It’s that season. Spotify Wrapped has wrapped, Christmas has come and gone, and perhaps, all the terrible weight of everything you didn’t do this year lands on your shoulders like a fat Yuletide log.
So maybe you start setting New Year’s resolutions. This year, I resolve to exercise 100 hours a day, to make a million dollars a minute, to visit fifteen different planets, oh and perhaps spend a few more precious moments with my family.
I’m sure you’ve also read about how many New Year’s resolutions fail, and I’m not here to beat you up about that or rehash any doom-mongering. You want to change, and that’s great!
But let’s set you up for success.
One of my many issues with New Year’s resolutions is that they focus on this immediate, arbitrary deadline, after which you will suddenly become a totally different, almost always unrealistic person.
You set these goals for yourself, and then the exercise of goal setting lets you convince (lie) yourself that when the calendar turns over, you’ll magically become a different person.
But so often, this goal setting is done without really believing that you’ll achieve these things. Saying I’ll exercise every day for four hours when I haven’t left the house in four days is… optimistic at best. Borderline delusional is more like it.
So here’s my advice. You want to make a big change, have a great year, be a better person? Start thinking of yourself as that person. Get into the tactile, the sensory. What does it feel like, what does it smell like?
Where are your shoes in the morning, when you lace them up for a run? How do they feel sliding onto your feet? How amazing does that coffee taste when you get back? Focus on the small moments. Not the unrealistic, vague markers of success.
Real change has to persist through the tough times; not from simply inventing an impossible to-do list for yourself. Real change comes from persistence, from grit, and the indomitable will that drives those things, like a salmon fighting its way up stream.
Salmon swim upstream to lay their eggs (and then die, but let’s ignore that for now). I’m no marine psychologist, but I’ll venture that they don’t wait around for the clock to strike midnight and then say, hey I’ll start swimming up this massive river going the wrong way. They just do it. It’s who they are.
So, instead of torturing yourself with unrealistic expectations, be a salmon. It’s normal for you to swim upstream. It’s normal for you to struggle, and even more normal for you to succeed. Don’t focus on all the things you have to do. Focus instead on being a person who does those things. Tell yourself it’s normal to do hard things. It’s normal for you to exercise however much you want to, to succeed in the way you dream of.
The salmon does not resent the river it struggles against. Get on your own side and see yourself as the adversity-overcoming champion you are. Be a salmon. Swim upstream, because it’s just who you are.