The Unspoken Tragedy of 'New year, new me!'

“If I hear ‘New Year, New Me’ one more time…..”,  Have you heard this as often as I have this year? Why are we tired of this phrase?

‘New year, new me’ represents a fresh start. It is great to occasionally put the past aside and start with a new, clean slate. However, it also sets an unhealthy precedent when it’s used for too lofty a goal.

This year everything will be different. I will look and feel better. I will save money even though I have never been able to do that before. I will …. whatever big goal you can think of.

Like most goals, a new year’s resolution is often created in a way that it is designed to fail. These goals are born from our desire to be different than we actually are. They come from our  need to overcome obstacles that have always held us back. Now, I’m a firm believer in the power of thinking positive, but wanting this kind of change and actually getting it are two very different things.

These goals are usually so lofty that the weight, emotionally, of the possibility of keeping them actually causes us to fail. It is too hard, too challenging, or too impossible. We fall back to the comfort of what is rather than to continue to be burdened by this goal that seems to never pay off. We do not like to live under such pressure for very long and we are creatures of habit.

These goals are set up to fail us and this is why we have come to hate them. It has become a false hope. A hope that only makes us feel worse when we have once again failed ourselves. 

We tell ourselves, “I should be able to do this, there is no reason why I can’t make that happen.” Only, if you could do that there’s a good chance you would have already done it…

We are capable of doing all sorts of things. However, there are forces in us that stop us from doing things we are perfectly capable of doing. If you set goals without taking this factor into account then they are dreams, wishes, and not often realistic.

The idea behind ‘new year, new me’ is not a bad one. However, this fresh start should be done daily and not yearly. Every day we should encourage ourselves to leave the past behind and work to do better today. This is doable. It is manageable and if we fail ourselves one day it is okay because we are starting fresh again tomorrow and we will work to do better. This feels less hopeless when we fail. In this short goal we take into account our humanity and the aspects of life and our feelings that we cannot always control. We allow them a space to exist and still we can say we are actively working towards bettering ourselves.

If you are bettering yourself daily, in very small and manageable ways, you will see major growth in yourself in the course of a year. If you set out to make a year’s worth of progress without the change in plan established and lived out every day, it is only pressure that you add to your life.

So switch it up! This year instead of saying, ‘New year, new me!’, say, ‘This year will be a year of New Day, New Me!’. Every day, learn from the past and use that information to make today a little better. Sit back and watch how those little betters will add up to surpass any grand goal you would have thought up for your year. Next year you may hardly recognize yourself. You get twice the results and with none of the pressure.

Be careful how you create your personal goals for yourself. Always take into consideration your human factor and give it space inside your goal in a way you can still work to achieve it without letting that factor get you down, it is there for a reason.

Build a better year, one day at a time.

Happy Building!