This is Your Year to Take Your Power Back and Become Who You are Meant to Be!
Do you have a vision for your life that you wake up every day thinking about? Do you have dreams that you can't wait to have come true? Do you want to make those dreams into a reality right now but think it sounds too difficult?
You can do anything that you set your mind to, it just takes persistence and the desire to keep moving forward despite all the odds. This can be the year that you recreated yourself into a badass and take on all the goals that you have left sitting there because you thought it was too hard.
Before you start to make a plan about how you are going to accomplish those goals, you have to start with believing in yourself, and believing that you can do anything that you set your mind to. The more you believe you are strong, the stronger you will become.
Before you dive in to making new goals, you may want to do a year in review and reflect on the end of 2022. Then, you can start making your new year's resolutions and new goals for 2023.
Believe in Yourself
When you believe in yourself and in your own strength, then your life begins to change for the better. You start to become all you can be, because you aren't giving up or sabotaging yourself anymore.
Often when we think that we aren't worthy of the things that we want, we may say we are moving towards our goals, but unconsciously, we are doing things to sabotage them.
According to Very Well Mind, there are three main ways that we self-sabotage:
Procrastination
Perfectionism
Self-medicating
All of these are harmful ways that we stop ourselves from measuring up to our goals. This can happen for a variety of reasons, such as beliefs that we have from childhood, or a history of bad relationships. Unhealthy relationships in the past can lead us to have a harsh inner critic, which leads to negative self-talk.
Overcoming your negative self-talk is key to believing in yourself so that you can meet your goals. To do this, we have to first start to become more aware of our thoughts. Listen to the way that you speak to yourself. Is it overwhelmingly positive or negative?
Once you can quickly notice your negative thoughts, ask yourself, is this true? Am I really a bad person? Is it true that I can't do anything right. Seek evidence to the contrary. Once you have evidence, you can substitute a positive message to yourself instead of a negative one.
So, if you are constantly calling yourself fat or a loser, say instead, "my body is beautiful. I am a good person. I deserve to accomplish my goals."
This type of affirmations can help you to have a more positive mindset over time. Saying positive things to yourself can help you believe in yourself more, and to overcome your inner critic which is stopping you from working on your goals.
Love Yourself
When you love yourself, you are more likely to do things that are good for you and your life. You are more likely to take good care of yourself, and avoid self sabotaging behaviors.
It can be a journey to learn how to love yourself if you have had a difficult upbringing or, if you have been in a relationship with a narcissist.
Any time someone else tells you that you aren't good enough, that message stays with you. That is why it is so important to make sure that you are giving yourself positive messages on a regular basis. This allows you to counteract negative messages from other people.
You can start a gratitude journal and write all the good things about your day, you can say your affirmations, you can make a list of everything good that you like about yourself. Then when you are feeling down, you can revisit these lists later on.
The more often you say good things about yourself, the more it will reprogram your mind for happiness and success.
Setting Your Vision
Once you have decided to work on self-love and positive self-talk, then you can begin to set a vision for yourself and your life.
You can do this by picturing exactly how you want your life to be. How does your future self look? How does she act? How does she feel? How does she react to troubling circumstances?
Start visualizing this ideal version of you, then you can do a long journal session and write it all out. Write in the present tense, as if this were already true for you. This allows you to use the Law of Attraction to create your perfect life.
You can also make a vision board with pictures of how you want your life to be. Do you want to lose weight? Quit smoking? Get a new job? Start your own business? Travel?
Make sure you put all of that into your vision. The person you want to be, the things you want to do, the places you want to be.
Once you have done this, you will have a clear mental vision of how you want your life to be this year. You can keep your vision board or your journal somewhere you can look at it easily first thing in the morning. That way, you start the day focused on your vision.
Next steps:
Once you have gotten clear on your vision, you will want to start to act as if all the things you wrote down were already true. Start showing up as your best self. Start reacting the way that your best self would. This allows you to move forward and to become that person.
You can also work on setting goals with the SMART goals formula so that you can easily achieve them!
I have talked about this before, the SMART goals format stands for:
Specific
Measurable
Achievable
Realistic
Time Bound
When you set your goals this way, it is easier to meet them. One of the main reasons that our goals fail is for being too vague or not measurable. This means, we won't be able to tell if we have met them or not.
For example, instead of saying, "I want to lose weight" say, "I want to lose 10 pounds by February 15."
This way, you are making sure that you will be able to meet the goal and move on to your next step. You can also break up big goals into small steps.
Like in the previous example, Imagine you want to lose 100 pounds over the year. Then, that would be about 8-10 pounds a month. So you would set a goal weight for each month at the beginning of the month based on this. That way, you are breaking something hard into small intervals to make it more manageable.
Aim for continuous improvement. As you meet small goals, then you will be able to meet more difficult ones later on. It is like climbing the stairs, one step at a time. Each goal is a step.
As the year goes by, you will be amazed to see you have climbed the whole flight of steps.
Like they say, "Slow and steady wins the race."
I wish you all the best of luck this year on making your dreams into a reality! I hope that 2023 can be the year that you say you made it!
