Episode 83: Why New Years Resolutions Don't work, and What to Do Instead, (When You Really Want to Grow!)

We have a MAJOR problem in our culture. We set new years resolutions that just end up making us feel worse about ourselves, contributing to more time on the couch and less time out chasing your dreams!

In this episode Pam will help you unpack this destructive habit, and develop an actual process to explore your desires and take action on them. 

After all, it doesn’t matter how good a ‘starter’ you are, if you never finish…

Exploring the difference between, resolutions, goals and intentions and how to make them work for you and your family this year. As well as the 3 step process to get you moving! 

Free Workshop: 7 Steps to Clearing Out Your Emotional Baggage (So You don’t pass it on to your kids!) 

Join us and get started!!

Start Regulating Your emotions, clearing out the triggers that have you stuck, and shifting your parenting strategies with my brand new program The Calm Project → Yours for FREE when you join the Align Mom’s Membership Today! 

Let's Connect on Instagram: @parentingtherapistpam

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WORK WITH PAM 1:1 

Did you know Pam is a therapist? That's right and she is currently taking on 1:1 therapeutic coaching clients.  What is therapeutic coaching? It's coaching that brings in the science and therapeutics of 25 years as a therapist. With real strategies, tool and techniques that will help you get the most out of every moment. 

So if you are struggling to regulate, are stuck in old stories and just can't seem to get out of your own way when it comes to growth and healing in your relationships, or your career, book a call and jump start your success this year! 

Book a call and see what is the right fit for you! https://calendly.com/pamgcoaching/30-min-consult

The best thing you can do for yourself and your kids is effectively regulate your nervous system. And a great place to start >> to wire the brain for gratitude. Research tells us that gratitude increases happiness and a peaceful mindset. Make the shift and watch how things in your life start to change. Sign up today! www.pamgodbois.com/gratitude

