A happy alternative to New Year's Resolutions.

0:04 This is Crappita Happy and I am your host, Cas Doune. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist. I'm mindfulness meditation teacher and of course author of the Crappita Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Welcome to another solo episode of the Crappita Happy Podcast, and it is our last episode for twenty twenty three. I hope you have had a lovely relaxing time. This episode's coming to you a little late because I have been having a lovely relaxing time during this Christmas New Year kind of void period where there is noah to be and nothing to do, and it seems like the whole world is on holidays.

1:03 And if you have not been on holidays, and if you have been working, I want to thank you for keeping the world ticking, keeping things happening. We rely on you and we appreciate you so much. But I'm not one of those people. So I've been on my couch watching a lot of Netflix. But it's that time where we're starting to kind of emerge from our hibernation, and if you're anything like me, it's about now that you start thinking about plans for next year. This is where those dreaded New Year's resolutions start kicking around in the back of your mind. You start thinking about all of the positive changes you want to make for the new year. And I promised you that I would be back to talk to you about this and to give you some suggestions for better, healthier, more positive ways that you might be able to set yourself up going into the new year that do not involve these hardcore, pass or failed type resolutions that we often set, which ultimately we never keep.

1:58 We know this, and therefore they kind of end up making us feel like a failure. So let's talk about why. For a start, I'm not a fan of resolutions. I'll see if this resonates with you, and you know, rather than just take that away from you and leave you with nothing, I will share with you some ideas that I think that are, like I said, better options. So the thing about news resolutions is that they tend to be not always but if you think about it, they tend to be these kind of very black or white pass or fail type decisions that you make. I'm going to quit smoking, I'm going to go to the gym three times a week, or I'm going to not drink alcohol on the week days or at all, I'm going to take a dry January or something. Maybe it's I'm going to cut out sugar, or I'm going to not eat take away food anymore. I'm going to lose weight, get fit, spend more time with my family, get off screens.

3:01 It's just this, Well, for a start, there are often lots of them. There's this long list of things that we think that we need to do and achieve. But the way that we phrase them, in the way that we frame them, they're this, I'm going to do this or I'm going to not do that, which means by definition, you can only either achieve that or not. And they are less about goals. I'm not saying that they're not about goals. You probably do have a goal, but the way we phrase them and frame them in our own mind is that they're more like actions. But start doing this, I'm going to stop doing that. And therefore, when your humanness comes into play and you have a slip up or you don't do what you said you were going to do, or you do do something that you said you were going to give up doing. Then we fall into that all or nothing kind of thinking, which is very very natural, not helpful, but it's kind of a natural.

3:58 This perfectionist kind of or nothing mindset comes in and we've let ourselves down, and we go into a whole lot of negative self talk and feelings of failure and what's the point. And I can never achieve anything, and I never do what I said I was going to do, and I said I was going to do this last year and I didn't and now I'm failing again. It just is not good for you. It's not good for you mentally. You're obviously not making any positive progress on any of your goals when this is the way we set ourselves up, and this is the way we treat ourselves when we inevitably fail in achieving that. I guess the other issue that I have with resolutions is that they do tend to be very focused on all of the things that we think are wrong with us. We are our own worst critics. We all feel like we need to be doing better in some aspect of our lives.

4:45 We're all down on ourselves because we're eating too much, drinking too much, we're putting on too much weight, we're spending too much money, we're spending too much time on screens, YadA YadA, yadah, blah blah, we're not organized enough, where houses are mess You know, it's just this laundry list of perceived flaws and failings that we're very focused on when we set new Year's resolutions. It's not very inspiring when you think about it. It's just a list of the things we think are wrong with us, and that, more to the point, we think we need to fix in order to actually accept ourselves or approve of ourselves. And if you have been around me for long enough, if you've listened to this podcast or don't listen, to follow me on social media, or been involved in any work that I have done over the past several years, you'll know that the science is very clear that this is not the way to forward progress. This is not a path to positive improvement, self improvement. Self criticism will only lead to a lack of progress towards goal achievement.

5:50 What we want to be focusing on instead is self acceptance, self kindness, self compassion self awareness for sure, but you know, we need to be bringing in a lot lot more of this self kindness and a lot more acceptance and recognition of our innate humanness and the fact that we are all flawed human beings. There is no such thing as perfection, and just let ourselves off the hook a little bit. One of my favorite Boodher sayings is, beware the subtle aggression of self improvement. The aggression of self improvement, the attack on yourself every time you focus on achieving a goal that you think is going to lead to you accepting yourself and finally approving of yourself. So I want you to really have that in mind when you're thinking about these goals or these changes that you are considering making in the new year. How much of this is based on I feel like there is something wrong with me, and I need to fix or change or better or improve myself in order to be a worthy person and worthy of my own approval. And you probably think that that's going to make you more worthy of other people's approval as well, And I'm here to tell you that it is appbsolutely not the case. So let's start from a place of self kindness, self acceptance. I am all for you being the best version of yourself.

7:09 I want you to be evolving towards your highest potential, being the most inspired, actualized, purpose driven, fulfilled content version of yourself that you can be. But I'm here to tell you that that typically does not start with piling on a load of self criticism and self judgment. So let's just start with that, and I guess you know, you know, if we go back to that point, there's just a lot of them. We've got a lot of things we wanted, we think that we need to do differently, and it's really hard to make sweeping, broad, multiple changes in our life all at once. The path to progress is typically much more incremental, it's much more microwth than that.

7:55 It's tiny changes formulating new habits that build on each other over time. Whereas we often will approach this new year, new slate, clean slate, fresh start, and we just pile on all of the things that we want to change all at once, and that's really difficult. You know, that's just not typically how change works. So coming back to something that's a little bit more manageable and getting down to the micro and just starting with like little habits that you might begin to change slowly progressively, knowing that you will slip up along the way, But that doesn't mean that you can't pick up and keep moving forward. It's not this, you know, we're just losing this kind of all or nothing thinking when it comes to goal progress.

8:38 So that's kind of the inner nutshell summary of why I I am not a fan of New Year's resolutions in the way that we would typically make them. So what do I think is a better way? Well, first of all, instead of thinking about these actions, these I'm going to do this or not do this if those kinds of pass or fail actions that we set for ourselves, let's think about goals. Goals are fine, Goals are great. I would love for you to be working towards meaningful goals. It's shown to boost your satisfaction, fulfillment with life, your sense of mastery. You know, having goals that are aligned with your values is great. I would really encourage you to be thinking about goals. But the thing about goals is that they're an outcome. A goal is something that you achieve at some point in the future. And whether you go to the gym three times this week or not.

9:30 Whether you drink or don't drink, or have too much sugar or not, or eat too much dessert today or not makes no difference to your ability to achieve that goal. At some point in the future, you can go off track on the way towards achieving goals. So starting to think about maybe it is in twelve months time, what would I like to have achieved. So if you're thinking that one of your resolutions is I need to save money, I'm going to stop buying takeaway I'm stop buying takeaway coffee. I'm going to save this much money every single week. If this is the way you're thinking, then instead maybe just reframe that into a goal this time in twelve months, what would I like to have saved? Where would I like to be in terms of debt reduction. If you're thinking I'm going to cut out sugar and junk food, I'm going to go to the gym, I'm going to exercise five days a week, and you've got this sort of list going on again, just turn that around and ask yourself for what purpose to what end? If I've got a list of things that I think I need to do, a list of actions, just make the distinction between an action and an outcome. So if I'm telling myself that I'm going to give up drinking, I'm not going to drink on the week days, I'm going to give up smoking. Whatever it is that this bad habit that I'm going to change to what end, for what ultimate purpose? But because at the end of the year, this is where I would like to be, this is where I see myself, and therefore I'm going to start to make these incremental changes with a view to achieve that.

11:00 So you see the difference. It's subtle, but it's very very important difference because there is a big difference between a goal, a strategy, and an action. And often when people say they've set themselves a goal, no they haven't. What they've set is a list of actions. Now we could get you know, I've talked about this before, you could get pedantic about it, and people took about the difference between a process goal and an outcome kind of a goal, and that is the difference basically between an action and an outcome. I would just like you just start thinking about it in those terms. Is this an action that I'm saying that I'm going to do, or can I and if it is, or can I reframe that into an outcome? I'm going to do this thing? Why? Because for what purpose? To what end? What ultimate outcome am I aiming to achieve? Frame it in those terms.

11:47 Set yourself a goal, put a time frame on it, and then whether you do that action or not, whether you sleep up, have a step back, you know, pick yourself up, have to start again one hundred thousand times, it doesn't matter because you can continue moving in direction of the goal. So there is that first and foremost, stop talking or thinking in terms of actions. The second thing I like to talk about is as an alternative, is this idea of intention rather than setting a goal even or something that's very specific and concrete. What about thinking about intentions? Intentions is like, how do I want to show up? What attitude do I want to bring? Let's let me give you an example to try to explain this. Let's so that my intention for twenty twenty four might be to simplify things. Maybe I feel like I'm over complicating things. I'm doing too many different things.

12:37 I'm running around like a mad thing. I'm torn between a whole lot of different projects, whatever it might be, and I want to simplify. So out of that can come like a lot of different kind of choices and actions and decisions that I might make in terms of how I live my life. It might then flow on to how I prepare my week. Whether I just choose to stick with three or four mens and I'm going to cook every single week on rotation instead of trying to overcomplicate things and recipe planning and meal planning and grocery shopping and all different ingredients, maybe I'm just going to simplify that, say, Okay, these are the four or five dinners that I know that the whole family eats, and that's what we're going to eat this week. And then everybody knows what to expect. I know what to shop for every week. Every now and again, we can go out and we can get a takeaway, or can we do something throw something different into the mix. But I've simplified. Maybe my intention is going to be to cultivate deeper friendships, maybe if that's something that's lacking. I know certainly for me, I'm in a whole new city, new country, you know, I want to cultivate some more meaningful connections with people. So out of that intention, then each week or each month, that will inform the decisions that I make about how I choose to spend my time, about whether what I say yes to, about what I choose to do on the weekends. You know, like it's just start from the intention and then from there let that guard your decisions and your actions. Have the actions come from something that you've already decided is important to you.

14:04 It's like a theme that kind of guides all of the decisions that you make throughout the year, and then that will flourish into a whole lot of different actions and outcomes which you never necessarily set in the first place, you know, so you let them kind of come out organically from this place of intention. My intention might be to be more present with people, So therefore I get off my phone. I make a decision to FaceTime people instead of just texting. I might decide to turn off the TV until eight o'clock at night instead of just having it on from six or whatever it is. So you see, we start with an intention. We decide how we want to show up. An intention comes from a place of your values. Normally, it's deciding what is important to you and how you want to be as opposed to what you want to do again, getting away from those actions, you're thinking about how you want to be and then letting that guide you. So have some fun with that. Have to think about your intentions maybe instead of even getting fixated on goals, especially if you're the sort of person who you know for whom goals can be are very they come from that place of self judgment and self criticism and needing to be better. I would really encourage you to get away from that kind of thinking instead, start thinking about values and how you want to be, the personal qualities you want to cultivate, the things that really matter to you, and then let the decisions and the actions and the outcomes flow kind

15:37 of from that place. Let that be a little guiding light. And then another fun thing that often you know I've talked about a lot in the past, and what many people do is they choose a word for the year. And I think this word for the year is a really great idea. I've had varying degrees of success in remembering my word and actually holding myself to that word for the year. I think if you're going to do it, you need to like really put it somewhere visible. And find ways to be constantly reminded of what your word is. But the word for the year really is a spin off kind of of the intention idea. You know, it is thinking about if you have got things that you think you want, if you've got one of those sort of laundry lists like actions, I'm going to be more organized and be more of this and be less that and do more of this. Then think instead of a word that kind of encompasses what that's all about, what the core value is there, But the foundation is that is leading you to want to make those changes or decisions.

16:37 So let's just say I'm really committed to living more sustainably, you know, be less wasteful, really thinking about the impact that I have on the environment in the terms of the choices that I make and how I shop and what I do and how I live. And so maybe I choose the word sustainability or sustainable or something like that. I'm just thinking off the top of my head here. But then maybe that word sustain or sustainable, maybe that then flows on into other areas of your life. And maybe when you're thinking about the exercise plan, you know, I really want to get fit this year, then you're allowing this word sustainable to also guide that, well, how do I do something? How do I implement something that's going to be sustainable for me? So instead of setting myself these big goals that I'm inevitably not going to achieve, how can I make it sustainable? There's maybe lots of other areas that you could think about how I bring this this theme of sustainability, keeping things sustainable might flow over into lots of other areas. One year, I you had the word unsubscribe. I don't know remember exactly why I thought of that word. Maybe it was just that my inbox was overflowing, but it was actually more about the fact that I wanted to just unsubscribe from pages on social media, from people that I followed, and even from ideologies and beliefs. I've gone through periods of my life where I've been vegan and very committed to that.

