With New Year’s speeding towards us, I want to congratulate you on your successful continuation of all the New Year’s Resolutions you made ever so long ago last January! Ah yes, I can see it now: you’ll wake up on December 31st after getting enough sleep, go to the gym one last time, waving to the desk worker you’ve seen twice a week for the last year. When you get home, you’ll nobly refuse the pizza your family ordered for dinner and instead enjoy a delicious vegan salad. Oh, and you’ll also call your Grandma; you’d never forget that. You’ll watch the ball drop for the new year and a wave of satisfaction will wash over you for completing each and every resolution, just like you did last year and the year before, steadily improving yourself and your life bit by bit. Truly inspiring!
Okay, be honest with me, have you ever brought a New Year’s Resolution all the way from January through to December? Maybe you have, in which case, I most certainly applaud you. But New Year’s Resolutions are so famously hard to keep up that it almost seems to have become more common to set them ironically, and we groan whenever the hundredth and first person that day smugly tells us their resolution is to not make any resolutions. In this article, I want to present for your viewing delight an alternative, an idea that does away with the hopeless inefficacy and inevitable failure of resolutions: Yearly Themes.
But first, let’s briefly examine why resolutions never seem to work. The truth is, changing behavior is very very hard, and it takes intention, commitment, and a fair amount of work. Resolutions fail precisely because they’re able to. They generally consist of a goal we’re working towards with a very clear failstate: go to the gym more–if we don’t go to the gym more, we’ve failed. Now, let’s be real, since changing our own behavior is so difficult, we’re undoubtedly going to fail our resolutions every now and then, especially at the start. And the problem is that, once we’ve failed, we become far less motivated to start back again and keep going. Humans like streaks, and it feels almost pointless to go on once we break them. The other thing is that life happens. We get busy, we get injured, we get stressed, we have to move, we have to find a new job. A change in situation can often make resolutions impossible, making us fail through no fault of our own.
Therefore, instead of a resolution, allow me to suggest to you a Yearly Theme. A theme, unlike a specific resolution, is a broad stroke. It is some aspect of your life that you want to focus on throughout next year. It is a framework with which to make decisions, a north star to lead you right, a friendly reminder to do the things that are important to you. A theme can encompass many aspects of your life, and within it you can set individual aligning goals.
Let me give you an example to show you why themes are better than resolutions. Instead of “I will go to the gym x times per month,” let’s say you set the “Year of Health” as your Yearly Theme. The concept of “health” says a lot, but what it means to you is up to you. Part of it can be resolving to go to the gym more often, yes, but it could also give you the opportunity to think about your diet, maybe your emotional and mental health, even stretching to things like relationship health, if that’s something you want to focus on. What’s cool too is that it can adapt with you throughout the year. Perhaps you’re going strong at the gym all through January, but come February First you’re in a car accident and you get injured. You may not be able to run or lift for a while, but instead of falling into lethargy, you think about the Year of Health. Well, you can probably still stretch, maybe finally see what yoga’s all about, maybe do some pool aerobics. Or perhaps now’s the perfect time to think a bit more about your diet and try to improve there. Whatever you do, the point is you’re still on track with your theme, whereas your resolution would have floundered and died.
Another key thing themes do is remove the guilt of failure, because where resolutions are about crossing individual points, themes are about trendlines. Imagine you set the Year of Initiative: you want to be more confident, you want to apply for that internship; you want to travel; you want to be spontaneous. And then Covid hits. And maybe what the Year of Initiative means to you now is simply pulling yourself out of bed. Putting on clean clothes. Eating. Bringing yourself to reach out to friends on Zoom. Doing anything to keep yourself sane and alive. And maybe, at the end of the year, you come out technically worse off than you were going in. But maybe you also come out less worse than you could have been, and that’s still a massive success.
My theme this last year has been the Year of Metamorphosis, lovingly referred to as the Year of Leveling Up or the Year of the Butterfly. I came up with this theme last December largely due to imposter syndrome. Basically, I wanted to become the person that other people thought I was, and to an extent the person I wanted to be. And, to be honest, the first four months of the year I didn’t have the emotional capacity to even think about my theme or self improvement. But by mid-April, a number of things happened in my life, and my theme came to take on a related, yet very new, meaning. And that’s the beautiful thing about themes–as you grow as a person, they grow with you, and they shine a light on the next step you should take to continue growing.
So, as we come to the end of another semester and another calendar year, I encourage you–once exams are over and you get home and settle back into your own room for the holidays–spend the last two weeks of December with the idea of themes squiggling around the back of your head. Don’t rush it–think about it, but try to let a theme come naturally to you (and pro tip, when the perfect theme occurs to you in some random moment, immediately stop and write it down because you will forget :P).
The themes I’ve personally set by the fireplace to warm for a bit are the Year of Care and the Year of Now–you can have more than one–but those may still shift around as the year begins its conclusion, we’ll see. Whatever you decide on for yourself, I hope you choose to wake up in the new year thematically, and I hope you’re able to leave next December a better you for doing so!
If you’re interested in hearing more in-depth about yearly themes, I would highly recommend the video, “Your Theme”, by YouTuber CGP Grey, and the episodes #95, #104, and #110 of the Cortex Podcast.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.