New Thoughts On New Year's Resolutions

Ever wonder why most people don't stick to their resolutions? It's because they haven't adjusted their beliefs. Most of us think that the inspiration of a fresh start is enough to get us to the end result, but if that were true, you'd have done everything you'd ever set your mind to. Join me as I walk you through how to think about your goals for the new year so that you really can start to change your life the way you want in 2023.    

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Welcome to " You need a coach bitch with Chris Hale. I'm your host Chris Hale. I'm a certified life coach that helps queer creatives. Take their passion, turn it into a purpose and get paid. If you are looking to make an impact on the world with your work by dismantling internalized, oppressive thought systems by using coaching spirituality and a lot of cursing, you are in the right place.

So let's get to work.

 Hey, besties. How are you doing? I'm gonna be honest. I have been so fucking sick, like, oh my God, , um, I had a really nice Christmas and Christmas day, and then on the 26th Boxing Day I got a fever. It was not Covid. Pretty sure it was the flu and it kicked my ass. I'm still actually recovering. It is Saturday when I'm recording this, releasing it two days late.

I could not even think about recording anything. Um, Wednesday when I normally would, or even Thursday because I was bedbound. I missed my husband's birthday. Um, I missed seeing one of our former students Perform in Beetlejuice. It's his Broadway debut and I missed it. And the show closes next week and I don't know that I'm gonna get there.

Um, and I basically spent all my time off in bed, which sounds amazing, but not really when you have a chest infection. So here we are. I wanted to get this episode in. The new year strikes, and I wanted to stay committed to my goal to record a podcast every week. And this does have me thinking a little bit about, I've touched on this before, about some of the changes that I want to make in the new year, maybe getting some help.

Um, I've tried to do the thing where I batch episodes. I've, I've haven't been able to do it yet to get that going. And so this is what we end up with when you're a solopreneur and you don. Plan ahead for not being available in your business, which I have not been the last week. So we'll see. We'll see what the development is there.

Anyway, I hope you are doing well. I hope you had a great holiday. If you were sick like me, I'm so fucking sorry it has been a nightmare, but maybe you're on the mend also and let's fucking finish this year out with a bang. I will probably not be. For the ball drop. I never am. Let's be honest. I think I went to bed at 10 o'clock last year and I see that happening again in my future, but that doesn't mean I can't finish out the year with the.

As we finish off the last few hours of 2022, I want to offer you a little bit of a different way to look at your goals and dreams in the new year. You can set all the intentions you want, do affirmations, make checklists, plan your whole 2023, but if your mind is not managed, you will be in exactly the same place next year as you are.

Right. And I don't say this to discourage you, but I am nothing if not honest. And the one thing that is going to determine whether you reach any of your goals or not in the coming year are the thoughts you are thinking about them. You can have the perfect plan, but if your thoughts are not aligned, then you will not succeed.

Heck, you probably won't even try. And failing ahead of time does not count. So failing ahead of time is when you make a plan or decide on a goal and then you tell yourself all the reasons it won't work, which, let's be honest, you just made up then you have no idea are true or not.  and then you don't do it and say that you tried, you did not try

It's like that, um, famous line from Stanley Tucci in the Devil Wears Prada. You're not trying, you're whining. And no, like, being realistic about limitations or systemic issues that might be in the way is not whining, but making them, the reason you don't even try means that there's probably some whining going on.

And let's face it, the majority of us are not trust fund babies. So we all have shit in the way of our goals, and it's what we choose to make that mean. That is going to be in our control. That's what we have control over. So I can either make those things mean I can't achieve my goal or like we've talked about before, I can decide how I'm gonna work around them to still get what I want.

So pick something that you wanna focus on in the new. And if you can't decide, go back and listen to the episode on how to Get Unstuck making decisions, and I want you to let your brain go wild with all the many reasons why you can't achieve it. Yes, you heard me right? Why you cannot achieve it.  because remember, we are not about toxic positivity here, so we need to get all this shit out.

