Courage for career women blog

with Vanessa May

Approach your New Year’s resolution with acceptance and challenge

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January is the season that many humans set goals for themselves. Perhaps you’ve set a work goal to get the promotion you want or find more purpose and meaning. Or maybe there’s a desire to be healthier and fitter or bring more mindfulness and compassion into your life. Whatever your New Year’s resolution or goal, the question that matters is the energy you bring to them.

Sometimes we come from a place of frustration that something isn’t happening, you’ve tried before but for some reason you just can’t sustain your efforts and energy to make progress. There’s a feeling of why isn’t this happening for me and an underlying tone of victim consciousness.

Or perhaps there’s a fearful energy behind it. You’re fully aware about the consequences of not achieving this goal. Failure to achieve it might have big consequences from lack of financial success to your own survivability or thriving in the world.   

Or maybe you’re all gung-ho about achieving it this time but secretly have a conflicting belief that it’s not possible for you.

When you approach your intentions and goals like this, you bring a resistance to the challenge and opportunity. This resistance is like friction, thwarting progress. A part of you is going through the motions of achieving what you desire, and another part is derailing you.

What would it look like if you approached your goals with acceptance and embracing the challenge?

A New Year’s resolution is a goal that requires a new kind of energy and effort. At the start there will likely be a force or a spark of some kind to create movement. From this place of movement there will be ups and downs, it’s normal, but what if you accepted and embraced those are part of the challenge? 

What if you looked out for them so that when they arise you could greet them with acceptance and acknowledgment that they were a normal part of the process of making a shift or change?

If I meet my word of the year “Integrity” with acceptance and challenge, I anticipate that over the course of 2023 there will be times where I will be right on the edge of my comfort zone challenged to choose integrity over fake harmonising. 

I chose integrity because I want to send a clear bat signal out of who I am in the world and what my leadership stands for. I want to let integrity trump my desire to please and fit in. I want to improve my muscle of staying with heat and conflict.  

I am not assuming an easy ride with this word. I have abundant expectancy of where integrity will serve my leadership, but I am letting go of expectations of how this will look. I am excited and open to the journey. I am acknowledging my fear and conflict avoidance and desire for perfectionism and consciously retiring these habits because they cost me and others authenticity. I chose an energy of aliveness as I work with this intention for the year. I am taking an attitude that I am constantly learning and growing so that I can allow myself to make mistakes along the way.  

I invite you to review any intentions or goals you have set for yourself, identify any resistance you may be bringing into them and discover your own acceptance and challenge for the journey ahead. 

If you need support stepping into your own authenticity and courage in the year ahead, or embracing the challenge of your New Year’s resolution, I’m here to help. Book a free call today.