New Year, New You? Building on the Positive

Anxiety Therapy San Francisco

Every year around this time many people attempt to shed their old selves in favor of becoming someone new.  Somehow the lure of the new and shiny beckons every January--shown by the increase in gym memberships, new dedication to therapy (woo-hoo!), and multiple New Year’s resolutions.  It makes sense in our culture, which worships youth and all things shiny, that we would want to banish the parts of ourselves that we don’t like in favor of a rebirth where we are unscathed. Unfortunately, we can rarely throw out all the “negative” things about ourselves and make positive change without taking inventory of what we actually appreciate and don’t appreciate about ourselves.  The need to make changes in our lives is admirable and necessary but how we go about it can make all the difference. 

Clients often come in to see me with a laundry list of the negative attributes and may even treat themselves as a fixer-upper e.g. “If I fix all these things about myself, THEN I will be ok,” but never acknowledge the strengths that they acquired in life.  It makes little sense to try and be a completely “new” person and throw out everything about ourselves both admired and undesirable.  It may actually be that adjusting how we treat ourselves will create the change we desire.  Keeping that in mind, here are a couple of suggestions for starting to make changes in the new year.

1)    Write down a list of all the things you like about yourself and that you do well. Post it somewhere you can see it or write it on your phone.  Reference it often.

2)    Write down all the habits that you see as positive that you ALREADY have.

3)    Think of one (or two) things about yourself or your life that you would like to change.  Again, avoid making a grocery list of so-called negative attributes.  That would be discouraging to anyone so why drag your self-esteem down?

4)    Find a way to incorporate something you would like to change into one of your already existing habits. For example, you hate exercise but never skip your morning coffee. . .can you walk to the coffeeshop that you go to?  Or you LOVE talking to people on the phone but will skip meditating—can you make a goal to only call someone after your five-minute meditation?

5)    Lastly, be kind to yourself--whether you succeed on your new habits or changes the first time or it takes multiple starts and stops. There is nothing inherently wrong or bad about you.  You can make changes but start with the assumption you aren’t broken to begin with.  If you have questions about how to make changes in your life or would like some guidance around anxiety therapy, please contact me, Lisa Manca at (415) 212-8780