Chances are that you, like the rest of the world at this time of year, are taking some time to reflect and are thinking about your New Year’s resolutions and what you’d like to do differently next year… Good! Taking time for introspection and structured thinking is important. Before you get all gung-ho about putting your list into action though, won’t you consider the following three questions? In doing so, you may find answers you need but didn’t know you were looking for.
1. What does this list tell me about what I want to feel?
At the most basic of levels, we want the things we want because we’re under the impression that they will make us feel a certain way.
If you think about it from this lens, your list is more symbolic of what you’re wanting to experience emotionally than anything else. For example, many of us want ‘the house’ because we want to feel grounded and safe, ‘the body’ because we crave the feelings of confidence and acceptance from others, ‘the right job’ because it will enable us feel empowered and purposeful, and ‘the relationship’ because we want to feel connected and loved.
Identifying the primary emotions that you are wanting to experience is a useful exercise for two reasons. Firstly, it answers the ‘why’ behind your list while simultaneously helping you identify other avenues you can explore to source these emotions in your everyday life—making it easier to feel better more often and taking unnecessary pressure off of your list—cause you know, life happens. Secondly, it increases your chances of feeling ‘successful’ in your journey towards change… which in turn, does wonders for your motivation moving forward. Small, incremental changes are oftentimes more powerful than huge radical ones and having many little ways of sourcing a particular emotion can help you feel better as you learn to do better.
That said, sometimes finding or regaining balance is equal parts a proactive input as it is an elimination. Due to that, it is also useful to ask ourselves:
2. What are the things I will NOT do?
Instead of going down the path of things like ‘gluten’, ‘sugar’, ‘cigarettes,’ and ‘late nights on weekdays’ I encourage you to consider the question above and look a layer deeper. What DON’T you want to feel? What are the things that you do consciously or subconsciously that make you feel these undesirable emotions? How does bringing an awareness to these behaviors inform your conscious action moving forward?
In my experience, if you do this exercise thoroughly enough and begin prioritizing your emotional experience above all else, you may even find yourself re-writing your list of resolutions entirely! If not, once questions #1 and #2 are answered, the third and equally important question to consider is:
3. Who do I have to be to make this happen?
We live in an achievement obsessed world where we prioritize the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ over the ‘why’ and the ‘who’—not realizing that the latter two are the more important questions when we consider our long term personal fulfillment.
If your list includes things that you’ve never done before or that will stretch you in new and different ways, the ‘who’ you’ll have to be in order to achieve them is more important than the the actual goals themselves. Why? Because ‘doing’ is a by-product of ‘being’. Think about it, who you are determines what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and even why you do it.
We usually think of a goal and immediately go into planning mode to figure out how we’ll accomplish it before giving thought to why we want it in the first place (questions #1-2) and ‘who’ we’ll have to be to achieve it. In this case, consideration of the ‘who’ we’ll need to be is an invitation to step into a conversation with ourselves about our mindset—an opportunity to focus on the only place we have complete control over and the most impact. We can’t control life and the circumstances it brings. We can, however, control who we are (and therefore how we show up) when we deal with them.
Can you imagine if we focused more of our energy on just our ‘who' and decided to make that ‘who’ the present, empowered, inspired, discerning, disciplined, creative, flexible and open open-hearted version of ourselves? In all likelihood, we’d not only have a better shot at fulfilling our New Year’s resolutions, we’d also feel engaged, purposeful, resilient, and ready for anything. Everything we’d do would be done by this more aware and intentional version of ourselves and would, in consequence, be better.
This is the true meaning of self-empowerment. This is where our lives begin to truly change.
This also takes us so much deeper and further than a simple list of resolutions wouldn’t you agree?
Namasme.
Photo by Jean Gerber on Unsplash