How to Party On and Celebrate Yourself This New Year
What if you make no resolutions this year and simply celebrate yourself?
How many times have you found yourself listing out all the things you’re going to change about your life leading up to the New Year?
You get rolling and then you have an entire notebook page filled with “I should…,” “I need to…,” and “I could…”
There you are, within minutes of deciding on your resolution, you’re already beating yourself up for all the things you haven’t done.
Suddenly, you’re surrounded with everyone on social media posting about their resolutions and goals, the tv commercials for gym memberships, fitness equipment, diets, health apps, weight loss supplements, meal prep kits, because this is going to be
“your year.”
This is the year you’ll finally get healthy or lose weight, run a marathon, write that book or get the promotion.
And pretty soon, you can hear the influencers and infomercials in your sleep.
Maybe you follow that up with a round of negative self-talk, playing the comparison game, and engaging in some emotional eating or drinking for good measure.
But what if this tradition could be different?
What if you could escape this post-holiday chaos, “New Year, New You,” and lose the resolutions?
Introducing the Anti-Resolution
Instead of overwhelming your mind with all the things you should do to be healthier, happier, prettier, more successful, a better parent, spouse, or person in general, what if you could flip the script?
It’s the overlooked anecdote to all this New Year noise that begins with celebrating you.
How could this year be different if you acknowledged and applauded all the things you accomplished throughout the past year and let that energy help direct your next actions?
Get Your Sparkle On
Think about where you shone this past year.
Sit with that for a minute.
Grab your pom-poms and let’s go, because it’s time to be your own cheering section.
Here are some prompts to get you started:
- What can you celebrate?
- What amazing things did you accomplish?
- Of all the things you could have pursued, which did you take on?
- What did you come out the other side of?
- If you had a year with a lot of challenges, what did you learn about yourself?
- What’s one positive thing you walked out of this past year with?
No New Year's Resolution
Rather than detailing an expansive laundry list of resolutions that
- focus on removing things from your life
- create feelings of guilt and shame
- highlight your thoughts about your own inadequacies…
INSTEAD, celebrate yourself by reflecting on your wins and successes, creations, contributions, growth, and change.
There is no need to fix yourself.
You are worthy as you are right now and deserve to celebrate that.
How Can You Add More to Your New Year?
Life gets better when you add more.
When you:
- create more of what you enjoy
- work toward opportunity
- tackle obstacles
- grow and change
- take action
- show up
- get support
It’s not about a resolution.
The point is recognizing your magic, your secret sauce, and your personal brand of awesome that brought you all the way here.
It’s About You, Not the New Year
It’s not about January 1st.
You can make this magic happen at 10am on a Wednesday in the middle of any given month.
While there is something special about being gifted the time cue of a fresh start—the concrete end of one year and starting a new one—it’s not the only thing in charge of you making decisions about how to evaluate where you want to go and what you want to do with your life.
So, some questions to think about…
- What awesomeness did you make happen last year?
- How can you add more of that awesome into the new year?
- What did you do that impacted your world and the people in it?
- How can you bring more of that energy into this new year?
- In what ways do you want that energy to show up?
- By what means will you harness that into action?
- How can you capture that feeling and bring in more of it?
Bring that celebration into this month and continue celebrating yourself throughout the year.
Shut down the noise and shine your way into the new year.
Silence the influencers, the marketing, and the haters.
There’s no need to do resolutions with a helping of comparison, guilt, or shame.
You’re already awesome.
Try something new this year.
Bring your cheer squad and anti-resolution game to the party to create and go after more of what you want. Do it for you.
Celebrate you and keep bringing more of that bold and bright energy to the table.
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Bethany Shields specializes in working with high performance athletes of every size.
After decades on the diet roller coaster then bariatric surgery, she changed her relationship with food and fitness to become an accomplished athlete. Coach Bethany now works with women who want to increase their energy, get stronger, and crush their fitness goals without resorting to diets.
Find other articles written by Bethany on her coach profile, and access additional resources to activate self-trust, pump up your confidence, and begin to take sustainable action.
