I'm using a different approach this year to make my New Year's resolutions

Reflections on making New Year's resolutions from a place of enoughness, self-acceptance & self-kindness

Dec 30, 2024

Where do you stand on making New Year’s resolutions?

Part of me wants to totally ignore the New Year & the pressure to make resolutions at this time of year.

This part of me knows that the 1st January 2025 is just another day, exactly the same as the 31st December 2024. This part of me wants to believe that I am already enough, and that I don’t have to change - that I’m fine as I am - and that I’m doing a great job already, without the pressure and ‘shoulds’ of New Year’s Resolutions.

But there is another part of me too … This part, quite naturally, is reflecting on the year just gone. This part of me sees the change in the year as an opportunity for more intentional refection, which can lead to renewed focus & clarity, and conscious movement forward, towards my hopes and plans for the year.

This latter part of me does want some things to change in this New Year.

However, for me, the way I make this year’s resolutions needs to be different. I can’t just add more ‘shoulds’ to my life - goodness knows I grapple with enough of those each day, seeping in from society’s expectations of me, without piling even more on myself.

‘Shoulds’ do not help me - no, they stifle me, overwhelm me and shame me.

So no - I won’t be making rigid, harsh resolutions for huge, unrealistic goals this year. Yes, I’d like to support myself with healthy choices in the context of my perimenopause. Yes, I’d like to grow my business and make more money this year. Yes, I’d like to bring more calm & regulation into my parenting this year and experience more joy in parenting (and reduce the parenting overwhelm, stress, dysregulation and flashes of rage).

But, as I’m making my New Year’s resolutions, I’ll be very deliberately starting from a place of my inherent ‘enoughness’ & ‘goodness’, rather than ‘should-ing’ all over myself from a place of negativity and ‘never enoughness’. In short, I’ll make sure it’s my inner compassionate voice making the resolutions this year, rather than my ‘internalised outer critic’* voice. (*My new name for the usually & rather dubiously named ‘inner critic’).

To do this, I’ll be remembering these compassionate principles:

