As we head into the new year, our social media feeds become filled with ideas and suggestions about goals or resolutions that we can pick to improve our lives or to make us better people.
But what if all of this striving to be somebody different than who we are today is actually leaving us more miserable?
I was born into a family of goal setters – people who constantly strived to accomplish more and more. And guess what? I fit in like a glove.
I’m somebody who naturally sets my sights on goals and I’m am able to figure out the steps needed to work towards them. But what I started to realize over time was that my constant striving to improve my life and my situation was coming from a place of dissatisfaction and unhappiness with who I was.
Think about a situation where, for example, somebody’s trying to lose weight, a common New Year’s resolution. If that goal of trying to lose weight is coming from a place of unhappiness within, what often happens is that the person loses the weight they’re aiming to take off, and yet, they end just as unhappy as they were before they lost the weight. This is because true happiness doesn’t come from external factors, but rather, it comes from within.
When we look at goals for ourselves, it’s important to consider if we are striving for something that we truly want ourselves, or if we’re striving for something because it’s society’s vision of where we should be and what we need to have attained to be considered a success.
I’ve tried to let go of letting my goals be driven by a desire to attain external markers of success as a way to attain happiness and, instead, have turned right to the source – within.
For my New Year’s resolutions this year, I’m sticking with something that I’ve been focusing on the past few years, which is to continue working on just accepting who I am: the good parts AND the not so good parts.
I want to continue working on simply being okay with who I am. On taking time to be with myself, in the moment, and to not always focus on achievements as a marker of how I define myself.
If any of this sounds familiar to you, my invitation to you would be to consider joining me this New Year, and do away with new year’s resolutions that focus on turning you into a better person by achieving something. Instead, focus on accepting the pieces of you that are difficult to accept, and focus on being in the moment.
This doesn’t mean that we step away from goals and achievements. In fact, my experience has been that the more we become okay with who we are, the easier it becomes to pick out the goals that we truly want to strive for. It also becomes easier to achieve them because the path becomes clearer and we end up being less confused by external feedback about what we “should” be doing.
I invite you to join me on this journey.
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