As the clock strikes midnight and we bid farewell to the old year, the air is often filled with resolutions and promises of self-improvement. However, success is never quite as linear as we’d all hoped it would be.
Article by Sophie Gatward-Wicks
Stress from the previous year carries into the new one, along with hopes, dreams and the same personal qualities we had minutes prior to the magical midnight moment on the 31st December.
The 1st of January can feel like an exciting pinnacle of turnaround. Turning a new leaf, a fresh start, a new set of slightly-differently dated days on your calendar to fill with all the things you didn’t get to do during the last trip around the sun. To some, it’s a reason to follow-through on long awaited goals, with motivation fuelled entirely by the January hype as new strategies are curated with “fail-safe” plans.
And although an exciting challenge is considered the best motivator for accelerated results, it’s really only sustainable if your challenge is against your own achievements. Small steps to gradual improvements can, with time, become incredible changes, but this only works in the long-term when pitting yourself against yourself. Personal growth is exactly that, a personal journey, and not comparable to the lives of anyone else.
When making these agreements with yourself, taking note of your past actions, your reactions and your previous capabilities is just as important as having that idyllic vision of your future self. It can be all too easy to become focused on how you would like to be perceived in the world, rather than how you would like to feel in the world.
Particularly around this time of year, social media can play a huge part in how we perceive one person’s life, their picturesque run-down reel of the year before, alongside all their successes and set goals for 2024. More often than not, this may be all that you see. Not their failures, or struggles, or the ‘’behind the scenes’’ dramas of that post, that picture, that event.
Basing your self-worth on the traditional notion of New Year’s resolutions is perhaps not the wisest way forward. Self-discovery requires trials and tribulations just as much as it does wins and successes in order to develop from experience into expertise.
Having an honest understanding of your current self, and only then aligning that with where you would like to see yourself in the coming year, will take the lid off the pressure cooker. Goals are so much easier to work towards if the steps are within our reach.
As you leave 2023, is it perhaps not more exciting to allow yourself the opportunity to fail, with the determination to succeed? Knowing that every learning curve will eventually lead you to where you were always meant to be.
Cheers to a year of authenticity, growth, and boundless possibilities – And of course, may your future be always BRIGHT!
