A New Year’s Resolution Worth Making

🎧 👉 Prefer audio? You can also listen to me share about this in podcast episode #036 here.

Happy New Year!

If you listened to last week’s podcast episode, the closing quote was so good it bears repeating, and it even deserves a full episode of its own.

“Every year, you make a resolution to change yourself. This year, make a resolution to be yourself.”

— Unknown

Oh, that’s so good. 

What if your focus this year was to practice being yourself?

When you hear me say that, you may think, “Charis, I’m already being myself.” But I want you to ask yourself if that is absolutely 100% true.

I’ve been actively and consciously practicing being myself, and yet I still have further I can go with being myself more often in my day-to-day life.

Here’s what I think it means to truly be yourself:

What if you honor your energy and, instead of pushing yourself with sheer willpower, you slow down and check in with yourself more frequently to see how you feel about what you are doing at that moment?

What if you ask yourself what you actually need at any moment?

What if you listen to your body when it was resisting what you were doing?

What if you listen to your gut about what was right for you instead of comparing yourself to what others were doing?

What if you forgive yourself for past mistakes?

What if you give yourself permission to change your mind?

What if you said “no” more?

What if you speak up and ask for what you want?

What if you start acknowledging your feelings, feeling your feelings, and even naming them instead of letting them take you for a ride or instead of shoving them aside?

What if you get off your hamster wheel and rediscover yourself—the real you underneath the busy bee you?

Now that may all sound wonderful to you, or it may sound daunting and scary…

Isn’t it amazing how simple it sounds to just “be ourselves”

...and yet, in reality, it can be really hard to actually “be” ourselves because we have decades of habitual behaviors that our brains have wired as our norm?

Yet, if you take regular small steps toward rediscovering yourself and get some support along the way, it is absolutely possible to be yourself more often than you probably are.

And I can tell you from personal experience that being yourself more results in feeling more balanced, feeling more joy, and feeling more peace of mind.

When you’re not really being yourself, you experience inner resistance and that creates all kinds of discomfort.

So again, I want to ask you, what if you practiced being yourself more this year?

You deserve to free more of the real you who right now may be a bit buried inside.

Go back over the examples I gave you above, and grab just one or two to focus on this week.

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

🎧 👉 Prefer audio? You can also listen to me share about this in podcast episode #036 here.