Happy New Year!
Hey Athletes!
Happy New Year! Did you celebrate? I personally cannot make it past 9pm most days and NYE was no exception there. New Years has never been much of a thing for me, I remember as a child the first time I was allowed to stay up to usher in the new year, all that happened was my Dad cleaned the fish tank. Exciting!
It’s the time of year where your feed is flooded with messages about resolutions and all the ways you could become a better human being by selling you the latest program or gadget. The fitness space is no doubt the worst perpetrator of this. I really don’t want to be like those brands but I will admit it is hard not to send out offers because no doubt there are a lot of people looking for it this time of year.
I have been doing a lot of reflection on resolutions this year and why it rubs me so raw. Every year I do this and come up with a slightly different answer, I guess if we want to talk year over year growth, this might be it!
Here are some of my conclusions this year.
1) There is no harm in reflecting and setting goals, I am all for it, and if a temporal landmark helps you here, by all means go for it and set your goals on New Years, BUT
2) We just went through a long holiday season and if you are anything like me, the post-covid season was about double any pre-covid celebration I had. Double the food, spending, parties etc. It would be very easy to look back and say bow “bad” I was through the holiday… but here is the thing. Eating and celebrating doesn’t make you bad. It just makes you human. Take the morality clause out of it.
3) Our memory is short. Because we just went through that, it may have the tendency to outweigh all the great things we accomplished this year because it is fresh in our memory. If we attach shame to this, we are only going to look at our changes as punishments and not opportunity. It is highly demotivating and setting us up for failure.
4) It also sets us up to overcompensate. How many of you were thinking “today is the day I overhaul my life”. Even if we try and detach the shame (its so freaking hard, trust me, I have been working on this for ages), opportunity also creates a lot of excitement. We may have the tendency to overdo it… at least mentally. We may put too many wants in our list or make them too big and give up entirely.
5) Once we can simplify and make our goals smaller and more achievable, we can enjoy them more. Some things I enjoyed this year that might inspire your goals: