I’m not a fan of New Years’ resolutions. When we make a New Year’s resolution, we rarely take into account the powerful, unconscious assumptions we hold about ourselves and the world that anchor us firmly to our habitual behaviors and prevent us from affecting any kind of meaningful, sustainable change. 

In the end, New Year’s resolutions turn out to be largely a waste of time. Worse, when we fail to fulfill our resolutions, we end up beating ourselves up and vowing to work even harder next year…and so the self-defeating cycle repeats itself. 

We vow to lose weight, but we’re can’t moderate how much we eat during our Sunday extended family dinners. Eating with our family every Sunday has become an important part of how we see ourselves, as defined by our family relationships and as someone who eats, eats, and eats even more – all for the sake of creating and enjoying community with others. 

We vow to stop work at 5pm every day to spend more time with our families, but we continue to work late because how we are perceived by others – as someone who works, works, and works even longer for the sake of meeting company objectives – forms an important part of our sense of identity. 

We vow to develop a more disciplined meditation practice, but the idea of sitting still, in silence, for 10 minutes a day is inconsistent with our sense of ourselves as someone who pushes, pushes, and pushes even harder – as someone who is always on the move for the sake of getting things done. 

To borrow a metaphor from the psychologist Robert Kegan, making a New Year’s resolution is like “having one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake.” We desperately want to make changes in our lives, but our biological and social conditioning holds us back. 

Unless we’re willing to undertake the difficult and emotionally charged work of uncovering and examining our unconscious assumptions – one New Year’s resolution I believe is definitely worth making – I recommend a different approach to welcoming the new year. 

This year let’s focus less on who we ought to be and more on how we have become who we are. Instead of thinking about all the ways we need to change to become better in the year ahead – which really is a thinly disguised brooding over all the ways we’re falling short today – let’s celebrate how capable and accomplished we already are and have become over the last 12 months. 

Starting each new year with a mindset of surplus rather than deficit, of celebration rather than regret, seems to me a healthier, more productive way to grow in the coming months. At least I hope that’s the case, because this time around that’s how I’ve decided to honor the start of the coming new year.