18:08 I've given gone through periods where I've given up drinking for you know, a couple of years, and there's been lots of vegetarian I've gone through periods where I've been quite committed to a particular ideology. I guess, and that's fine. I'm no you know that's totally fine. But my word for the U was unsubscribed because I was just ready to just let go of, you know, subscribing to these you know, these ways of living and these ways of thinking and these rules. I guess it was starting to feel like I was boxed in and being forced to live by a set of prescribed rules. So unsubscribe. And it just applied to just so many different areas of my life. And I also did unsubscribe from a lot of junk mail, but it was more than that. And so that's what I mean. So I really often when we talk about this, you know, choose a word for the year, people get oh word, like within five minutes, here's my word. And I really encourage you to spend a little bit more time thinking about it than that it's going to stick and you're going it's going to be more meaningful if you've really given some thought to that deeper question of intentions and values as opposed to it coming from because often instinctively it will come from that same sort of place of that resolutionary type place like you know, that's I'm going to be more organized, and so my word's going to be organized or focused or disciplined or something like that. You know, and I just stop that. Stop stop stop, stop stop that. Let go of that. Get deeper than that, go deeper than that, get to the core of values, intentions, how you want

19:41 to be, attitudes or court, personal qualities or characteristics you want to cultivate within yourself, how you want to show up for people, for your work, for your family, in your life, what really matters to you, and kind of think about the intention behind that and allow the word to kind of come from that place. I hope that is helpful when you think about the word for the year. But you know what, at the end of the day, if you're really you're a hardcore goals person and you just want to set yourself a challenge and you're the sort of person who's really motivated by that and you're going to rise to the challenge, then you go for it.

20:24 I mean, you do you whatever works for you. But having said that, I would say, do make the distinction between a goal and an action. Go to the gym three times a week is not a goal. That is a decision to do an action. So what is the goal to what end? For what purpose? What is the outcome that you are ultimately working towards. If you want to go to the gym three times a week, save two hundred dollars a week, that's an action to what end. What's the ultimate goal? Ultimately? How much money do you want to save for what purpose? Maybe it's for something bigger. Maybe it's for a holiday, or a house deposit, or a new car, or a kitchen renovation. I don't know what it is, but think about the bigger pitch of the outcome you're working towards, so that if there's a week when you can't save the two hundred dollars a week, then you haven't failed. It just means that you make some changes and adjustments in order to pick up and get back on track to that ultimate goal. Just knowing that life's going to get in the way, and it doesn't mean you're a failure. I hope that's helpful. I'm going to keep this really short. I really hope that you whatever you're doing for New Year's Eve. I'm not a New Year's Eve person either. I'm so boring. I'm constantly disappointed by New Year's Eve. It's always expensive. When I was younger, inevitably, and I'm talking about like when I was a teenager and in my early twenties. I can't tell you how many times New Year's Eve I have the broke up with a boyfriend, out a fire with a boyfriend, you know, spent way too much money, you know, had a terrible time to wait until five in the morning for a taxi, whatever. I don't know.

21:46 It's just always overhyped for me and disappointing. So if you're having a party at home or you're celebrating with friends, do enjoy. I will be having a very very quiet night doing what I normally do, which is going a bit early, probably doing some journaling, probably thinking about intentions for the new year. But whatever you're doing, enjoy and don't put so much pressure on the first of January being new year, new you. But you are perfectly perfectly fine, exactly as you are right now. In fact, let's think about maybe the fourth of February. I think fourth of February this year is the Chinese New Year. Maybe we could just call that the New Year. I think, especially in Australia, that makes sense because so many of us are still relaxing and on holidays and kids aren't back at school yet, so we've really got to take this pressure off, the first of January being the start of the whole new routine and all of these new habits that we're supposedly going to implement. It's okay, there's plenty of time. Think about where you want to be in a year, think about your intentions. Thank you so much for being here with me for this ride with Crappy to Happy. I'm looking forward to an exciting twenty twenty four, hopefully bringing you lots of really great guests, really great topics.

22:59 Constantly looking for your feedback, so absolutely email me hello atkast Don dot com or message me on Instagram, cast on Underscore XO. I love getting your messages. I really appreciate your support and I cannot wait to catch you next week for an amazing episode of Crappy. A hap, but you've got a great guest in store. I'll see you then,