Visualizing New Goals and Strengthening Self-Compassion
The new year can create a renewed emphasis on goals, resolutions, and routines to help us align with our best selves. However, many of us are still recovering from the previous season and attempting to collect ourselves after increased social engagements, family commitments, and work assignments. Feeling a bit of resistance and fog about your goals heading into the new year is not unusual. Below are some tips to help support our self-compassion while tending to our self-care and visualizing goals for the year ahead:
Reflect
Pausing to reflect might feel like you are stalling to begin, but taking a few days to check in with yourself can be helpful. Sometimes our desire to do something doesn’t align with our motivation or the time required. Think about previous achievements that made you feel proud. Measure the amount of clarity, support, and resources that contributed to your positive outcomes. Our body has a great way of reminding us of what works (feels good) and doesn’t work (feeling anxious, annoyed, irritable). Lean into that intuition. Identify what made you feel good and add that to your tool kit. If you’re missing 1-2 of those things, consider what that means for you ahead of time so that you can begin confidently.
Choose a start date that feels good to you.
January 1st may not be your start date, and that’s okay. Allow yourself to reset. That new job, your approach to wellness and creative efforts will feel much more sustainable if you begin when you feel organized and clear on your vision. To gain that clarity, we need rest. If you are fending off the latest virus, struggling to find your energy during these cold and dreary days, and maintaining your activities of daily life, adding something new might feel overwhelming. Check-in with yourself to see how you are feeling. It might feel like thirty days is not enough time to gain momentum, and 365 days might feel too long to remain engaged and sustainable. Try to resist the pressure to confine your efforts to a conscribed start date. Consider tailoring your timeframe to your desired outcome.
Reevaluate old goals
How many of your goals are from a year or two ago? Did you promise to learn a language in 2020 but have yet to complete a lesson? Take a moment to identify what your older goals mean to you now. Sometimes when our goal list feels full, we resist trying something new because we feel obligated to follow through on previous goals. You are allowed to change your mind. Sometimes our lack of progress helps us recognize our interests. So allow yourself to close that book you are struggling to finish or delete that app whose notification you ignore. Doing so can free up space to think about trying new things.