Transcript

0:00

Hey there and welcome back to the peaceful home podcast. My name is Pam and I am your host. And today. We are talking about new year's resolutions. Well, Not really. What we're talking about is how do you set a goal for the new year and actually stick with it? This is one of the big questions, right? So many people are running around setting goals for January one. We're calling them new year's resolutions. But their goals. And then by the time February 1st rolls around. It is all crumbled. Let's talk about why and what to do instead. Let's dive in. So often the new year starts, or we start to get close to the new year. And people start to ponder questions. Like what is my new year's resolution going to be? What am I going to do this year? Now if you're like most people, you set goals or resolutions, like I'm going to join a gym or I'm going to eat better. I'm going to take better care of myself. I'm going to start meditating or do yoga. But the problem is all of those things are rooted in the same lack mentality. They're rooted in the mentality that says you're not good enough. You're broken. You need to be fixed. That is. Our real quick path. To failure. You're never going to succeed. If you're telling your brain, you suck. You're not good enough. Right. We don't get gym memberships because we're like, I just love the gym. You're not going to get a new gym membership or come back to the gym. If you've been away. Because you just love it so much. Because if you loved it so much, you wouldn't have set a new year's resolution that you're going to get your ass in the gym. Let's be real. So what happens at the new year is we set these lofty ideas of like, by the end of the year, I want to be so much healthier because I'm going to do all of these things. And we set goals. We decide what we want, but the thing about new years, Which by the way for most of us happens in the dead of winter. Is it brings with us. Seasonal effective disorder increases in depression and anxiety struggles with processing trauma and grief after spending the holidays with family. And let's be real. It's fucking cold. There's a reason bears hibernate. It's biological. So our motivation to take on really big stuff. Is pretty much shot at the start of the year. And actually from a seasonal perspective, winter is the time of shutting down. It is not the time of rebirth rebirth happens in the spring. But it doesn't matter because we go new year, new me, I'm going to do all these amazing things and it's going to be a rebirth. And then we fall flat on our face by February 1st. We set goals that are too big and lofty. They're hard to conceptualize. And as a result, we never even get out of the starting gate. And we set the same resolutions over and over. Have the same goals. For ourselves, for our family, for our own personal development or for our business over and over and over. And that's not what I want for you, and it's not what I want for me. So I'm going to teach you the process that I use. To take these ideas of what I want to experience what I want to have in my life. What I want things to be like by the time I get to. April 1st. July 1st October 1st. And January 1st of next year. The start of each quarter. This is where setting intentions comes in. No setting intentions works really well. In parenting. It works really well in relationships for self development work. I obviously own my own business. It works well in that. My husband uses setting intentions for his job, what he wants to experience in the workforce. So where we begin with setting intentions is looking forward to what you want to experience achieve, be feel by the time you get to the end of any designated period. So you could decide. That for the next week, you're setting an intention. Based on something you want to experience the benefit of. At the end of the week. You could do it for a month. For a quarter for the entire year. It does not matter. But I'm kind of one of those, I like instant gratification. So I actually like to set intentions for days and for weeks, and yes, I set larger goals, but I recognize now at this point, what I need to do to break things down. And focus on the growth that I want to experience in these shorter periods of time. And this is without a doubt, my ADHD, because if I set a goal and say six months from now a year from now, this is what I want things to look like. If I'm not taking consistent focused action on a day-to-day basis. I will never get there. And I, as a matter of fact, I'll forget what the goal or the, the intention even was. If I go much longer than a week. So we start with what I want to be experiencing. One week, one day from now, how do I want to feel? What do I want my relationships to be like, what shifts do I want to have for myself? And then I reverse engineer it. What do I need to do to get there? But the process looks like this. The very first question I ask when I'm setting intentions is what do I want to experience? What do I desire? What would make me grateful? And I pull out a notebook and I journal, what are these experiences that I want to be experiencing more of? What do I want to have in my life? What do I want my relationships to be like? So I journal about that and then that's my end result. And so I might say. You know this week, what are I want the experiences to be like? And what's important. And what's valuable to me. This does two things. It primes the brain. To notice these shifts. So it primes the brain to recognize. Um, opportunities to feel connected. If connection was my intention. It also gives me the opportunity to shift my own energy towards what I desire. So we tend to get a little lazy around here with now an almost 15 year old, who is a home body, and doesn't really want to go anywhere. And quite honestly, We're rolling up to Christmas. She's been busting her ass for the last week and a half with Christmas cupcake orders and holiday party, cupcake orders and all sorts of other things over the last week and a half along with high school and all the other. Music performances and all the extra stuff that happens this time of year and every. Everything she does. And if I said to her, what do you want to do this holiday season? That's festive. She would say, sit at home. As a matter of fact, last weekend, I said to her, Man it's the weekend before Christmas, like a full week before Christmas, we should be out doing stuff. There's lots of holiday festive stuff going on. And her response was. Nah, I'm good. And she loves the holidays. It's not that she doesn't, she's just totally content to stay home as is my husband. And so at the start of this week, I decided that I was going to infuse this week, rolling up to Christmas and through Christmas with more holiday spirit, with more holiday cheer, because it's something that I appreciate and value, and I just wanted to experience. More of. So on Monday morning, I sat down and I wrote this intention. What would I love to experience? I would love to experience more opportunities with my family. To enjoy holiday traditions. To create new traditions to have celebrations beyond just watching national Lampoon's Christmas vacation or elf. So this primed my brain to look for opportunities to do more things. And it shifted my energy around it because I am definitely the person that says I want to do these things. And then at seven o'clock at night, my husband says. Do you want to drive around and look at Christmas lights and I go, no. It's cold and dark, and I don't want to leave the house uncomfortable now. So in the setting of this intention, a couple of things happened. I got real clear on the Christmas gift. I was getting my mom not saying what that is yet. We also have the opportunity to be part of this event where they had Christmas lights, outdoor, and you walked through this. Uh, you know, outdoor. Setting. And add hot chocolate and whatever other things, or very festive. And so I bought tickets for us to go and we