Happy New Years! 2023! Mindset tips

 Can you believe it’s the start of a new year? I sure can’t. You might be feeling excited, bubbling over with ideas and resolutions, or maybe you feel like you’re being pushed into 2023 against your will. Either way, I have a few tips to help your New Year start off right, and it all starts with a mindset. 

Developing a mindset: 

My motto is: Keep your expectations low and your aspirations high. 

That just means, don’t expect to be perfect. Don’t expect to completely become a totally different person. Don’t expect to keep all your resolutions. And the biggest one of all: Don’t expect to have your life change. 

We’ll talk more about that later. For now let’s discuss the aspirations aspect of my motto. You need to have goals to work towards. That will give you something to look forward to, but also help you be productive in the new year. The problem is, sometimes our aspirations become our expectations. Here’s how that happens. 

Preventing Stress: 

When you achieve your goals, or aspirations, you might feel pressure to keep it up. Say your goal was to read a book a day. Now, I am all for lots of reading, but even I only read 1 - 2 books per week. So, you want to read a book per day. You keep that up for a week or two. Then one day, you have lots of errands to run. You have a job, kids, and a hobby you love. So how can you be expected to keep up with one book per day? If you do for a while, you create an expectation to read a book per day, not an aspiration. And if you fail every once in a while (we’re all humans), you might get stressed and upset. So here are some tips to help:

1. Have realistic expectations and aspirations

2. Reward yourself for achieving your goals

3. Be your own best friend, who’s always there to encourage you in your aspirations 

How to create a goal: 

There are two steps towards making an achievable goal. One is to keep a diary, to keep track of your progress and set up a rewards system as motivation. For example, if I wanted to read all of “In Search of Lost Time” I would reward myself after each book with some Fredrik Backman. 

The second is to make goals according to what YOU can do, not what can be DONE TO you. The example is my own resolution. 

I want to get a book published. The problem is, I don’t know if that can happen or if that’s God’s plan for me. It would be my publisher’s decision, not my own. But I do have the power to write a book I want to get published, so that became my achievable goal.

How to make this year fun: 

This is probably the hardest goal of your resolutions list. How can you be sure that this year will be the best one yet? How do you know you’ll be happy? Well, I think if you adopt my own resolution you will be happy with the results. Here it is:

Treat every day as an adventure 

And here are my tips:

Always look to learn new things 

Treat mistakes as opportunities 

Enjoy every moment, even where you’re doing things that aren’t your favorite, because you never know where it will lead you

Surround yourself with a group of people that are open about there own goals and supportive of yours

And lastly, comment your resolutions and I’ll give you a piece of advice! 

Love you all, happy New Year!