At the start of each new year, the talk is all about how to tackle those New Year’s Resolutions: how to be a better version of ourselves - healthier, slimmer, fitter, happier, more successful, confident, and so on. All are reasonable goals; ones that people the world over tackle with gusto from the first week of the new year until the point at which they feel that they are falling short of their aims and give up. We often fail to see those New Year’s Resolutions through to completion because there is one thing that we all need to do before we start out on any quest for success.
Accept yourself – just as you are, right here, right now.
“What? Why on earth would I accept myself when I still haven’t managed to lose that stone, find a partner, take the leap into the career I really want, or manage to conquer my fear of making presentations at work?”
Because accepting yourself is the only honest, true and useful starting point in life. It means acknowledging where you are right now and being ok with that; accepting all your strengths and all your flaws, letting go of the need to be perfect and understanding that perfect does not even exist. It means embracing the fullness of your character and looking at your strengths with a sense of joy and your failings with a sense of affection. Fading down the thoughts in your head that tell you that you will be good enough when you are fitter, richer, smarter. It means recognising that, actually, you are enough - right now, just as you are; that as a human being you already tick all the boxes and make the grade - you do not fall short. You don’t need to prove anything, or impress anyone, or achieve anything - you are enough right now. It means acknowledging that at times you will be funny, smart, kind, loving, creative, energised and hard-working. Other times you will be cranky, scared, tired, mean, distracted and de-motivated. All are part of the complexity of being human, and all are ok.
Accepting yourself doesn’t mean that you give up on wanting to improve your health or enhance your career; it just means that you realise that you are not less than just because you have not yet achieved these goals.
So, consider letting this be the new you this New Year – accepting that as a human being you are good enough just as you are. Then watch how this realisation acts like a big old hug for all the times in your life when you felt less than, and sets you up for a kinder, calmer, more contented future.
Final Thought:
“Be yourself, everyone else is already taken” ~ Oscar Wilde.