went and we had a great time. But had I not been looking for it? I would, it would have been another thing that I went, oh, darn I missed that. We'll have to do that next year. And I wouldn't have, because I would have forgotten. So this is the first step. What would I like to experience prime the bank brain and shift the energy so that you can take action on the things like I did buying the tickets so that we could go to this event last night. The second step in this process is what do you desire to see in others? So in this example of going and partaking in these outdoor lights, what I wanted to see for my family as an excitement. To experience this together. And I got clear on what I wanted from them and I didn't have to communicate it. But I looked for it. And so when I said, Hey, here are two options of things that we could do. What do you guys think? And they chose. When it was time for us to go. Or get ready to go. I was able to like, be like, aren't you so excited? This is going to be so fun. I'm looking forward to spending this time with you and having this positive experience and it's going to be so great. And my teenager was like, yeah. I love it. I'm so excited about it. I'm glad you bought tickets. Thanks for buying the mom. That was her reaction to my. Setting this clear intention of what was important to me. Uh, number three is what will you do to contribute? So for this, that was pretty straight forward. I bought tickets. I drove us there, right? I like created the environment for us to do this. Now, there are lots of different intentions you might want to set. So maybe your intention for this week or for today. It's to keep your cool, when your kids lose it. And then you recognize what I would love to experience is calm. Even when my kids are losing their mind. And when I'm calm and they're losing their mind, I can co-regulate with them. I can support them in the way in which they need to be supported without yelling at them and telling them to knock it off or hiding in the bathroom. So I don't have to deal with their meltdowns. So then you start to prime your brain for this opportunity. Of them struggling so you can stay calm so you can demonstrate your ability to do so. And then you can shift your energy so that when. They have a wise ass remark or snap back at you. You don't fall into the trap of personalizing and getting into conflict. You instead move from a place of compassion and love. And you say, all right, my energy here is I made the conscious. Decision. I set an intention that when they experience an emotional trigger, because maybe you're dealing with a young adolescent who is emotionally triggered, often it happens, happens to the best of us, right. They're emotionally triggered. And what you found is that when you stay calm, they. Respond. Much more effectively. They stay calmer. They stayed chilled out. They don't lose their minds. So that's your piece of it. And then you're like, what do I desire to see in them? I would love for them. To co-regulate with me. I would love for them to respond. To my calm. In a way that starts to bring them down. But even if they don't that's okay. And another example, that's maybe not parenting related. Would be, if you have holiday gatherings coming up or non holiday gatherings after the holidays, that's fine too. Anytime you have to get together with people that you can do this. Maybe you don't love getting together with people or maybe. You don't love the people that you're getting together with. Maybe it's like your spouse's friends and you're like, Ugh. Okay. I mean, it's fine, but like, I don't really want to be there. I'd rather be home or I'd rather be out with my girlfriends or whatever. And so you decide what about. I love to experience what would make this a positive or more positive experience for me? And maybe you recognize the reason that you struggle with them is because they're surface conversation people. And I struggle with this all the time. That I have some friends or some people that we get together with. They just want to like, basically talk about the weather and I'm like, Ugh. Poke myself in the eye, right? I'm like let's dive in deep and talk about real meaningful stuff. And so what I would love to experience is I would love to experience some of those deeper conversations. This primes my brain for this opportunity. And it allows me to shift my energy into looking forward to and attracting some of those more positive. Um, deep conversations. Step two is what do I desire to see in others? What I would desire to see in others is their desire to participate in these deeper, more meaningful conversations. Is that of talking about the weather and then how will I contribute? What actions will I take? I'll be open. I will, um, be friendly and I will. Um, Maybe have some ideas of what I want to talk about or things that I could bring up with people that would allow them to go a little bit deeper. Now for me, I got into social gatherings and I will say to people, they'll say, what do you do? And I say, um, I work with. Moms so that they can clear out their own bullshit, so they don't fuck up their kids. And inevitably, I get everybody's trauma stories. So that works out. That's a really great opening line for me, because what happens is either a and I did this at an event recently, either. I get people that are like, oh my God, I'm parenting my kid. And I so worried that I'm going to screw them up or I get, oh my God, my parents did these things. It totally screwed me up. And I get the stories and I heard. Hundreds of stories over a three or four day period. With a bunch of other people, because that's what I said, I did. What do you do? This is what I do. And they were like, well, and so it became the thing that opened the door. That was my contribution. That was the action I took. And then I received what they said. I validated, I supported, I did all the things that I normally do. Um, in conversations and what that created was an environment where I felt deeply connected to people. That was what I was looking for. So you can use this in any environment and it works really great with parenting. It works great with like, you can set an intention around. What you want to experience from parenting perspective with your kids? You know, maybe you've been struggling this year with yelling and you're like, I, my intention is to stay calm with my kids, but really my intention before I can stay calm with my kids is to get to the bottom of, or uncover what's creating this dynamic. Or logically, my brain says, I don't want to yell. I want to be calm. I want to be supportive that my kid does something. I personalize it. I become triggered and I yell and I don't know how to get out of that cycle. So maybe the intention for today for this week is you start with. My intention is to take a breath. When I start to feel that experience rise. And my intention, number two, the second intention I'm setting is to get to the bottom of, to uncover. What it is, that's getting in the way of me staying calm with ease. Like why does it have to be so frigging hard? Maybe that is where you start. Right. You get to decide what the starting point is. But the idea here is that you're like, what do I want to experience? What do I desire to see in others? Like what do I want somebody else's contribution to be? And what will I contribute? How will I contribute to getting to the outcome? More easily. That is what intention setting is all about. It's about using a practice. To get real clear on what actions you're going to take. Maybe it's being calm. Maybe it's taking a breath. Maybe it's focusing on compassion. Maybe it's getting supports in place for yourself, whatever the case may be. That is your work. Leaning in and setting intentions with compassion for yourself and removing judgment. So important. The goal here is not to fix you because there's nothing broken. The goal. Always is to grow. Thanks guys. And I will see you soon. Take care.