By Joyce Kattunilath
New Year’s herald new beginnings – a chance to define ourselves anew. This is a brand-new opportunity to intentionally rethink our personal goals and directions. While every new day brings with it fresh opportunities, most of us like to consider a brand-New Year as a symbol of new beginnings.
Making promises for a fresh year and fresh self is exciting. As 2023 begins, let us seize the opportunity to look forward. We’ve all made those resolutions – to find a new job, quit a bad habit, commit to an exercise routine, etc…. but what if your New Year’s resolution for 2023 was simply taking better care of yourself and looking after your wellbeing?
Keeping our body, mind, and spirit healthy in our fast-paced modern lives can sometimes feel like a daunting task. Taking care of ourselves doesn’t have to get complicated. Most of us get tied down with family, work, social lives, and other engagements that it becomes almost impossible to carve out time for ourselves. We get so good at ignoring our own needs, that it’s hard to just click our fingers and suddenly prioritise them. A good place to start is in taking small, purposeful steps towards our goals, in the right direction, and across multiple levels of our lives.
There is no one giant step that does it. It’s a lot of little steps.
Peter A Cohen
Taking small steps towards your goal
Step 1: Break it down.
Instead of worrying about what you might do all year long, make a self-care or wellbeing list of things you can do today or this week. Let’s be realistic and set goals that can be accomplished over small periods of time, which will in time provide for a series of milestones. As we keep accomplishing our short-term wellbeing goals on a continued basis, we design for ourselves a step-by-step system which paves the way to long term goals. We have all come by these words that ‘Success does not come overnight’; you have to take small steps, every day, towards your goals and eventually it will all sum up. Take the first step today, it will be worth it.
Step 2: Track your progress.
Track your progress on a weekly or fortnightly basis to see how well you are doing and where you can improve. Most importantly, ask for help when required, stay focused on your goals, and never give up.
Step 3: Modify your goals to suit your wellbeing journey
Assess your progress regularly, such as weekly or a couple of times a month and modify your goals and path as required. Sometimes you will need to step back and re-assess your wellness journey and that isn’t a bad thing. Remember that a lot of things in life do not go as planned and consider this to be a re-routing process, and not a failure. This is our opportunity to step back and re-evaluate what truly matters and reframe our goals rather than giving up on them.
In reality, no one really knows all that they will face in a year, a month, a week, or even a day. Let us remind ourselves to take small steps throughout our wellbeing journey and trust that by nourishing ourselves and those around us, a balance will emerge that’s just right for us. There should be no shame or guilt when thinking back on your resolutions, but rather pride in how you went about accomplishing them. Consider your progress towards each of them and take a moment to acknowledge how much effort you have actually put towards achieving them this far. Let your unique purpose and committed action steps, no matter what they are, lead you to achieve your wellbeing.
