A lot of us get trapped into our routines. Admittedly, it’s far easier to simply go through the motions instead of seeking out a better way of doing things.

Take New Year’s resolutions, for example. Every year, the hype surrounding these life-changing resolutions is bigger than the reality. More than half of us will try to break the routine this year (most of us will fail), but we only resolve to make these changes on January 1. Why? Well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.

However, we don’t stick with these resolutions because they require a fundamental personality change that we aren’t willing to go through. You might want to lose weight, and you like the idea of being skinnier, but you also like the idea of a five-meat pizza (because just three meats would be dumb). For the record, I’m a 5-meat fan, as long as bacon is involved.

At a deep level, we are exactly who we want to be. We do spend a lot of time on our external image though, deluding ourselves and trying to maintain a front for others. For those of us making a weight-loss resolution, we might have spent the year leaving our shirts untucked, wearing vertical stripes, lots of black, baggy sweatshirts, and other clothes that make us appear less fat.

New Year’s Day brings us another pop-culture opportunity each year to stop spending so much energy maintaining that illusion, but we love the food more than we love the skinny.

Do you know many psychologists it takes to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change. At our very core, we don’t want to change. Change is scary, change is difficult, change is uncomfortable.

I spend a lot of time attending Maple Valley City Council meetings and blogging about them (on this paper’s Web site and Facebook), and this year is going to bring a lot of change. The kind of change that’s making some of the old-timers nervous.

The old guard on the council has been reduced to minority status, and the old minority has just been released from solitary confinement (more than just 30 days in the hole), and they’ll need some time to get accustomed to the sunlight.

Maple Valley has had the same mayor for the past 12 years presiding over the council, and on Jan. 4 we’re going to get a new one, after Laure Iddings resigned this past week. This new dynamic is going to be weird for a while, and the personality of the council has just undergone a fundamental change.

Because it’s such a new situation for the city, I’m going to ask our council members and the new mayor to commit to a few New Year’s resolutions for the city council in 2010.

I’d like them to resolve to put Maple Valley first, and set aside the arguments and resentments from past years. It won’t be easy, since there’s a lot of lingering bitterness from the past election, and will probably manifest itself in petty sniping, contemptuous attitudes and outright opposition to even good ideas that would benefit the city.

I’d like them to resolve to keep the city services commensurate with the population growth. We cannot continue to fall further behind, especially with the upcoming loss of the King County Sheriff Precinct 3, the development of the Donut Hole and the likely Black Diamond growth explosion.

I’d like them to resolve to quit punting on issues, and to actually make some tough decisions. It’s become too commonplace to meekly state an opinion and wait for others to agree. Guess what? Everyone else is too afraid to speak up as well. A good leader will help encourage council members to state their position and contribute to the debate.

Let’s start the year off right. Let’s resolve to make our cities the best in the state. We can work on the next step (becoming the envy of the nation) with our 2011 New Year’s resolution.