Renewing Your Vows to Yourself

SUMMARY

As you finished off last year, you looked at a process where you reflected on the progress that you'd made. You refocused on what's important because you collected some data, aligned that with your values and priorities, and got yourself ready for going into the new year. You went off and had a bit of a break — which was fantastic. You celebrated whatever it is that you celebrate at that time of the year, and you're already a week into 2023.

If you are one of these people who have made some New Year's resolutions to yourself, and you might have done that with some expectations coming from others, or through a lens that was not healthy. Hence, it made you stretch too far out in what you will get done in the initial part of the year, I want you to know that it’s okay.

However, it’s a balance between serving others with self being taken care of. In fact, I've learned over the years that the greater amount of self-care that I can give myself sets me up to help way more other people as well.

Look at it through the lens of getting the foundation set.

This week, I want to celebrate moving into a new year by helping you renew your vows to yourself.

TRANSCRIPT

Do you always keep the promises that you made to yourself? Have you gone into this new year and made some new year's resolutions that you've already started to forget about?

Well, that's okay, a lot of people do that. But stick with me because I want to help you flip some mindsets and behaviour so you can keep going, and none of that will matter.

Hi, this is Grant Herbert, Emotional Intelligence Master Coach Trainer and Sustainable Performance Coach, and today I want to celebrate moving into a new year by helping you renew your vows to yourself.

As we finished off last year, we looked at a process where we reflected on the progress that we'd made. We refocused on what's important because we collected some data, aligned that with our values and priorities, and got ourselves ready for going into the new year. We went off and had a bit of a break — which was fantastic. We celebrated whatever it is that we celebrate at that time of the year, and we're already a week into 2023.

What happens a lot at this time of the year is people make new year's resolutions. Unfortunately, most new year's resolutions don't make it past the first couple weeks of the new year.

For example, in gymnasiums, most members are disappointed because during the first two weeks of the year, the gym is full of people, and they cannot get on a machine because they are all in use. However, they know that this disappointment is short-lived. They know that most of the new people in those gyms would only last for a couple of weeks because, like most people, they made those new year's resolutions without doing the groundwork to back them up and having the support and accountability to keep going.

If you are one of these people who have made some New Year's resolutions to yourself, and you might have done that with some expectations coming from others, or through a lens that was not healthy. Hence, it made you stretch too far out in what you will get done in the initial part of the year, I want you to know that it’s okay.

Now that you’ve collected some data, brought it forward, and refocused on what's important to you, you now want to make a commitment. That commitment is to renew the things you said you would do. However, make sure that every one of those things is for you.

When I talk like this, people often think, “Well, isn't that a bit selfish? Aren’t I supposed to be serving others?”

Yes. That may be true.

However, it’s a balance between serving others with self-being taken care of. In fact, I've learned over the years that the greater amount of self-care that I can give myself sets me up to help way more other people as well.

Let's look at it through the lens of getting the foundation set. Last year, we talked about Personal Leadership — leading yourself — being the foundation of all leadership. Therefore, renewing your vows to yourself and making sure that what you’re doing will help and support you, is the foundation for being able to help others.

So, what do you want to achieve this year?

The process that we use is that we look at the end of the year and look at the results that we want. Then, we look at the reality of where that is right now. You can look at the reality of things like your health, your relationships and your finances. So, look at the reality for each of those areas and what you want to achieve.

The third part of the process is to look at the roadblocks that are stopping you or would stop you, from going from where you are now to where you want to go. Then we bring in some resources (changes in mindset, behaviour, learning, training, coaching, whatever it is) so that you can overcome those roadblocks and have an open road to go from where you are now to where you want to go.

It’s also important to remember that it's about incremental change. It's not about wholesale change where we work in a dichotomy that says, "I'm either here or here.” No, it's about: “This is where I am now. What's the first step?”

And every one of those single steps eventually get you to where you want to go.

It's also (as we talked about at the end of last year) Celebrating Progress.

When all those things are in place, you are now in a position to renew those vows.

Here are some of the things that hold you back from renewing those vows:

1. You don’t believe you are worthy of the results you want to get.

2.You don’t believe you are good enough to get there.

The challenge is that you've taken yourself through a process at the end of the year, or at every moment that you get the opportunity, to beat yourself up about the things that you're not good at and the things that you've failed at.

So, what you need to do if you're still in that position, is to go back a couple of weeks and read this blog: https://www.grantherbert.com/blog/celebrate-how-far-youve-come where I talked about celebrating progress, and get yourself in the right state of mind as you relearn this.

Like every other person on the planet, you deserve to have a life filled with joy, love, peace, happiness, fulfillment, and abundance. It doesn't matter where you've come from you can draw a line in the sand right now and become who you need to become this year to get the results you want to have.

However, you first need to be okay with yourself having those things.

So, with all that in place, now that you're in that right mindset, what is it that you said to yourself that you would achieve in 2023?

However, if you feel that some things are still out of place and that you still are not in the right mindset, there’s plenty of help out there to help you get there. If you've got some questions, you can contact me no matter where you are listening to or watching this, and I'll point you to some resources to help you with that.

I want you to revisit your list of vows and put it through the filter by asking:

Does it meet my values?

Does it meet my priorities?

Is it truly what I want to do?

I use a very simple process. Before making any decision, I ask myself:

“For what purpose and at what cost?”

So put it through that filter and go:

“For what purpose do I want to do that?” And if the purpose is external, i.e., to get the approval of others, then challenge whether or not it's something that you want to put your energy into. If it gets through that first filter, ask, "If I do that, what's the cost?” The cost we're talking about here is the cost of your priorities, your energy, your health, and your mindset. If the cost outweighs the reward, you can challenge that.

Once you've done that, now's the time to stand on your altar and recommit those vows. Make that choice to believe in yourself and re-establish that contract with yourself that you are going to do what it takes to become who you need to become so you can have the results you want.

You can also involve others however the first step is to realise that this is just of value to you. It's not for anyone else's approval or for them to run a fine toothcomb over it and have an opinion about it. This is a commitment to yourself.

The commitment you make to yourself is the strongest commitment you will ever make. In the workplace, if I can get the leadership to get the team involved in developing strategies to move them forward, then there's a greater chance that those strategies will be executed because the collective team has come up with them.

The same principle applies to you.

As you do this, make sure that you are not letting those negative voices come in. Make sure that you are truly committing to yourself.

As you commit to yourself, the intrinsic benefit of those vows will also flow to others — whether that be your friends, family, or workmates.

So, renew your vows to yourself.

New year’s resolutions are great if they're looked at the right way. You can capitalise on them if they're realistic and being done for the right reason. So, do not throw them out.

Let's not go, “Well, a week's gone past, and I'm, still eating a bowl of ice cream every night,” or whatever it is for you. (That wasn't a, you know, me owning up to something right there.)

Instead, go: “Only a week's past. There are still 51 weeks left.”

With this in mind, you recommit.

Once you've done this once, what I want you to do is think about that every single day of the year.

Life is a recommitment every single day.

When I wake up every day, I am grateful that the sun came up again on another day. I am grateful that I am given another opportunity to live a day in my life.

Re-committing to myself is the best thing I can do to make sure that I capitalise and give back for that opportunity. And it's the same for you.

Well, that's it from me for another week. Welcome to 2023. You and I are going to have a lot of fun this year. We're going to go on a journey together. I'm going to introduce more topics to help you become who you need to become in your personal, professional, and people leadership.

I’ll see you next week.