Rethinking New Year’s Resolutions

It’s that time of year again. Some of us might be thinking about making some New Year’s resolutions, and some of us might have looked at the last couple of years of world-wide chaos and gone, nope! We’ll enter 2023 real quietly, real respectfully, not say anything silly about 2023 being ‘Our Year’ and hope that the Universe is kind to us!

And I’m somewhere in-between.

It’s occurred to me recently that we can achieve far less in an hour, a day, a week or even a year than we usually think we can.

But when we look back over three or five years, often the amount we have achieved, the changes and milestones we’ve hit in our lives and the amount we have grown? It’s astounding.

Often, New Year’s Resolutions don’t get stuck to, but that’s partly because life is complex. It’s a meandering path full of twists and turns, rather than a straight set route that we can rely on. Particularly for the military community, one of the reasons we are such a resilient and agile group of people is because the future is rarely set in stone, and pivoting, a skill that is championed in the business world, is something we do on the daily!

We are solution led people, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit for that.

But pivoting also requires mental energy, and that mental energy can add up and become exhausting. We are constantly solving problems in our everyday lives, re-organising dates, applying for refunds for things we booked when we thought our partners would have time off, organising house moves and school moves, finding and booking tradespeople in when things break down, and figuring out how to get to the vets or the hospital in the middle of the night when we don’t have a car and our spouse is away. We’re deciding who we feel like we can call in a favour with, but also doing favours whenever we can, knowing that when the going gets tough, it’s good to have cultivated mutual support in our communities.

We spend a LOT of time on our toes, more than most people, and we are hit with more curveballs. So it’s to be expected that we might find it difficult to maintain routines or stick to our New Years resolutions. After all, no two months look the same in the military.

A close friend of mine has a brilliant analogy for working towards big goals that I use constantly.  She describes a big goal like your North Star. You are constantly moving towards it, and sometimes it will move to a different place and it won’t be directly ahead anymore. You might have to adjust your direction a little, but if you keep moving towards it, keep your sights set on it and take little steps, however small, to help you reach your goal, you will eventually get there. It’s okay if you get distracted or take a diversion because diversions are part of life. The North Star will always be there, it won’t disappear, and eventually you’ll get back on course.

When friends ask us well-meaningly if we’ve hit that big goal we had, if we’re still running every day, or if we did anything more with that book idea, or going back to university, and our answer is “No, stuff came up”, it can feel disheartening. But if you look back at the last three years, looking for the treasures, mining for the growth and blessings and adventures, you’ll probably find you have achieved far more than you ever expected, even if those achievements aren’t exactly the same as the things you had initially planned. And you’ll also likely find that they have still been taking you closer to your North Star, even if at the time, they felt like detours.

Here’s what I know is true for me; there have been so many times in the last 10 years where something has felt like a detour. Where I’ve felt stuck, like I was putting one foot in front of the other but didn’t know where I was headed. There were days that felt like they had no point, efforts that felt wasted, opportunities that looked at the time like they had been missed. And yet if I stepped back in time and told my younger self what life was looking like right now, she would be thrilled. And I wouldn’t have the life I have now if it wasn’t for all those detours.

So this New Year, why don’t we try to think more about what our North Star is, and how we can keep taking little steps towards it. Let’s take a beat to look back on the last few years and celebrate all the ways we have become more than we expected of ourselves, and use that as a signpost for all that we might do and be in the years to come.

Maybe your win was to start the journey to getting sober, or overcoming anxiety or depression. Maybe you’ve been navigating health issues, waking up every day, putting your feet on the ground and doing life even when it was hard. Maybe you’ve been studying, developing a business idea, or developing as a human being; healing past trauma so it isn’t passed down to your children. Those are all huge wins! Don’t let what success looks like for you be dictated by what someone else says it looks like for them.

If you make one New Year’s resolution that’s really worth sticking to; let it be that you don’t let comparison steal even a moment of joy from your life.

May 2023 bring all that you hope for, and more.