you are in fear or drivennness your cortisol drip accelerates. That steady drip damages your immune system making you vulnerable to disease. Now you push harder and produce less. Some suggest that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is birthed in such an environment.

Judging yourself or comparing yourself to others is a very dangerous situation. Please, don’t compare yourself to others. Don’t judge yourself by how someone else dresses, by the car they drive or the house they live in. That is just stuff and not a true measure of who you really are. You are uniquely created. You are engraved in the palms of God, who created you. In trying to be what you think others expect, you become a fabricated personality. Eventually you lose your original identity.

We are always taken by surprise when someone who seemingly has it all together and then throws it away by illicit behavior, is caught and crucified by the public. Why wasn’t it enough? What made them risk everything for a moment of secret pleasure? Was it simply no matter what is on the plate, because it is never enough?

The problem is not a new one. In the 70s, there was a song called “One More Ride on the Merry Go Round”. The opening lyrics say:

Look at the world I have conquered,

I've won every spin of the wheel.

I get everything I go after,

They ask me how does it feel.

I tell them that I'd trade the moon

For a string with an orange balloon,

And the days when my only dream

Was a dish of vanilla ice cream.

Perhaps it is best to begin again with your resolutions. Let your first one be to be good to yourself and take time to have fun.