Bring it to the light because it's sitting back there in the recesses of your brain. Unexamined is what is going to inevitably lead to your downfall. Our subconscious runs so much of the show that we wanna make as much of it conscious as we can, and we do that by not being ashamed of our fucked up.

Listen, we all have them. We all think things about ourselves that we're told we shouldn't think. Let's at least be honest with ourselves and not hide from our own brains. Once you have them all out, I want you to pick one. It doesn't matter which one, and now you might need to pause for a second. Um, and if you're like in the car or traveling or something and you can't maybe come back to this later, but I want you to look at that thought and then I want you to decide what you would rather believe.

I. , right? Because remember, it doesn't matter that we have the thoughts. It matters that we believe them. So right now, you're currently believing all these shitty thoughts, and specifically this one. What would you rather believe than the one that you're thinking right now?

Now that you have that thought, that new thought? I want you to look at the new thought. How far of a jump from the original thought is? Because my guess is that it's going to be a pretty huge stretch of the imagination for you to believe that new thought. We do this, we try to reach for the impossible because we want the results yesterday, but that's not how it works actually, if we're really getting honest.

Have a look at your goal. How realistic is that? If you, for instance, have a goal to exercise more in the new year, and right now you're doing nothing, then doing an hour every day for 30 days might be a fantasy that's too big a jump. It's too much to expect from yourself. It would be better to start with 10 or even five minutes every day and work out from there, or three times a week for three weeks, and then increase after that or set the goal for the end of 2023 that you will be a person that works out every day by the end of the year and create whatever plan you can realistically.

Right. Taking into account that you will not always feel as motivated and optimistic as you do now looking into a new year with a clean slate. Remember when we talked to you about perfectionism and wanting to start out with no mistakes and keep a clean record? Yeah. Your brain still wants that. So it's really important that you are honest with yourself and take that into account when you're making the plan for the new year.

That's why so many people fail with their New Year's resolutions and why I don't even believe in them anymore. I would like to say that we're being like really nice to ourselves, but I think what we're being as delusional and we're imagining this version of our, this perfect version of ourselves that we just aren't right now.

Let's be honest. We don't wanna be, I don't wanna be this perfect version of myself. I wanna be the person who consistently shows up to my goals, not perfectly shows up to my goals, because when I'm trying to perfectly show up to my goals, I'm burning myself out. It's not sustainable. So think about a plan that's gonna be sustainable and allow for humanness along the.

So back to that thought. The way you're gonna know if it's too far a jump is by the way it feels your body will be rejecting it in some way. It won't make you feel as good as it sounds. So the classic example of this is, is like, I wanna make my kids happy, or I wanna make my parents happy, or I wanna make my partner happy.

Whatever you wanna make somebody happy. It sounds lovely, but it creates a lot of pressure because you don't actually have control over anyone's happiness but your own. And deep down, you know it so it feels incur. If your thought feels this way, you'll need to find another better feeling thought than the one that you have now, and that might just be maybe one step further along than where you are now.

That slightly better feeling thought will be the the one that gets you to just do the next thing toward completing your. . Now, this doesn't mean that we're not setting the big goals. It just means that we're going to focus more on the minute to minute, day-to-day activities and thoughts we need to be having to keep us working toward it.

This is why like conventional advice around say writing a book is to focus on writing every day for a certain amount of time or a certain word count. The idea of writing the entire book can feel too overwhelming.  when it's time to actually get down to it. But it isn't the goal or the word count that allows you to do it.

It's the thought. The goal might be to write 2,500 words, and the thought might be, I can manage that, or that's doable, or that's easy, or I've got it right? Like maybe if you write regularly, 2,500 words seems like nothing. So you can, your brain can easily wrap around that and it feels true so that you're more likely to sit down to do it.

Another thought might be, I just need to get the first draft out. Write something practical, simple, and most importantly, believable. You don't wanna have to argue with. Whether or not it's true, this is probably one of the biggest tips. If you take nothing else away, it's, I don't want you to spend too much time trying to coach yourself into believing things that you just don't work yourself up.

