How to handle failure (when you don’t stick to your resolutions or goals)!
The new year can be an opportunity to set new goals or resolutions for yourself. It can be inspiring to feel the refresh of a new 12 month slate. Yet, with the turning of a calendar page, life still gets busy and it can be difficult to stick to our new found goals.
For many of us, when we fall short of sticking to these resolutions it can feel like a deep personal failure. Sometimes that failure can feel so overwhelming that it deters us from trying again.
So, how do we normalize not achieving our resolutions perfectly? It begins with self-compassion.
A TedEd talk by the School of Life gives a few helpful tips to lead to more self compassion:
- Recognizing the task was actually hard. Often, when we set new years goals we neglect to recognize that some of these resolutions may be asking hard things of ourselves. Hard does not equal un-achievable. But recognizing the difficulty can lead to self-compassion over self-criticism.
- Sometimes, we weren’t properly equipped by our histories. We all have a story and a family background that sometimes contributes to why certain new goals might be more difficult than others. Practice offering empathy to those parts of your story.
- Seeing that failure is not unique to you!Trying and not succeeding immediately at something is much more common than we often let ourselves believe.
The quotes, “It is only a failure if you don’t learn from it” communicates to us that failing often leads us to being better at the goal the next time we try to accomplish it.
2021 can be a year where we offer ourselves more understanding and compassion as we navigate our goals and resolutions.
Written by: Celeste Calvert
Originally posted on Grow Counseling