Beware “new year, new you”
Beware the hype, tools and approaches that make you feel like you’re not good enough. Trading money and time for esteem will make you poorer in all three.
The emails are flying in:
- Get into shape with a new gym membership today!
- Get 20% off on our meditation app!
- Sign up for our 2022 reading challenge and read more books this year!
- Buy my calendars and journals to organise your life and have a better year!
It feels like a wacky Black Friday campaign. But there is something insidious about it. It plays on your insecurities around who you suspect (but want desperately to fix) you aren’t (slim, young or beautiful), what you don’t have (success in love, business or life), or where you’re going (if you don’t start getting up at 4 AM every day and running a marathon each month, you’ll never be or have enough).
As a productivity coach, I am all for capitalising on the energy of a new year. I do think, as a Questioner, that the New Year is a bit random (in reality, we can start over at any point, whenever we want: we do not need to wait for January 1st, or the other traditional New Year in the west, Labor Day/the first day of school). But it is also a useful reset button for many humans.
So, I agree, if you want to reset right now, having reflected on last year, and have some additional self-awareness and information on what worked and what didn’t, what you’d like to try now, and what you’d like to let go, then yes, please do reflect on your reset and how you’d like to move forward. I’d even vote for making a plan, scheduling concrete actions and setting up some accountability mechanisms.
But if you are responding to societal pressure to be more or better or thinner or younger or faster or more successful or less lazy, I gently invite you to think again.
The minute you decide you are not good enough (and that you have to get better) is the minute you start your descent.
Herein lies the poison. When you decide you are not good enough, your brain will seek support and proof. And that which it seeks, it will find. So you will find people, tools, approaches and challenges that will support your not being good enough — and in the worst-case scenario, profit from your belief. You’ll be offered 30-day diet programmes, 3-month exercise plans, a yearly meditation subscription, whatever it is, and be promised a perfect, healthy, sane body and mind.
But here’s the rub.
People don’t “get better” when they believe there is something wrong with them.
People do better when they feel better.
Believing in your core that there is something wrong with you and that you have to get better is poison. It will eat away at you. It will sabotage every new habit you try to build, every new programme you pay for, every new approach you try.
Do you want a New Year, New You?
Start from the knowledge that you are enough.
From there, we can go everywhere.
