EPISODE 22

New Year

The New Year reliably brings a barrage of breathless New Year, New You! promises. Beyond all the hype, though, it can still be a valuable catalyst for reflection and conscious change. Learn to leverage the New Year as an opportunity to explore and adjust your choices in ways that work for you.

This week we’re talking about the concept of the New Year — from meaningless consumer hype to contemplative pursuits that really can make a difference.

We explore the potential pros and cons of leveraging the New Year as an opportunity for self-improvement, and we share the approaches we like best for pursuing change in our own lives.

From expert theories of change to the awkward realities of working on a goal that eludes you, we take a thoughtful look at New Year’s conventions, and we offer some experiments to help you establish a better, more self-compassionate plan for your year ahead.

“New Year” Episode Highlights

  • The New Year holiday as the caboose on the Thanksgiving-to-Christmas marketing train
  • Arguments against January 1 as a hard date for making big changes
  • Pilar’s Goal Flower model for setting and achieving goals
  • Accomplishing less instead of more
  • Why uncovering the belief systems that are holding you back may be more effective than simply addressing surface problems like excess weight, disorganization, and debt
  • Dallas’s approach to goal setting (and the holidays)
  • Making resolutions when you’re ready and in your own way, instead of when and how the calendar or culture says you should
  • The shared energy of forming new habits with everyone else in January (or any other time), and the value of using camaraderie to launch into autonomy
  • Creating sustainable change and escaping commercially-driven cycles
  • The Prochaska Transtheoretical Model of change
  • Dallas’s insights on self-sabotage, and Pilar’s thoughts on our inherent “immunity to change”
  • Making small transformations on the road to accomplishing larger goals and avoiding self-sabotage
  • The difference between building sustainable change and making cyclical changes to break up an unsustainable lifestyle
  • The right and wrong motivations for modifying behaviors – love vs. fear
  • The power of conscious language
  • How to embrace the opportunity of the New Year to achieve what you really want
  • Acknowledging universal obstacles to change

Look at the changes you want to make for the new year, and articulate the motivation behind them.

  • Ask yourself: Am I doing this out of fear or out of love?
  • Replace a behavior that has typically been fear-based with one done out of love. It doesn’t have to be a different behavior; it may be the same action, but with a different motivation in play.

1) Make an Immunity Map following the steps in the Experience Life article, “How to Overcome Immunity to Change”.

2) Get on the waiting list for Pilar’s Refine Your Life 6-week workshop series.

Share the Love!

Have you told your friends and family about The Living Experiment? If you dig the podcast, please share it! Every recommendation from you means a lot!

We’d also love to have you connect with us on Facebook. Tell us about your experiments, and share your thoughts, stories and reflections there.

Sponsor Gratitude

Thanks to our sponsor, Optimize by Heroic, for supporting The Living Experiment. Now you can get Optimize membership (formerly $250) for FREE just by signing up here. And check out the Heroic social training platform, with a goal of creating a world in which 51% of the world’s population is flourishing by 2051 — starting with YOU!

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Resources

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