Happy New Year!!
I hope you had an amazing holiday season and loads of time to rest and recharge in between drinking and eating cheese!
Guess that means it's time for that old new year, new me thing.
Look, I know some people don’t think too much about using the New Year as an opportunity to change your life.
There is nothing in the ticking of a second hand on your watch or the flipping of a page in your diary that's going to magically rock your world.
But it’s a great chance to draw a line in the sand when it comes to making changes, reviewing your wins and lessons learned and deciding what you would like to focus on changing.
Chances are you’ve made a few goals or resolutions for the year.
You might have made some plans on how you’re going to accomplish those.
Maybe you’re planning on getting some help – a business coach, a personal trainer, a financial advisor, building a team to help you in your business.
Chances are though, you’re mostly depending on willpower to achieve the changes you want to make this year.
Which means it’s a perfect time to talk about why willpower rarely gets you where you want to be.
Change is a dirty word to your brain. Specifically, to the caveman part of your brain.
Which is best friends with the part of your nervous system that regulates all those automatic functions that keep you alive awake or sleeping.
Going up against that dynamic duo is like facing down Batman and Superman together. When you're hungover, ill and haven't slept for two weeks.
And those two friends hate change. They don’t care whether those changes will make you happy. They can’t understand that making those changes could make you healthier, wealthier, put years on your life.
All those besties know is that you’re alive today.
And any changes you make could make you unalive in a heartbeat.
You're fighting to lose a few pounds or double your revenue.
They're fighting to save your life. Literally.
Tell me again how your willpower is going to get you to the finish line?
That doesn't mean it's time to just give up and return to that Christmas slump of Netflix, cheese and Baileys (just me??).
It means you just need to get cleverer than your brain.
When I was doing my hypnotherapy training, one of the phrases we had basically beaten into our head was “make the unfamiliar familiar”.
There’s a reason why vision boards, affirmations, manifestation and visioning work. They’re all ways of teaching our brain gradually not to be afraid of change.
I'm a big believer in setting both incremental and aspirational goals. Which means sometimes the gap between where you are right now and where you would be if you achieved those goals is way to big for your brain to be comfortable for.
You need to break your goal into incremental changes and then convince your brain to accept those small changes.
Write the first step down on Post-its and put them everywhere.
Journal about what it will feel like to achieve that step.
Create mental pictures of you taking that step and seeing yourself getting it done.
When it comes to manifestation, let's talk about how Olympic athletes doing it.
Every day, imagine all the steps you'll need to take to get your big goal.
For those athletes, it may mean seeing themselves getting up for training every day. And then imagining what it would be like waking up early, it's still dark outside, it's cold, wet, windy. The magic in their manifesting comes in here - they imagine themselves getting up when they don't want to, what the tiredness will feel like in their body, how the rain and the cold will hit them when they walk out the door, how they will feel during and after the training.
They're making those tough days that they know are coming up familiar to their brain. They're using words and pictures to show their brain that they can get through those times they don't want to train or just flat out feel like they can't do it.
Which means when those days come, their brain is 100% on board with them getting up and getting it done.
They're making every single step of their training familiar to their brain, making their brain their friend not their enemy.
There's a million times more broken resolutions every year than there are achieved ones. You've probably abandoned a fair few in your lifetime.
So, if you've come up with some for 2023 or set yourself some pretty ambitious goals in your business this year, feel comfortable with the fact that you're probably going to have to dig a little deep to get them done.
Don’t give up if you fall at the first hurdle.
Don’t think you’re not strong enough or capable of making the changes you want, of achieving the goals you’ve set.
Don’t let your inner mean girl give you such a hard time you decide you can’t do something you really want to do.
Take a step back, focus on why what you want is important to you and then think about what tools you need to make those changes.
Because willpower is not a tool to get what you want and it’s definitely not something you should use to beat yourself up with!
If you’re still figuring out your year, here’s what I’ve been doing over the Christmas break:
💫 Wrote out a HUGE list of everything that no longer serves me and that I wanted to leave behind in 2022
💫 Wrote out an equally huge list of everything I was grateful for over the last 12 months
💫 Got clear on the changes, growth and healing I’ve gone through and who that has made me today
💫 Looked at my biggest wins and learnings – what I could take from them and how they made me feel
💫 Manifestation pages – I’ve written out a journal entry for 1st January 2024 detailing everything that’s happened to me in 2023, how I did it and how it made me feel
I’m wishing you all the most amazing 2023, a year of growth, abundance and joy!
Let’s get it started!!!!
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