Here’s a life goal for the new year and beyond: Look for the next way you can be nice to yourself, then repeat. Do it again. Keep at it. Never stop.
If this became a way of life, your personal modus operandi, what do you think you would discover? What could you accomplish?
First you might discover that you are other-than-nice to yourself in many ways, and that you justify this in many ways. If you’re like virtually every other person around you, you would discover that you try to motivate yourself with other-than-nice thoughts and feelings about yourself, others, and the world.
You might see how you use fear to try and motivate yourself to do things you don’t really want to do. You might see through all the little games and stories you use to keep yourself going through the motions, laboring at tasks big and small that do not reflect your heart’s true desires.
If you took your new life goal seriously – look for the next way you can be nice to yourself, then repeat – you might become very indulgent with yourself for a time, binge watching shows, overeating in your pajamas, using AI for pointless distractions.
And you would probably quickly discover that none of these things are very satisfying. They are pseudo-satisfactions, flimsy fakes, insubstantial proxies for the real thing. You would start to ask –
“What actually feels good to me?”
“What do I actually want?”
“How do I want to be spending my time, using my energy, engaging this world, and living my life?”
And then you would set off on the path of discovering the answers to these essential questions. You would start to notice the difference between being genuinely nice to yourself (that is, giving yourself what you actually want most) and being other-than-nice to yourself (with-holding or distracting yourself from that which you actually want most).
Probably you would discover that being truly nice to yourself – allowing yourself to have what you want most – is a moving target, an ever-evolving game of hide and seek. You might notice that this game can either be really fun or really frustrating. If you’re very insightful, you might recognize that this choice – will it be fun or will it be frustrating – is your choice to make, and that you’ve been making it all along.
The decision to be always looking for the next way to be nice to yourself, and to enjoy this fun game, is a decision to be exquisitely present to yourself in each moment. This presence is required if you are going to move out of the default patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior that you developed before you knew what you were doing, and start creating new patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior based on intention – an intention to enjoy being nice to yourself in this moment, and this moment, and this, and this – until your life becomes a steady stream of delightful moments delivering deeply satisfying and genuinely pleasurable experiences one after another.
You can be nice to yourself through three main channels: doing, feeling, and thinking.
You can do things that are nice to yourself. Take a bath. Eat good food. Get rest. Smile at yourself in the mirror. Write yourself love letters.
Doing nice things for yourself is how most people initially conceive of this idea of being nice to yourself.
But at more subtle levels, it is how you feel about yourself and how you think about yourself that is most powerful. Start noticing your inner dialogues, and start telling yourself better feeling stories about yourself, others, and the world. Let being nice to yourself be as much about your thoughts and feelings as your actions.
When all three channels are aligned – what you do for yourself, how you think about yourself, how you feel about yourself – you will have maximum creative leverage. You will start to imagine… then anticipate… then experience a life that is a true reflection of the desires and wisdom of your heart, your body, and your mind.
But don’t take my word for it. Try it for yourself. Have some fun with it. Experiment. I can’t think of any downside (except that some people won’t know what to make of you).
If you decide today (or tomorrow, or the next day) to begin treating yourself in the way I am describing, I am certain that you can create more of what you want in the new year with less effort and more enjoyment than ever before. Even if I do not know you personally, I want this for you.
As always,
All My Best,
Justice Schanfarber