With every new year, there are tons of blogs written about best practices for setting New Year’s resolutions. In fact, we wrote one last year too! I wanted to try something different and give you a resolution to try out. A lot of people try to do resolutions that others do: go to the gym more, eat healthier, stop drinking soda, do better in school, be nicer to people. All of these are admirable goals, but I wanted to share a resolution that can have a larger impact on your life. What if you set out to gain greater self-understanding? For those who read this blog, you may have heard the terms metacognition and self-monitoring. These are skills that can help you gain a greater sense of self-understanding, self-control, and acceptance. With more self-understanding, self-control, and acceptance, you will be empowering yourself to set appropriate goals and strategies to achieve those goals.
Learning Opportunities
Every opportunity, circumstance, situation, and outcome is a learning opportunity. We learn two things: 1) about the situation, and 2) about ourselves interacting with that situation. In this sense, nothing is a failure if you learn from it. In 2022, let’s focus on growth. What can I do differently next time? How can I set myself up for success in the future? By focusing on yourself, you are multiplying your learning opportunities and setting yourself up to achieve all your other goals. So how can we do this? Here are some questions that should become a part of your toolbox this year:
- Did I achieve what I wanted to achieve?
- If yes, what did I do to lead to that outcome?
- If no, what can I do differently next time?
- What was in my control in this situation?
- How did I either set myself up for success or set myself up for a letdown?
- What do I do really well? How can I lean on these skills/strategies/behaviors more for other situations?
Acceptance and self-understanding of who we are can only help. Not only will you set better goals for yourself in 2022, but you will also achieve more goals by tapping into your strengths, developing yourself, and accepting what is and is not possible.
Love Yourself
As a first guiding thought for 2022, learn to love yourself. Self-understanding can be a scary thing. Acknowledging our faults and our challenges is an admission of weakness. In this admission, there is strength.
I hope you will join me in this resolution: I hope to learn more about who I am, what makes me tick, and how I can leverage this to be the person that I hope to me.