“You did great this year” - This year, before I set any goals for change, I’ll be celebrating three things I already achieved this last year, and I’ll be consciously identifying three things that I’m grateful for, from 2024. This way, I’ll be starting my resolution-making from a sense of my own abundance, rather than lack, and Ill be starting from a place of feeling more ‘enoughness’, rather than from that desolate place of ‘never enough’.
I’m embracing the idea that these two concepts are true, at the same time: “I did great last year AND I can make more changes in the coming year to achieve new goals”. I believe wholeheartedly that starting here, in this place, means I’m more likely to succeed & grow in ways that serve me in 2025.
“You’re wintering right now” - If, like me, you’re in the northern hemisphere, whatever you decide to work on this year - please go gently & take your time - winter is for slowness, reflecting & visioning, not for racing out of the gate.
For example, I’ll be re-establishing some goals about getting up & outside for more early morning sunlight, and barefoot therapy on the grass, as well as more morning exercise - But not right now. It’s cold & it’s dark and more often than not these days I’ve got a cold or a sniffle. These days, when I wake up, I’m mostly not feeling any kind of pull to get outdoors first thing, so I’m respecting the wisdom of wintering that tells me to stay in, stay warm, to hibernate & to move slowly in the longer, darker nights.
So I’ll be aiming for these resolutions to kick in in the spring, not right now. So many of us think that when we set New year’s resolution’s they all need to start on the 1st January, but this idea sets so many of us up for failure - we don’t need to do this to ourselves!
“Whenever you start, start small, start slowly” - We are more likely to build on small successes than we are to achieve & maintain big changes from the get go.
So, to continue with the example from above - Maybe when I decide to kick in my goals for more morning sunlight, I will deliberately aim for one day per week, then once I’ve achieved this, I’ll maybe step it up to 3 or 4 days a week. Starting out with a goal to do anything 7 days a week is simply a recipe for disaster - again, let’s not do that to ourselves!
“You’re human” -I’ll be keeping my resolutions realistic & in line with my human nature.
Humans are cyclical beings, and we need regular rest, sleep, water, nourishment from our food, connection (with ourselves and others), and time in nature.
We simply do not succeed and stay healthy when we deny our human needs. So I’ll be making resolutions that primarily focus on getting my humans needs met - planning in more rest, honouring my cyclical nature, prioritising my sleep, etc.
Not sexy I know - but I believe that if I can get this foundation right, then any other goals I set, like growing my business, earning more money, being a calmer parent, will be FAR easier to achieve.
Share
“Change your behaviour, not your self” - I’m very consciously & deliberately starting here to make my resolutions this year: Our ‘self’ is always already enough. At our core, we don’t ever need to change, or be better, or be more or less.
From this place of enoughness and inner goodness, I can then aim to change my behaviours, if new or changed behaviours will better serve my core, inherently good ‘self’.
This feels a subtle, perhaps semantic, point to make - but in my experience (both in my own life, and in supporting my clients) it’s a really important distinction we need to make, if we are to allow the unfurling of the best version of ourselves we can be.
To start in the opposite place, to believe on some level that ‘we need to change who we are, actually makes change harder: Firstly, this is not our true, core, integrated self talking, this is a particularly destructive emotion called ‘shame’ talking. Shame wants to keep us small, hidden and silent, and staying this way never serves any of us, not in the long term; Secondly, on a practical level, it’s far easier to change our behaviours than it is to change our ‘whole selves’, which then reflects back to the previous point of ‘starting small’ - always make changes with what is easier to change, as this approach more often leads to snowballing positive outcomes.
It’s not that our ‘self’ never changes - of course it does, we grow and change and evolve every year - but our self naturally changes & grows & unfurls in ways that best serve us, only when we take the external pressure off to change, because we’ve been conditioned to believe we ‘aren’t good enough already’.
A practical example here is instead of trying to ‘become a calmer person, because I’m too angry’, try instead to start with compassion towards yourself, saying something along the lines of: ‘I do often feel angry, but anyone would in my situation, it’s very human to get angry when our needs are not met’.
So many of us can attest to this - I know I am FAR more likely to ‘be angry’ when I’m exhausted, when there is too much on my plate, when people are disrespecting my boundaries or when I’ve slept poorly the night before.
This doesn’t make an ‘angry person’ by nature - no, this anger is instead a signal that I am living in a context that is triggering my very human capacity to feel the emotion called ‘anger’, for very good reasons.
Once you’ve provided this contextual compassion to yourself for feeling anger, only then might you consider setting behavioural goals around this - for example, meditating for 3 minutes as many times in the week as you can manage, or getting to bed before 10pm at least a few times a week, etc. Again two things are true here - We are good people, whose anger is being triggered due to many circumstances outside of our control & temperament, AND there are behavioural changes we can make to support ourselves when the context we live in does not.
“Resolutions are experiments not edicts” - I’ll be setting resolutions that sound more like this: “I’ll try this thing & see how it feels, see whether it works for me … and if it doesn’t work then I’ll let it go, and perhaps realise it was not the most appropriate goal for me, at this time, and that’s ok, and I’m ok”.
I won’t be making resolutions that sound or feel anything like this: “I’ll do this new thing & if I don’t do it perfectly everyday for a year then I’m a failure”.
I guess this in itself is a resolution for me in itself - “I resolve to be kinder to myself when I find it hard to meet my goals”, which I will, because all of us find it hard to meet our goals - it’s 100% universally human to find it hard to reach our goals.
Again, we are far more likely to succeed in the long term in a context of compassion, not in a context of force or being made to feel like a failure.
“Bring a huge dose of future-oriented self-compassion” - Rather than assuming that I will always, for the whole year, maintain the same level of commitment and motivation for the resolutions I make on the 1st January, I will instead think of that day-to-day, mid-year version of myself - the one who will actually be trying to put some changes into place, in the longer term.
And I will be proactively kind to that version of me. I will help out that version of me, from this place now, by only making New Year’s resolutions that can potentially, realistically, be actioned within my wonderfully messy, unpredictable human, mothering & working life.
I will not set resolutions that are really hard for future-me, nor any that are high-pressure ‘shoulds’, that don’t take into account my complex, beautiful & at times vulnerable humanness.
For example, as a perimenopausal woman myself, who is a business owner, and a mother, and a therapist - I will not pretend its realistic for me to ‘run a marathon’ this year. Instead, I’m going to resolve to do some movement, most days - that might be a walk, a swim, or yoga - all of which I believe I can realistically fit into my very busy life. I know this, because I’ve managed this most weeks this year too - it’s tried and tested. On this note, it’s also totally okay if you resolve this year to ‘do more of the same, because it’s been working so well already”!

So that’s it. My different, more compassionate approach to making New Year’s Resolutions. I’d love to hear from you whether this different approach sounds appealing to you, or whether you already approach them in this way too.

I'm using a different approach this year to make my New Year's resolutions

Reflections on making New Year's resolutions from a place of enoughness, self-acceptance & self-kindness

Discussion about this post