New Year, New You? Are you setting your 2022 up to fail before it begins?
It’s that time of year when I always seemed to fall out of the year desperate for a break and promising myself, I would use the time to make the next year feel different, look different and be different. The first few days of holidays were often spent recovering, the next part I began with setting good intentions and making plans for positive change. I often used the time to reconnect with my family that I hadn’t seen enough, catch up with friends that I missed, I walked slower, spoke less, and exercised in daylight for a change. I wondered why life couldn’t feel like this more often? I would always read books about the change I wanted to see in my life, and I made promises, promises for more balance, greater patience with loved ones, fewer hours at work and be more present when I wasn’t at work. A New Year packed with Resolutions is our opportunity to make amends and set intentions for change and ensure the next year was different to the one that just passed…. Or is it?
The New Year’s Resolution – with good intention – is stacked with ‘shoulds’. I should spend more time with my family, I should take better care of me, I should find greater balance, essentially: ‘I should be a better person, living a better way.’ This year is the year I will do just that! We are supposed to become better and to follow through with that assertion. It creates a new set of obligations, an obligation that has led us to search for resolutions in the first place. It’s very easy to assert a statement, it’s much more complex to create the pathway to carry through and create real change. In addition, the judgement and sense of obligation connected to the New Year’s Resolution sets us up for failure without solid architecture or a vision to support it. The physiological effect of the additional self-expectations can create stress and activate the sympathetic nervous system, the body’s natural fight-or-flight response to threat, be it actual or imagined. Our well-intentioned list of resolutions becomes something human evolution has programmed us to avoid and quickly begins to feed a sense of failure.
Like the New Year’s Resolution, goals can also create misdirected stress. As Richard Boyatzis explains in his new book Helping People Change:
“Goals ask people to declare something to which they aspire and are supposed to achieve. For many of us this creates obligation. The obligation creates and begins to add to negative processes in the brain. The goal then may become something to avoid rather than pursue. When we set a goal, we begin to think of how to work toward it. This invokes the analytical brain, parts of this network invoke our stress response and often impair us cognitively, emotionally, and physically. By focusing on the goal, we tend to see what is directly in front of us and lose sight of other possibilities on the horizon.”
Sound familiar? I often felt completely consumed with guilt over not fulfilling a New Year intention I set myself. If you are a high achiever, you will know this feeling well. Have you loathed yourself for setting a New Year Resolution that you know by the end of January is looking shaky? You’re not alone. Breaking this cycle is why we focus instead on the whole life vision. A vision is not a goal or a strategy, simply, a personal vision that is an expression of your ideal self and ideal future. It encompasses dreams, values, passions, purpose, sense of calling, and stuff that matters to you. It represents how you want your life to look feel and be. Not just in one area but all areas or as we call them your “Life Buckets”. Coaching helped me to understand the significance, benefits and understand how to create a whole life vision and bring it to life. It is the only reason I was able to break the vicious cycle of feeling stuck and completely unfulfilled year after year.
I remember, 14 summers passed and each year I was feeling completely burnt-out desperate for another way. Each year I told myself all the things I should be doing, I would do. Life got in the way, I got in my own way, and I found myself back where I began at the close of each year. I often achieved all the business goals we set but it wasn’t feeling as good anymore. I had a business vision but not whole life vision that would provide the architecture to allow me to achieve my New Year Resolutions. The parts of my life I loved the most were the most neglected. Then throughout year 15, I decided things would be different, I sought coaching support and I started writing. I wrote about a new way to live, how things could look, feel and be different, I made some courageous changes, set a clear life vision. It was an exhausting year in a different way – change is so so tough and damn uncomfortable! I fell out of that year the same way I entered exhausted, yet excited, clear, relieved, and ready. It felt different. I just knew the new year would be different and it was. That year marked the start of the most fulfilling and satisfying time of my recent history. It hasn’t been easy; it’s felt uncomfortable and at times I’ve questioned my courage and judgment. Having a clear life vision, patience and living a life daily I only dreamed possible has enabled me to demonstrate resilience and keep focussed. Life is balanced. I have been able to navigate perceived problems and turn them into possibilities. I have more fulfilment than ever before.
My experience as a Life Coach has shown me that a whole life vision inspires positivity and accelerates growth – the virtuous cycle as we call it. Discussion and regular assessment of the personal vision in your ‘Life Buckets’ inspires deeper, more open thinking. Working from the foundation of the whole life vision takes limited beliefs of the immediate pain points out of the equation and turns them into possibilities. Imaging your ideal self and ideal life in the future is more inspiring than imagining your way through a series of intentions that solve short term pain like; calendarizing date night, ensuring you attend yoga and getting to the kids’ athletic carnival. If you are living to your vision and setting intentions and revisiting your action points regularly these events naturally occur and life feels in flow, joyful and fulfilling.
Goals or intentions are certainly helpful and a very important part of the work we do to get stuff done! But they are to be regarded the steppingstones to greater fulfillment. Goals, especially business-oriented goals are characterized by a desire to achieve more. They are not the vision themselves; just part of a process of getting to your life vision and they are less potent unless they have a clear reason to exist in the journey. Remember, fear, pressure, stress and emotion will highjack your best intentions. You will almost automatically be forced back into the original neural pathway. And you will then react or behave as you have always done instead of how you want to. When there is a crisis going on the brain wants to conserve energy to deal with it so will revert to use those old well established neural pathways. This is where applying resilience and refocussing on your life vision will help you continue your journey to change.
Instead of piling the stress response with loaded obligation of achieving arbitrary goals, ‘visioning’ or future-oriented planning is thought to activate parts of the brain involved with reasoning and creativity. New studies suggest that envisioning the future may be a critical prerequisite for many higher-level planning processes. It allows us to dream a little and maybe that makes us more optimistic. The more optimistic we feel the more likely we are to attract the experiences that fuel our vision and propel us towards the life experience we may have thought wasn’t possible.
I now enter the close of each year excited for pause. A pause to celebrate the previous year good, bad and indifferent, I use the time to reflect on my growth and where I’m heading. I reflect on my vision and how I’m tracking, I create new ideas and centre my thoughts on how to be resilient in response to challenges. The close of my holiday time marks excitement and contentment for the next year ahead. The benefit of the last 15 years has taught me that having a clear life vision is like having a blueprint for success. It makes defining relevant goals easier and more achievable, the journey is more fulfilling and purposeful, and this all contributes to making change more likely.
If you are planning to use this holiday season to ‘reset’ and devise New Year Resolutions ask yourself, what are you truly doing differently to make that a reality? how you will you use this free time to make next year different? How will these resolutions serve a greater life vision? Devising a life vision and actioning it is involved and challenging, and change is tough! Yet if change is what you truly want it’s worth working for it.
If you feel stuck or just unclear about what’s next, or where to in 2022? Please reach out. Sometimes a call is all you need to start the solution. Email me at Josh@purposeandflow.com.au or book in a call via this link. I’m here to share how I turned my life around and how I can help you too!