The Fascinating Truth Behind New Year New You
“New Year, New You”. It’s a phrase you hear thrown around constantly at this time of year. But when you really think about what that actually means, it boils down to a sense of not being enough. Not pretty enough, not skinny enough, not smart enough. And so, we resolve to doing more or less or what we already do in the hopes of reaching that elusive ‘enough’.
We start off with a bang, creating new routines, showing restraint and maybe even spending money on new items that will help us reach our shiny new goals.
And then, life happens, and we end up losing our way a bit. The excitement fades and we start to lose sight of the goal that we made just a short time ago. All of a sudden we give up, and we no longer have a “New Year, New You”.
Now, some people will tell you that’s because you didn’t make your goal SMART enough; that it wasn’t specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely, so you were never going to achieve it anyway. But I’m here to tell you that “New Year, New You” won’t come with SMART goals. It has to come from a much deeper place than that.
A “New You” needs to understand and be accepting of the PERSON you are trying to be, not just trying to be ‘enough’ of whatever you think you are lacking right now.
It can’t come from a place of comparison, it has to come from a place of love and acceptance.
In this ‘current’ world of influencers and social media a ‘perfect life’ is always on show, but it’s never real. It’s one tiny piece of someone’s life and we never know what goes on in the life we don’t see. In reality, it’s one big advertisement, and we are enticed by the comparison of what we don’t have, and if we only had those things, we would be happy and have enough.
It’s a lie.
We are already enough.
And that doesn’t mean we’re not dysfunctional or that staying in that dysfunction is going to allow us to be all that we can be. It means accepting there are things we have experienced and have happened to us that are stopping us from being the version of us we were created to be, and there is work we need to do to get there.
“New Year, New You” is our secret plea to get out of that dysfunction; we know there’s something that needs to change, we just don’t know how to get there. And setting a goal or making a resolution is a surface level solution, which is why it doesn’t stick, because the problem hasn’t gone away.
Instead of setting goals, I suggest focusing on creating little habits, ones that are based on your identity rather than an outcome. I discussed this in a previous post which you can find here. To be able to build these identity-based habits, it requires two steps:
- Decide who you want to be
- Celebrate the small steps to get there
Sometimes this will need a little bit of ‘fake it ’til you make it’, because even though we can decide who we want to be, believing we deserve to be that person is another thing altogether. It takes work to believe it, and you might even need other people to help you get there, but the truth is you do deserve it.
And every time you achieve one more small step in the journey to being the person you want to be, celebrate it. I like to think of this part as the 1% principle. It’s a principle that was introduced by Tom O’Neil, which is based on the idea that if you improve by just 1% every day it can dramatically change the trajectory of your life and help you reach your goals faster. When I first heard of this 1% principle, it was explained using this example:
When a plane takes off at New York airport with a plan to land at Tokyo, if the plane moves just 1 off course in the beginning, it would end up 6,755 miles away from Tokyo. It would mean landing somewhere over the ocean instead of where you planned to!
And this is an amazing thought if you think about your life and the improvements you can make. One tiny change can completely change the trajectory of the outcome.
So now you’ve got a vision that you’ve talked yourself into, you’re learning to accept that it’s a vision you really do deserve, a few new small steps or habits tat you’ve created and a small change to the direction in your life. The only thing left is to put it all into action, and you’ll see a “New You” in no time!
Find yourself someone you can be accountable with, surround yourself with people who inspire you, and make sure you’re listening to and watching positive content. You’ll be amazed at the difference it will make to your progress!
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