Using the New Year for New Beginnings

Setting Intentions and Creating Cycles that Support Meaningful Change

Jan 06, 2024

Dear Livable Futures community!

I hope you are well here in this first week of the new year on the calendar.

I’ll admit, I love the spirit of new year's resolutions and the collective focus on change in January. I know many may choose to avoid the traditional "fix it" culture of resolutions altogether and I understand. But for others, the energy of a new beginning is invigorating.

This time inspires me to assess my life, establish new intentions, or recommit to goals that may require another attempt. It's also an opportune moment to contemplate more significant changes we aspire to witness and add an eco-twist to our intentions.

However you feel, at the very least, it is significant that we start writing a new number every day—this simple change creates a shift you can use to jump start a new healthy habit or breathe life into an old one.

And it doesn’t have to stop here. Exploring various new beginnings beyond the conventional calendar, such as other cultural new year practices, seasons, academic cycles, lunar phases, and morning sun rises, provides continuous opportunities for growth, rejuvenation, and support.

Rethinking Resolutions: Be Gentle with Yourself and Add an Eco-Twist

While resolutions can be oppressive, reframing them to align with a our own wellbeing and the wellbeing of others is helpful. Yes, we should absolutely resist those tenets of capitalism and white supremacy culture and, my mother would add, patriarchy that keep us in a “not good enough” loop. But might we also make the impulses of the new year work better for us?

Fostering more livable futures for life on the planet demands change, ranging from substantial systemic shifts to small, personal adjustments. The process need not be overwhelmingly challenging; rather, it can be approached with a sense of optimism and possibility.

What if you are always already enough? Then what does this new beginning of the new year offer you?

Be gentle with yourself, set intentions that are nourishing and connect you to the more-than-human life cycles around you. What might the moon cycles suggest? The seasons, the activity of the wild ones sharing your habitat? What changes are you making for your own wellbeing that will also benefit the land, your neighbors, or those who come after you?

Or maybe the resistance to resolutions could also be a nice resolution in itself:

This year why not aim to rest more? Accept what is? Resolve to love ourselves? Notice perfectionism when it creeps in and make a different choice? Practice deep acceptance? Oooooh those sound nice. I’m adding a few to my list. What are yours?

Creating Healthy Habits: Lessons from Personal Experiences

There is also the worry that you will make resolutions that are too vague to achieve such as, “I want to be healthier,” or “I’ll stop being so irritable with my partner,” or “I want to take more action on climate change…”

Explore micro habits

If your goals feel to big and vague, no problem! Just make a micro habit within the bigger goal and you’re on your way to success:

I want to be healthier becomes—> I will eat vegetables first at my meals.

Stop being irritable with my spouse becomes—> take a deep breath and get some space when I notice I am feeling irritated.

Take more action on climate change becomes—> keep reading when I see reporting on climate change and soften into intention.

In my experience (and in the burgeoning literature on habits), making small shifts leads to be impacts. And they can be even smaller than the examples I just gave. For instance, if you want to floss more, you simply start by picking up the floss every time you brush and it will expand from there. Atomic Habits by James Clear is a great resource for more habit changing strategies.

An eco-twist on micro habits? How about, replacing one thing you often throw away with something reusable (I love my beeswax bowl coverings for leftovers). Or for something even more micro, every time you buy a coffee in a paper cup, touch the shelf with reusable cups. It might sound silly, but it works. Trust the process, take the win, and make the bigger changes incrementally.

Make a habit you can win at easily to help you stay motivated!

Use existing good habits to support building new ones

Another strategy that has been super supportive for me is to connect new habits to an existing habit I already do well. What is something you do already and how can you use it as a cue for a new habit you want to develop?

Called “cueing,” this is a super effective practice gleaned from reams of scientific research in cognitive behavioral therapy. Cueing works because every habit (negative or positive) already has a trigger. Use this loop to your advantage.

For example, you can do 30 squats while you brush your teeth.

For a gentler example, during the pandemic my son and I created a mantra to say while we were washing our hands for 20 seconds to take the anxiety out of it. Instead of urgently scrubbing off the terrifying virus, when washing our hands we recited “I completely love and accept myself and accept how I feel” three times slowly which is about 20 seconds. Now that habit is so ingrained I can’t wash my hands without bathing in this self love mantra. So cool! (Thanks to Nick Ortner for the phrase from his EFT tapping videos, another healthy habit to consider picking up in the new year).

Do what feels fun, you’re more likely to keep it up

Drawing further inspiration from my own life, incorporating new habits into enjoyable activities you already do can be highly effective. Combine cueing with something you enjoy, add micro habits, and watch change unfold!

