On Resolutions, Jan 2023
Happy New Year to everyone and congrats for surviving the holidays and all of the ups and downs of 2022! Thank you to everyone that made it out to our December Holiday Soirée which honored our beautiful community and showcased the artwork of our talented client, Monica Mitchell. It felt really good to be able to gather and celebrate this year with our amazing team of instructors and our wonderful clients and friends.
I've been working on this particular newsletter for some time now. I wanted to write something motivational for the New Year while also being informative and poignant. I wanted to contribute to the good intentions that many of us try to harness this time of year. I wanted to offer something that didn't feel like noise, something that felt like the truth.
But the truth is, I've been a combination of tired, busy, and unclear this past week. Not the best energy to bring to a motivational piece!
Some of what is written below was penned with that intention of inspiring and sharing to support others on their path. Much of what was originally written has been erased, put aside for another time. It no longer felt relevant or authentic. Sometimes writing comes very easy to me--the words seem to flow and I feel buzzy with energy when sharing my ideas with you. My writing feels vibrant and full-bodied, fully embodied. And other times, I'm too tired to form sentences. I second-guess every word, every paragraph. My thoughts feel sticky, my words, murky.
I wanted to share this with you today as it's not only what I've been experiencing but I thought maybe some of you might be able to also identify with this as it relates to resolutions, goal setting, and the desire for some kind of change. It's really hard sometimes to stick to our goals. Because although the desire is there, sometimes the motivation is not.
It can also be hard to allow ourselves to even set goals and have aspirations. We don't believe in ourselves and the strata of our lives enough to have the goal. Or, as was my case over the last week, sometimes we are just too tired and unfocused. Because, life.
Resolutions and goals and change and what that all means is actually a gigantic topic and a really important one to me that I happen to be quite ambivalent about, which makes writing on the subject difficult. On the one hand, I love the idea of setting goals and having something to work towards. I spend a good portion of my life helping my clients achieve goals. I love seeing our clients gaining strength in the studio and witnessing the transformations that take place in the lives of my coaching clients.
On the other hand, setting goals and resolutions sometimes feels layered with the idea that we need fixing or that we need to become more productive or that we should be more or less of who we are, whether that's in our physical bodies or in our careers or even pertaining to our our self-care. (Have you ever been stressed out by your self-care routine??) And this way feels rooted in capitalism, in social conditioning, in white supremacy, in oppression, or at times in shame. I don't want to be a part of those goals. And, I imagine your conscious self doesn't want to either.
Many performance-based goals fall into the extrinsic goal category and so often aren't met or when they are met don't deliver the results we imagined. We connect to this idea that when we achieve something outside of us, we will feel a certain way on the inside. We imagine that we will be happy when.....that we will feel financially secure when...... that we will feel complete only if and when........ But when we outsource our happiness, security, and wholeness we detach from our intrinsic agency, our inherent freedom.
I am not saying that we shouldn't have any performance or mastery-based goals. Goals help bring meaning to our lives. Working towards our goals can be fun and benefit our health, our social lives, our relationships. Setting goals and working towards them can benefit our personal and spiritual development. Goals can help bring true purpose to our lives. But we need to watch out for the driver of the goal. Is it your ego, the hungry ghost that will never be satisfied? Is it a feeling of insecurity or not enough-ness? Or is it coming from a place of goodness? Will it offer benefit to others and will it, in some small way, ripple goodness outward into the world?
Are you* in the driver's seat of your resolution?
My advice today when setting goals and resolutions is this: Acknowledge your attributes. Bring compassion to your shortcomings. Forgive yourself for not getting it right. Forgive others for not getting it right. Start over, as many times as you need to. Consider, when do you feel love? When do you feel inspired? When have you felt awe and wonder? When have you felt yourself tear up at the shear beauty of a person or the world? Let your goal amplify those feelings by creating experiences that give you more of that.
In other words, when do you feel most authentically alive with all of your inherent goodness? When are you radically loving yourself and your life? More of that, please!
Next time I'll share some of the research in neuroscience and psychology around goal-setting and long-term behavior change. Till then, what does radical self-love feel like to you?