Special Guest Post: Jennifer Iannolo is the Founder & CEO of Zenfully Delicious, her new project created to empower people with chronic illness to live a delicious life. And she is still traveling the world creating new tales for her award-nominated food and travel site, The Gilded Fork.


Picture if you will, Auntie, what your favorite kids are witnessing right now: The adults around them are suddenly struck with the fervor of a new year. They didn’t lose the weight they said they would last year, but now it’s 2012! Everyone is eating right! And going to the gym! Where all those other people suddenly are!

Sadly, a few weeks from now, those kids will (again) watch said adults abandon their resolutions and go back to the same old habits, chalking it up to “Well, I tried, but...”

That’s one heck of a message to send out to a young person, no? That we adults wait until this particular day of the year called January 1st to try and be better people, and get rid of all those bad things about ourselves. We see the error in our ways, and give it our best effort for a couple of weeks, then give up. Imagine if that’s the advice we were to give them for approaching life (psst...it is).

If children learn by example, can’t we come up with something a little more effective? Wouldn’t it be more fruitful for them to see us put new habits into practice whenever we chose to make a change? If they were to witness us declare a goal, come up with a plan of action, then repeatedly apply discipline and consistency until we succeeded, they would then learn that change doesn’t happen overnight, and certainly not due to some magical thing called “New Year’s Day” where everything is automatically set to zero.

We would teach them to be accountable for their lives.

Committing to something and bringing it to fruition in small, consistent steps, is invaluable in the creation of a self-sufficient human being. They will be rewarded first by discovering they are committed to something, and second, that it’s going to take some kind of action for them to have it. It won’t necessarily be easy or happen overnight, but with consistently applied discipline they can achieve it. There’s something to be said for bygone days when junior wanted a new bike, and had to rake leaves and do chores to get that bike — and not a day before it was fully earned.

My rally cry to you, fellow Aunties, is that we not mollycoddle our favorite young people by bequeathing to them tired, worn-out rituals that serve no one’s good. Ones that make them say to themselves, “Oh, great, it’s New Year’s Day, and dad’s on a diet again. He’s going to be cranky for a couple of weeks, then go back to eating Twinkies. I can’t wait for this to be over.”

Instead, let’s give them some tools they can actually use. At any time of the year. Because they say so.

So MY 2012 resolution is to abandon all resolutions forevermore, and work with my "Rent-a-Kids" on naming their goals when they have them, then teach them to develop an action plan to bring them to life. The best part? They get to watch me do the same. Then there is accountability on both sides, and New Year’s Day can be one of relaxing and celebration, instead of the day where everyone tries to start over.

Are you with me?

Published: January 3, 2012