For example, I love watching soccer, I watch way too much of it which can mean I sit around for hours on a Saturday easily. Lately I’ve been able to cue strength training and light yoga with soccer. I started with a micro habit: When I am watching soccer I pick up the free weights (which I keep next to the couch). That’s it. Then picking up free weights became doing a few bicep curls. Next I added getting my yoga mat out. Eventually with the yoga mat there I could resist stretching a bit during games. And so on.

Choose a word or a mantra

A fun and engaging practice involves choosing a word for the year to guide daily decisions. This approach adds an element of playfulness to the pursuit of personal goals. One year I chose “Nourish” and I’d often ask myself, “what feels most nourishing to me right now?” It worked wonders for saying “no” to things that were not serving me. This year I’m playing with the word “Fun” which centers feeling good and finding fun in all the mess and bother of getting through the day.

Re-frame it

The other wisdom I’ve learned over the years from multiple teachers is to re-frame goals. For example, if you’re sensitive to gluten and trying to stop eating bread, instead of saying, “I can’t have it,” try, “I choose not to put that in my body.” I did something similar with alcohol when I wanted to be sober by choice. I worked to change my perception of alcohol as a treat and instead acknowledged it as an addictive, toxic substance. I’ve never looked back.

If you want more detail on habits, I find Martin Seligman’s book Flourish and Jeremy Dean’s Making Habits, Breaking Habits: Why We Do Things, Why We Don't, and How to Make Any Change Stick particularly helpful as science-backed compendiums of several strategies that work. Just for fun, both of these links send you to beautiful summaries by Maria Popova in The Marginalian.

I love it that there is more and more research these days supporting the things we know intuitively.

Faith, Passion, and Overcoming Failure

Addressing the fear of failure, let’s use 2024 to stop being afraid of audacious goals and bold leaps of faith!

I want to see a massive investment in renewable energy, many massive coordinated campaigns to draw down carbon, huge shifts in peace and stability for all people, and a fast growing movement for livable futures. It feels great to want these things and frees up energy to go about pursuing them.

Pour your faith into it

On a personal level, I think sometimes we don’t want to make resolutions because we are afraid of disappointment. And I guess if you’re in the habit of haranguing yourself when you fail then that could be tough. If that’s the case, embracing failures without judgment and returning to the path of self-love could be a powerful resolution for this year.

Pouring one's faith and passion into a goal can lead to unexpected success. I remember when I was applying for the professor job I’ve been in now for twenty years, I didn’t think it was even remotely possible I’d get it. A friend sent me a card with an Eleanor Roosevelt quote on it that I cannot seem to relocate in the vast world of the internet but essentially it said “pour your faith into it what you desire and watch what miracles occur.” So I poured my faith into and put everything I had into preparing for it and what do you know? I got the job! But even if hadn’t, I would have generated all kinds of new opportunities from the experience.

Commit to big goals and give yourself grace

My sister is another great story. She’s into CrossFit, eats a super clean diet, and has a beautiful thriving romantic relationship with her partner of twenty years. Yes, a lot goes into this but in the end it is pretty simple. I once asked how she and her husband stay so fit and she said, “it is pretty simple really. We work out every day, except when we don’t.”

Do the healthy habit so often that when it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t matter.

Then give yourself grace. No judgement. Just re-commit.

Create Your Own New Beginnings

What new beginnings give you energy and inspiration? How can you find a few more in your life that will support you in your goals and thriving?

In addition to the first day of the roman calendar, there are many religious new years of course. My family and I observe Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year in the Fall and I’m always happy to celebrate with my Chinese friends later in the winter. I appreciate the lovely moon cakes and lanterns and the wisdom of their Zodiac. As a teacher I enjoy the timing of the academic calendar as another set of new beginnings, relishing the end of the Spring semester and the period of deep study that is Summer, then the fresh energy of new students each Autumn. Each week has a cycle of waxing and waning. Moon cycles are enormously influential forces on our bodies and can be supportive cycles for intentions and growth. I love the new beginning of each day and the hopeful potential each dawn holds.

Closing Mantra: Living Consciously and Having Fun

Drawing inspiration from Dr. Gay Hendricks, this closing mantra emphasizes the commitment to living consciously and infusing every moment with fun and personal growth throughout the year. Say it aloud and if it feels good, I hope you’ll bring this spirit into the new year with you:

“I commit to living consciously, and I commit to having fun as I do. I commit to expanding my consciousness and my capacity for fun every minute this year.”

Thanks for reading. I love sharing sustaining practices and these are some of my favorites to support the ever evolving process of coming into alignment with who we are and living consciously.

This year, let’s make creating livable futures fun!

Norah