What springs to mind when you hear the word ‘January’? Jolly things and happy times? We did a straw poll and some of the words we heard were ‘cold’, ‘depressing’, ‘boring’, ‘miserable’, and ‘debt’.

January’s got a bad name for itself but if marketing gurus got their hands on it we bet they’d be able to re-brand it as something desirable. So, this month how about each of us being our own marketing guru and creating a new image for January?

• Design your ideal bedroom on paper – sketch, write, cut and paste pictures
• Fill a charity bag with things that don’t give you pleasure anymore
• Plant something in a communal space
• Pledge half a day’s help to your eldest – or most domestically challenged - friend or relative
• Join a different friend once a week in their exercise of choice
• See how far you can develop a second language with a CD from your library
• Have some totally unstructured free time to just ‘be’
• Host a holiday picnic – everyone makes a dish typical of their last holiday destination
• Visit as many places as you can with a public transport one day travel card

How about January as the month for…

• Living your life on purpose.
• Evaluating your contribution to the world.
• Reflecting on where you’re going.
• Enjoying being cosy inside.
• Making friends feel at home.
• Celebrating what you’re grateful for.
• Reconnecting with past pleasures.
• Re-reading favourite stories and poems.

Remember, January can be anything you want it to be. You can make it as jolly or as miserable as you like.  You can create the kind of January you want. It can be anything you want it to be.

Some of you have been sharing ideas on new years resolutions and how you’ve started 2007. We liked Christa’s thought-provoking post on new year’s day about self discovery and being brave:

My resolution is to DSD. And to become still more authentic, imagining possible reactions and behaviours, trying them out for real or in my imagination, and deciding, which one feels more like my genuine and content inner self.

Christa also mentioned how she’d enjoyed reading Susan Jeffers' bestseller, ‘Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway’ as recommended by Karen. Maybe that’s a motto for all of us in 2007.

• Write postcards from your home town to friends you haven’t seen this year
• Play with gadget or bit of technology you only know how to use at a basic level
• Sit in a public place and watch the world go by
• Have a sing song with a friend who’s karaoke box has evaded ebay
• Spend a day exploring everything in a mile radius of your home
• Get messy with magazine recipes for home made beauty treatments
• Listen to a track from every CD in your collection
• Watch your favourite films or re-read a favourite book
• Make greetings cards
• Visit your local garden centre just to admire the plants and pets or get ideas
• Random Cuisine: Make whatever’s on page 69 of your least used cookbook
• Spend an entire Sat/Sun morning immersed in the colour supplements