We all start the new year hoping to be a better version of ourselves: To take what we experienced last year, learn from it and improve. The best way to do that is to put yourself first, take care of your mental health/wellbeing and stay present with yourself. It’s not selfish, it’s self-care. In this article, I’ll run through the steps of how to stay organized and check-in with yourself!
First Step: Conclude 2019
It’s important that you acknowledge all of the good things as well as all of the bad things you experienced in the last year. In acknowledging them, place each event or moment that feels important into different categories. These categories can be titled as the following for example: “Things I learned from,” “Things I don’t want to repeat,” or “Things that still need to be dealt with.”
Categorizing each important moment helps you remember that each one of them did something to move you further in life. It may have been a bad experience, but you learned from it. It may have been a good experience, but still something you don’t want to repeat! Each moment in our lives serves a purpose; acknowledge and appreciate that.
Second Step: Set Achievable and Quantifiable Goals
Yes, of course everyone has New Year’s resolutions and the running joke is that they’re never kept. Keep your resolutions by making them something you can track of and turn into milestones.
For example, if your goal was to do more for other people/be less selfish, you could set a goal to volunteer in some way at least twice a month. Then, you could log those hours and even plan to increase the amount of hours you put in each month and track them. It will not only make you feel accomplished, but make it easy to actually attain your high goals.
Final Step: Set Up Regular Check-ins With Yourself
If you didn’t realize it before, the first and second steps were personal check-in opportunities. In the first step, you stopped to see where your head is at as you start this new year. You looked at what is resolved and what isn’t and learned to appreciate both the good and the bad moments of 2019.
In the second step, you learned how easy it is to check-in with yourself regularly and track what you’re doing. So here, it’s time to learn how to track how you’re feeling instead of tracking physical and quantifiable goals. Make sure you take time at least once each month to stop and process your emotions, what’s going on in yourself and take time to be alone with your thoughts.
Learning to love and pay attention to yourself can be hard, but if you start with these three steps it will start to feel more and more like second nature. Take care of yourself this 2020!