Before You Make Your New Year’s Resolution, Read This.
There are two ways to lead a life in alignment with your values.
You can use what you believe you value to try to build your life.
Or, you can look at your life as it is to discover what you REALLY value.
And hey. These are actually both true.
Many human beings have had this experience: You look at your life and realize suddenly that your value systems do not align with the way you’ve been living. That it’s time to make some changes. This is a beautiful, natural, inevitable moment when your values are maturing and your life is catching up.
When that’s the case, making changes to your lifestyle is almost effortless. Clunky at first, maybe. But not that hard. What isn’t true anymore naturally falls away. And you will easily have motivation and energy for the thing that is true to replace old behaviors.
But here’s the thing that people miss.
If it’s not easy to make a change, and it’s constant efforting and internal friction and forcing yourself, you might not be being that honest with yourself.
This is where you want to get really humble learning about what you ACTUALLY value, outside of your idea of what you think you “should” be doing. This is always demonstrated by looking at what you’re already motivated to do and participating in.
To put it simply: What do you do already? There’s a pretty good chance that’s what you value.
The truth is that people only do what they actually want to do. What is the deepest part of you invested in?
Until that part of you gets on board, good luck.
You should know that your ego, the part of you that wants to look good, or thinks you can achieve a desired result if you pump out a specific behavior will have lots of ideas for you about how you should live your life. But if you aren’t doing these behaviors, if they don’t stick or you constantly avoid them or make excuses around them, you have to ask yourself how honestly you’re really invested in these things.
Shame and wanting to force behavior for its *result* are horrible motivators.
Not only do they feel awful, but they’re all mental. The mind alone has hardly motivated anybody to do anything.
Shame doesn’t work.
Neither does force.
The only thing that truly motivates a person to change their behavior is desire.
It lives in your body. It comes from the deepest part of you. You cannot fake it or put it on when it’s convenient for you.
The energetics are entirely different when you’re saturated in desire and commitment to the process, to the lifestyle, to the nitty-gritty of participating in a change. Devoted to a value system in the deepest part of you.
Let’s explore an example.
If you’ve been telling yourself for awhile that you value animal life and want to go vegan, but you continue to eat meat and are always in opposition to that idea of yourself, making excuses to eat meat, you say you’ll start tomorrow and then next week and then on New Years… Get really honest with yourself. Do you actually value animal life more than your love for the taste of meat?
Your behavior says you don’t.
And honestly, I don’t.
As a spiritual woman who has walked two miles in Manhattan during a heat wave in relentless pursuit for a composting bin, that is some unpopular truth that my ego hates. Right now I like eating meat more than my value for animal life.
I wish I valued animal life more than my own desire for meat. I’ve cut down in some places because it feels true. I used to eat meat for every meal, and at some point eating meat every day just naturally fell away. But I am not a yes to giving it up all the way.
I used to say I’d be a vegan someday. Next month, next year, when I moved into the city, whatever. But now I know I probably won’t. Because I don’t actually want to.
Lots of people would have a problem with that. It’s seemingly contradictory and definitely not PC.
I’m willing to be honest with myself.
Because there is a baseline truth of who I am right now or in any given moment on any given day. The truth of where I am on my path.
And the more I resist it, the more of my precious life-force I let spiral down the drain with my willingness to leak my energy on thinking about and having friction around what I think I “should” be doing. Instead of being in what’s true, and investing in what I really care about now.
When your values change, like REALLY change, you will know because your lifestyle will naturally shift to meet it.
So if you can’t get motivated to work out, have a daily meditation practice, change your diet, start writing, quit smoking, start doing art, whatever…
Do you actually want to?
Whatever the answer is, that’s totally okay. There’s no right way to be a human, only to be in the reality that you’re imperfect and ever-evolving.
From here, you ask yourself why you think you want the thing, or who you think you could be if you had that. Excavate the part of you that forced it on you. See what they’re really looking for. And if you can give it to yourself directly from the source.
You will never need to outsource true self-love to a third party.
People do not feel victimized by the things they truly value.
I stretch every morning, no matter what. No matter how early I have to get up, if I am sick, if I am traveling, if I am sharing a room, if I am bored with it, if I don’t really feel like it. I am 100% committed to this value of movement and connection to my body and it’s easy for me to make time for it. It was not always like that. I used to be full of excuses, self-judgement, and comparison around it. I let it go. One day, the desire came in clear, and I’ve been committed ever since. Bottom line, I didn’t want to until I did.
And sometimes, it’s a true desire that just isn’t ready yet.
Whatever you’re doing and wherever you are might change. It’s very real that it might just not be time. A part of you has to catch up. It’s like when you carry a book around in your bag for a month before you actually begin to read it.
But if you listen in, you can tell the difference between something true emerging and a fabrication of your egoic will.
So I recommend you be honest about your values.
In the new year, honor yourself by saving yourself the energy, self-judgement, and self-punishment cycle of not doing something you think you “should” do.
In fact, ditch a New Year’s Resolution all together and instead commit to an imperfect practice of unconditional self love. You can love yourself where you are. As a flawed human who is always growing and changing.
Because remember:
You will always be available for the deepest truth.
And if you’re not available for it, it’s just not true right now.
