When the clock struck midnight on 31 December, I resolved that 2020 would be the year where I start going to boxing classes six times a week, meditate twice a day and adopt a vegan lifestyle.
Three weeks later, I was in bed, exhausted and bruised from boxing (I quickly learnt, despite the Rocky films, that being an excellent boxer takes more than just a music montage), eating a family-sized tiramisu and deleting the meditation app I had downloaded but never actually got around to using.
Between wondering if I had enough room in my stomach for a cheese board, I was filled with feelings of guilt, inadequacy and shame about the fact I hadn’t been able to implement these big changes in my life for very long.
Apparently, according to US World & News Report, new year’s resolutions have an 80 per cent failure rate – although some people fare better than me and make it to February, at least. On top of that, this week signals the moment when one in 10 of us will give up on any ideas we may have had of trying to save more this year.
Which is why we need to stop making failure synonymous with being lazy or uninspired; in fact, it is quite the opposite – failure means that you had the initiative and courage to try and surpass your current self.
If you started Veganuary with the best of intentions and succumbed to chicken nuggets at 1am or the new trainers that you ordered especially for the gym are sitting in your wardrobe collecting dust, that’s OK. We should be proud that we tried and embrace it as a learning experience, instead of a catastrophe.
Modern society suggests that failure is not even part of our discourse – one need only log into social media to see the perfect, glamorous lives that everyone is living, except us.
In 2020, the only resolution that we should be truly concerned about keeping is to be kind to ourselves if we should fail at something.
There is still an insurmountable pressure to be ‘our best selves’ and ‘live our best life’, and the beginning of a New Year seems like a good time to implement these mantras. How many times have we heard (and internally groaned at) the phrase ‘new year, new me’?
It’s all so exhausting and unrealistic.
The expectation is that we should somehow be able to juggle a myriad of responsibilities that life throws our way, while constantly self-improving. This adds more obligations and worries instead of taking them away.
That is not to say we shouldn’t have aspirations and goals – we should. They should, however, be conducive to living a happier and healthier life, not exasperating an already stressed-out one.
Failure can be humiliating and painful, but instead of considering broken resolutions as something detrimental to our success, we have to see them as a tool to our success – something we can spend the rest of the year learning from and building on.
Whether they admit it or not, everyone has experienced failure at some point in their life.
Albert Einstein failed his entrance exam to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School, Stephen King’s ‘Carrie’ was rejected by 30 publishers and Michael Jordan has missed 9,000 shots and lost almost 300 games throughout his career.
Let that be a lesson to us: persistence and tenacity is more important than getting it right the first time.
You should strive to be the best person you can be, aim high and work hard but never, ever at the expense of your mental health and self-esteem.
In 2020, the only resolution that we should be truly concerned about keeping is to be kind to ourselves if we should fail at something.
For me, that means once again picking up the boxing gloves, giving away all the cheese and cream cakes I have in the fridge and re-downloading the meditation app.
Instead of expecting that we will transform into brand new people with the tick of a clock, let’s set more achievable goals and employ a mindset where failure becomes simply a stepping stone to success.
If we get it right – great. But if we don’t, then we simply try again.
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source https://metro.co.uk/2020/02/05/failure-inevitable-embrace-dont-feel-embarrassed-12172680/
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