Maintaining the New Year Energy
So I definitely had a bit of a New Year high this year. I flew down from the sky and landed in 2020 in superhero pose; around me, the dust of 2019 swirled and settled as I slowly looked up grimly towards the coming months, a vision of focus and determination. I was grounded and committed to my goals and intentions, I had so many ideas for content and products that my Notes app was getting out of control and I was going to make 2020 a positive and transformative year. But then January was 7 weeks long and things began to, fizzle.
At the time, all those long weeks ago, I said to my friend Jen that I was worried about running out of steam, that the energy was too intense to sustain me, but in the spirit of my Powerful year, I went with it. I didn’t want to second guess and stymie myself, so I followed my energy and did what I felt like each day. Of course, that energy ebbed and flowed and there were days that I thought I’d lost it and days where I thought I was unbeatable. But here at the end of the month I’m finding myself restless, and starting to wonder ‘is this it?’. Maybe you are too.
What I realised was that, rather than being a cause for panic, or beating myself up, or drastically changing my goals, actually the novelty had simply worn off. All those new and exciting ideas and plans had now just become the things I do every day. They were no longer shiny bright keys to the future, they’d been subsumed into the humdrum of daily existence. And being a 21st century human with a short attention span and the constant craving for new stimulation, it wasn’t that my energy was fizzling out, it was my interest.
I know it’s not reasonable to expect to be on a constant, crazed high of motivation week to week and month to month, but I would like to be the superhero version of myself more often. She was pretty badass, nothing was impossible for her. So for those of us who did feel at the height of our powers around the turn of the year but that they’ve begun to wane, how can we re-summon our inner superhero? Here’s how I’m trying to recapture the new year energy.
Not letting habits become habits
I have been setting daily intentions using the Biddy Tarot planner and somewhere in the middle of January, this became an extra reason to get flustered in the morning rather than the powerful daily connection to my intuition that I wanted. It had become a habit, but one that was a chore, that I found myself starting to auto-pilot through and not really be present for, like cleaning my teeth.
So, I’ve tried to relax around these things. If I miss a day or week it’s no big deal and try to remember next time. I’ve cut a few of the habits I was trying to establish in order to prioritise others. I try to allocate a bit more time around the things I wanted to do very intentionally. Ultimately, I remember that these aren’t some random measures I’m being externally judged on – they’re things I decided to do to improve my own experience of life. And mostly that’s the perspective I need.
Keeping connected to what it’s for
Another reason why the new year energy starts to lag is that we hit the part of the goal where we have to actually start doing hard work. No longer is it a beautifully rendered picture of a future life in our minds; we’re at the easel, covered in paint, and the canvas is a very long way away from that mental picture. It’s easy to start to lag when things get hard and you start to think ‘maybe I could not do this…’.
This is when we need to maintain our connection to what we’re doing it for. To hold in our memory the late-December version of us who saw so clearly that this project was a pathway to what they really wanted. To make sure we can conjure that vision of the future and really truly believe in it, so that on the days where it’s just not coming together we have a chink of motivating light to keep us going.
Not pushing
For about a year now I’ve been trying to shift my mindset to a place where I stop pushing and striving and instead do what I feel pulled too. What I realise now is that that is the same as new year energy; you don’t start out the year saying you’re going push and grind so hard to get this thing done, you feel pulled toward goals and dreams and feel inspired to work towards them. So, I’ve been conscious through January not to push too hard.
And what does that mean? It means that when I had a terrible night’s sleep and felt ill I didn’t force myself to sit and my desk and push through to stay on schedule. It means that I made the harder work more pleasant by making it joyful (more on this here), it means that on a day when I felt inspired to do something different I followed my energy. Everything was still getting done, I just wasn’t pushing to get it done.
Keep planning
If superhero new year energy loves novelty, then keep feeding her novelty. I am a recovered make-the-plan-then-close-the-book-and-never-look-at-it-again planner, and I know how easy it is to make those plans around the turn of the year and then go off and get on with your life and never look at them again. Your plan is a living thing, though, that needs altering and adjusting.
By regularly (once every couple of weeks) checking in with your goals and plans, reminding yourself what they are, seeing whether you’re working towards them and hitting milestones, you not only keep on track but also feed the part of you that thrives on the novelty. Maybe you decide that the reality of one of your goals isn’t actually worth the pay off, so you need to make a contingency plan. That superhero version of you is going to love getting their teeth into that!
