Making Resolutions that Stick

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. This book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year’s Day.” ~ Edith Lovejoy Pie

Happy New Year!
The end of a decade is the perfect time to set goals for the months to come and to reprioritize your life. As we say “Goodbye” to 2019 and “Hello” to 2020, I find myself wanting to set some goals and aspirations for myself, typical of this time of year. My biggest challenge is to dedicate some time to practicing better self-care and the first step in my regime will be to craft a short period of time each day to nurture self-compassion and self-love. In short, my goal is to be more gentle with myself. Or better yet, for my brain to be more nurturing and loving. I have learned that I was more likely to stick to resolutions when I started focusing on how I wanted to feel and who I wanted to be. If you’ve walked away from 2019 with only disappointment or you wish for greater clarity, let’s work on that together this year.

One of my favourite Expressive Art Therapy exercise is a dream board for the year, and it combines intention with collage for a fun filled activity that is sure to provide increased motivation and some much needed direction when we are feeling lost. A dream collage is an image composition that illustrates your vision for the future , your desires for a new reality. You can visualize your goals and make them more detailed, bringing to the surface of our subconscious. You can create a dream collage by cutting up old photos from a magazine and glueing them to a piece of paper. As a mixed media project, you can place photos that symbolize your desires and use pens and other arts media to write  inspirational messages to yourself that will motivate you throughout the year to come.

To wish you a happy New Year, I want to share a few self-loving ideas for New Years resolutions that I found online (https://parade.com/969195/megangrant/new-years-resolutions-ideas/):

1. Focus on a passion, not the way you look
2. Work out to feel good, not thinner
3. Do something new and step outside your comfort zone, like a therapy session
4. Try reducing waste and finding new homes for your old stuff that is collecting dust
5. Give one compliment a day and make someone else’s day