New Year, New Me?
Oh, January! Time for cold weather, post-holiday blues, and … New Year's resolutions! But what if we took a minute to rethink our approach to the "New Year, New me" obsession?
Humans need to make plans for the future and for themselves. In 2020, it has become hard to come up with any plans at all. The pandemic has turned our lives upside down for the most part, and it forced us to adapt without clear clues about how long any of the "abnormal" life will last. So how do we set our goals for 2021?
Maybe one thing to start with could be to set realistic goals for yourself.
Too often, I'll start the year setting a multitude of unrealistic aspirations for myself — because it's actually really hard to learn a new language while taking up a new sport and taking several hours a week doing manual crafts and saving three times as much as you did last year. Too often, I'll try to stick to my new year resolutions for a few weeks, feel bad about slowing down around mid-January and have completely abandoned any type of hope for myself by February. By March, the feelings of self-loathing for failing to uphold the intents of the year may have withered away, but there's still no one clocking in that gym membership.
With the space we’ve been given for self-reflection during these strange days spent homebound, maybe the time has come to finally getting to know yourself a bit better. And this could start with setting realistic expectations for the year to come. Maybe that means that your chosen goals will have to be small, but most and foremost it has to be something that you feel comfortable keeping up even throughout rough times.
Resolutions are also much easier to keep up when taken with someone else, or a group of people. So instead of setting yourself an incalculable number of books to read next year, why not start a small book club with your friends or your loved one?
Realistic goals may include decreasing the number of things that you might need to take up, and instead try and concentrate on what you already enjoy doing. Or maybe there's a collection of things you've been putting off for a long time, and you can set a goal of achieving a few of them by a certain date. An important one is setting the goal to create space to reconnect with yourself. To give yourself some guilt-free time that does not have to be productive in any way, shape or form. To watch yourself grow, slowly and honestly. That, I think, is the best goal you can set for yourself for 2021.
The world is already a pressuring environment nowadays, you don't need to add too much to it by stressing yourself out over the little things. Watch the year unroll, and do your thing, one small goal at a time!
See you on the flipside my loves <3
