NEW YEAR, SAME ME

Want to know a little secret? I don’t have a single New Year’s resolution. This might seem surprising considering I am a mental health advocate who is constantly yapping about making adjustments to improve our relationships and internal world. But I am honestly over the cyclical pressure to change and improve. I do not want to enter 2024 with the expectation that I am not good enough and that this is an opportunity for me to totally start over or reinvent myself. Instead, I would much rather focus on the parts of me I like so much, I don’t want them to change.

One of the lightbulb moments during my grad program was learning about therapists taking a strength-based approach. This means that instead of trying to “fix” weaknesses, you help clients identify their strengths so they can lean into them more. I think this is a great tool to use if you (like so many of us) feel compelled to start the new year off right. So in lieu of spending the beginning of 2024 making lists of all the things we don’t like about ourselves, why don’t we take that same time for self-reflection and identify what makes us awesome?