Take advantage of 2022, by connecting with you!

Most people start every year, with resolutions, firmly believing they can change. Often, we look forward to the stroke of midnight so we can alter our habits. Next year, I’ll eat healthy. Next year, I’ll save money. Next year, I’ll get organized. 

The truth is if you want to benefit from your New Year’s goals, before you create your list, examine your relationship with yourself. What I mean by this is stop and observe yourself.

How do you speak to yourself? Often the way we speak to ourselves is the way someone in our lives spoke to us when we were young. Try this for a day: Write down any thoughts you say to yourself. For example, I’m so stupid! I just can’t. I’m a failure. I’m a screw up. I’ll never be good at this or that.  

Think how you would speak to a close friend, and try speaking to yourself in that way.

Secondly, identify where you let yourself off the hook thinking no one will know. For me it’s no one will know I didn’t go for a run today. No one will know I sneaked that extra cookie.

We cannot truly transform ourselves until we stop those old thoughts and create new ones. For years, I was hard on myself looking at what I hadn’t accomplished rather than what I had. No matter how hard I tried, how much I did, it was never enough. I had a story that I had to always be outperforming others and then was mad at myself when I failed. When I gave myself the space to just be me and not compare myself to others, a new world opened up. 

We hear the word integrity used in many conversations today. For many years, I saw integrity as the way you treated others. I confused it with having morals or respect. The truth is the promises we tell ourselves are more powerful than anything we promise another. Everytime you break an agreement with yourself, you start to believe in yourself a little bit less.

Want to keep those resolutions, or goals, as I like to call them?

Step 1: Observe and create new ways of speaking to yourself.

Step 2: Notice what you promise to yourself and when you let yourself break those promises. Why do you feel it’s OK to not keep those agreements?

Step 3: What stories about yourself from the past are you still relieving today? Declare those judgments over! They are not true!

Follow those steps, and 2022 can be not only a New Year but a powerful one where you connect to your true self.