New Year – New Me: What Happens With New Year’s Resolutions?

Where are you with your intentions and goals for 2021? Where is your support team to succeed? What have New Year’s Resolutions (NYR) to do with anger management and one’s biggest wildest dreams?

This and more is the topic of our conversation within the F and Z Reality Podcast. Sounds interesting? Do you as well want to do something different this year? Check out this brief recap from our episode on NYR and enjoy tuning in.

It’s the beginning of April, and the first quarter of 2021 has passed. So it’s a perfect moment for little reflection and to check in with your NYR, your plans for 2021. Keeping up with the promises we are making to ourselves is quite challenging, and NYR is a good case study to have a better look at it. We shared and explored our experiences with setting goals, intentions, directions or challenges for a different new year or executing projects. As we dug into various strategies and tricks to get to your goals. Here, you can find key take away points!

1. It’s easy to stick and keep up with NYR or goals that have a deep meaning for us.

Most of the NYR or goals we set are too broad and somewhat in a wish-list than achievable destinations. And it does matter how we frame our goals. One might want to improve on a healthy lifestyle and then it’s easier to eat healthily and follow an exercise routine when one realises that it will have a financial impact in a few years as lack of health is costly.

2. Create your private support system.

Share 2 or 3 important things you want to achieve with someone close to you, a family member or a friend, as they will be checking in with you and holding you accountable. Pick people who care about you and want to see you succeed.

3. Become your own best friend – support yourself by yourself.

No one knows you better than… you! There are 3 steps to building a lasting and supporting relationship with yourself. It starts with self-listening: openly and honestly listen to your needs, thoughts, wants and feelings. Invite yourself for a coffee, enjoy your own company, share and update yourself. In doing so, it will create an opportunity for the second step: self-trust. That’s the start of your self-relationship, you start caring for yourself, and so you want to keep all the promises that you made to yourself. And then the last step: self-confidence. You become confident about your promises, about your intuition, about your thoughts and your judgements. And here it loops: when you listen to those thoughts, you learn about yourself, you start to know which thoughts and actions serve you, and you become a real best friend to yourself.

4. Distinguish your needs from your wants.

It’s a learning process, exactly as building the relationship with some else. It requires some trying outs and testing what works. You need to experiment, observe and learn to be able to distinguish between needs and wants. And a key component is to be honest to yourself. There is so much external noise, like social norms, your boss, family, partner or friends telling you who you should be, what you should want and that stays in your head. So it’s essential to check in, honestly, with yourself — what do I really want? It helps to know your values, it takes quite some digging and time. THe more you discover yourself, the more easily you separate your needs from your wants.

5. Discover what helps you manage your anger and yourself.

There are many techniques out there to master self- and anger management. From mindfulness tricks like taking a deep breath, closing your eyes, listening to your heartbeat and focusing on the sounds around you. Or also having an intense short physical activity to push all this blood from your brain to your muscles. Practising regularly at home to allocate time just for you to be yourself, thinking about life and how a day will be. So that when needed, you would be able to just take a deep breath, put on the poker face to prevent escalation of a difficult situation, then take a break and get back when emotions are calmer.

6. Discover what works for you and follow it.

There isn’t anything on this planet working for everyone. Everybody has to pick what serves them best. As we are so different, we feel differently, we think differently, and different things help us. We often get stuck in a belief that there is one right way of doing things. Find out what works for you and keep applying it.

7. Dare to be your entire self.

Dare to be you, dare to be honest, dare not to have any plans but to have trust in you, as a human being you have everything that you need to thrive to succeed. Instead of trying to accomplish a big change — become more intentional each day, be more present, be more yourself, so the change is towards being more you, not becoming somebody different. And for that to happen, you need to have a predefined destination where you are going, knowing what your life mission, purpose or biggest wildest dream is.

8. Define your own success.

Often a definition of a successful year is not our definition of a successful year, it comes from social media, people that inspire us, our society, work, family. Follow your own KPIs or metrics, measure your small wins and create your own happiness.

Which point sounds the most interesting to you? Want to know the whole story and rationale behind each point? Follow this link and tune into the full episode, it’s around 30 minutes long and it will give you the stretch your mind is looking for! Now you are ready to do some self-check and re-calibrate your path in 2021.

Tune into our F+Z Reality’s Podcast here.

Have comments? Questions? Suggestions? We want to hear it all: fandzreality@gmail.com!