Take baby steps. It's going to be so much easier for you. If you do it this way. Then try to take on a whole new persona, a whole new way of think. Tomorrow, right? Like you're not so much different today than you will be tomorrow. You're pretty much gonna be the same person, but you can inch your mindset along, and this is what we wanna do.

Carl Lo has this. Concept of the infinite 1%, right? And you just like get a little bit better, like 1% at a time. And I think that's the way everything works, right? We're just improving on the way we're thinking about things just a little bit incrementally every day. And eventually at the end of 365 days, you are a totally different person, but you're not gonna be a totally different person tomorrow.

And this is. . Again, people don't stick to these resolutions or these goals is because the expectation is that I'm gonna wake up tomorrow and somehow be someone I haven't been for the last 365 days. Another thing to think about here is when we talked about not being too precious with our work. This comes in real handy here.

So if you can be okay with just getting the workout and coming back to it later, you're gonna be further along than if you tried to craft the perfect first draft. Also, I might add that creating right, that creation stage, that inspiration stage and editing are two distinctly different tasks. That require different skills in like different parts of your brain.

So you don't wanna be trying to apply an editor's eye to your initial output because it will thwart your creative process. And anyone who is in a creative process will know this, right? Like you start like creating and all of a sudden you start like, oh, is that right? Is this right? And then you get into like that mode of picking the work apart and now all creation is stopped and you have to like re.

I learned this as a choreographer. I learned to trust whatever came out of me at the time, and then afterwards I could look back at it. And let's be honest, eight times out of 10 I didn't change anything and sometimes I changed everything, right? But that happened very infrequently. . And lastly and may, maybe this is the most important part.

Well, fuck, it's all important. Um, I don't have the strength for filler on the heels of this viral plague, but  I want you to be aware of. I think it's, um, something that Karen Crabtree talks about that she calls goal fondling. It might be her, it might be Brooke, it might be, I don't know, but I'm not sure the exact definition that whoever I'm quot.

Uses about goal fondling, but I think of goal fondling as the daydreaming and fantasizing we do about how great we're gonna feel and how awesome life will be when we hit our goals. And the problem with this is that it gives your brain a temporary dopamine hit and it satisfies the desire just long enough to get you to not take action to get it.

I know some of you are gonna relate to this, right? You spend all this time thinking about all the things that you're gonna make and create, and you get really excited.  kind of about starting them. Maybe we even start some of them, but like you don't stick with it because you're too addicted to that dopamine hit of starting or fantasizing about starting that.

You never actually do it. I'm not saying don't think about the ultimate end result, but I want you to be intentional about it. Sit down every day and write it down and practice the thought that you wanna believe that's going to get you. Try really feeling into how you'll feel at the end and see if that feeling actually drives you forward or if it keeps you stuck.

Goals don't just happen. We make them happen, and the thing that I have seen have the greatest impact on my goals and my client's goals and my colleagues' goals is that we practice our beliefs just as much, if not more than we focus on our actions. This is where manifestation comes. Taking action from non-belief has you unfocused, and for lack of a better analogy, just throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks True.

Manifesting is when your belief and your action are aligned, because when we decide we want something, that's just the beginning. And what we really need to decide is that we're ready to do the. And the work is gonna be in the thinking coupled with the doing. So if you can hold onto the new thought that you're going to practice until it becomes your default, then climb a rung up the ladder to the next believable thought and just keep doing that.

Well, I have no idea if you will reach your goal by the end of 2023, but I can assure you that your life will look a hell of a lot different than it does. Remember, commitment is not always comfortable, but it gets the job done. So that's what I have for you. Taking you into the new year. My lovelies, these last seven months have been amazing.

There will be more to come in the new year. I am not leaving you and if you wanna work with me, you know what to do. DM me on Instagram, book a consult on my. Email me at Chris at the only chris hale.com. I will see you all in the new year. Happy New Year.



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