Seattle Child Therapy – Thriving Child Blog

Happy New Year!!! Focusing on the self in the New Year.

Happy New Year to all of my clients, colleagues, and you!

The beginning of the year is supposed to be a great time to write down my intentions for the upcoming year – things I want to accomplish, create, and attract into my life. These aren’t necessarily resolutions (though they can be), but more an exercise in forcing myself to sit down and think about what I want – to daydream, picture, and envision my future, especially the year ahead.

This year in an effort to have more focus and clarity for myself, I am breaking things down into the areas of:

• personal (i.e. personal growth, self care, emotional wellbeing, living situation)
• health/fitness (i.e. weight, strength, endurance, energy level, food, eating/sleeping habits)
• relational (relationships of all types)
• business/professional development
• financial (i.e. abundance, spending, saving, planning for future)
• spiritual (i.e. connectedness, meditation, intuition)

I noticed it’s really interesting to watch myself struggle to sit down, pull out a piece of paper, and actually think about these things and write down what I want. Things seem to keep popping up to pull me away from the exercise (oh, I need to do laundry…side tracked to re-organizing the cleaning closet…make the bed and put away shoes…maybe I should take a nap…). Even writing this blog is actually another form of procrastination. Why am I so resistant to sitting with myself and dreaming about the future, and more specifically, my future?

I would love to say the past year has been fantastic and it’s easy to just imagine more of the same, but (at the risk of too much self disclosure – sometimes people feel like therapists must have perfect lives..after all, we must know how to deal with everything perfectly, right?) it hasn’t felt that way. It hasn’t been a bad year necessarily, but it has been a year of frustration, angst, confusion, disappointment, and sometimes feeling like I am pushing a rock up hill in specific parts of my life. So to sit down and think about the next year ahead – it’s easy to say I don’t want more of the same – but it’s hard to feel and see that it can be different. I know knowing what you don’t want is a great starting place, but it’s also very important to know, see, feel, and be able to articulate what you do want.

Okay, enough procrastination! One piece at a time. I will go and write down at least 3 things I want for my personal life in 2008.

here are a few questions to get the juices flowing:

Do you spend time alone with yourself?
Do you feel you act with integrity and honesty?
Do you like who you are?
Is there anything you would like to learn more about, or expand upon?
If you were on your death bed tomorrow, would you have any regrets?
Do you take time to reflect?
Do you have positive thoughts about yourself? or are you self-depreciating?
Do you carry guilt, shame, embarrassment, anger?

Okay…so what do you want to be like this upcoming year with yourself. At a Being level, who do you want to be? How do you want to feel about yourself?

now…do you want to go and do it too??? any struggles, resistance, distractions? what are you avoiding? or was it easy?