Should we be making New Year's resolutions?

Out: New Year's resolutions  In: Giving yourself permission to be bad at something.

Transcript

00:00Give yourself permission to be bad at something.

00:08Resolutions, right? We all have them. There's this societal pressure of,

00:12you know, make a resolution. What are you going to do differently this next year?

00:18And the reason why many of them fail is because we put unrealistic expectations on ourselves.

00:26You're not going to be Simone Biles on your first time ever going to gymnastics class,

00:32right? You're not going to be this phenom pitcher, whatever it is, knitter, what have you. It's like

00:38give yourself permission to learn and to fail and to keep going. The habits or the resolutions to

00:45start with are the ones that we often dismiss and that are actually like painfully easy.

00:51You know, things that are like, oh, that can't be a resolution. That's too easy.

00:55I would never do that. It's like, well, let's start there, right? It's not meant to beat

01:01yourself up. When the enthusiasm of having created a goal wears off, which it inevitably will,

01:12a lot of guilt and shame start to come in. Many of us are really good at offering

01:17grace and love and kindness to others. Where we struggle is using that same language

01:26towards ourselves. When we talk about New Year's resolutions, it's really important to talk about

01:33the impact of small, incremental, almost unobservable to most people activities that

01:43yield the most change and kind of have the biggest impact, positive impact in our life.

01:51Maybe I'm just going to add a 30-minute walk, you know, three days a week or two days a week to my

01:58set. Like start somewhere for somebody who is committed to making more positive changes in

02:05their life is to really think about a few big domains. And when I say domains, things like,

02:12what do I want to achieve professionally within my job? What do I want to achieve physically

02:19in terms of my overall health? What do I want to achieve financially? With family, kind of having

02:27some broad categories of things that are a part of your daily life or are important to you.

02:36And then to have one or two ideas there. I think an approach to try is adding something

02:46perhaps fun that was recommended to you.