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This message is brought to you by Apple Card Apple Card members can earn unlimited daily cash back on everyday purchases wherever they shop. This means you could be earning daily cash on just about anything, like a slice of pizza from your local pizza place or a latte from the corner coffee shop. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app to see your credit limit offer in minutes. Subject to credit approval. Apple Card issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch terms and more@applecard.com so in our last episode, we talked about what I call the myth of the clean slate. This is the idea that in order to start fresh, you need to erase your past self, wipe away your history and become a totally new you. And we explored something really different. Treating your past year as data, not a verdict. Welcoming your past selves back into the picture instead of dragging them out to the curb. Beginning this new chapter with the person who lived last year, not in spite of them. So here we are. You don't need a clean slate. You don't need to become some mythical, flawless version of yourself before you're allowed to to move forward. That raises a pretty big question though. Okay, if I'm not doing New Year New Me, then how do I actually begin again? How do you step into this year with intention, without making a brittle list of resolutions that you already secretly know will crack by February at the latest? That's what we're going to explore today. Because this episode is not about abandoning growth or goals or dreams. It's just about changing the container you put them in. So let's start by taking a really honest look at how we've been taught to do resolutions. Even if you don't write them down anymore, a lot of us, we still carry this internal template that looks something like this. Pick a handful of things that you're unhappy with, turn them into bold, sweeping declarations, attach your self image to doing them perfectly, and then start January 1st like your life is a movie montage. Hope that this time your willpower doesn't run out. And just to be clear, we're not talking about thoughtful, flexible frameworks here. Things like success, scaffolding, that structure that I've shared over the years for bringing big, deeply meaningful goals to life in a real world, adaptive way. That work still stands in my mind, it still matters, and we'll keep building on it. What I'm talking about right now is the cultural resolution template. Most of us inherit things like I will never eat X again, or I will go to the gym every day, or I will meditate for 30 minutes every morning, or I will write a thousand words a day, I will become that person. It tends to have a few built in problems. First of all, it's all or nothing. If you're on, you're succeeding. If you miss a day or two, you're quote off and the resolution is broken. There's no such thing as a messy middle or good enough for this season, or adjusted because life happened. It's just very binary. And real life is not so. Second, it often exists in a vacuum. You design it in this kind of weird time bubble, maybe during the holidays or a quiet weekend when your schedule is disrupted, your energy doesn't match the rest of the year, and your stressors aren't fully online either. So you kind of create this idealized plan for future you who always sleeps well and never gets sick, and never has caregiving emergencies, and never gets a curveball at work and never feels lonely or tired or overwhelmed. And then January 3rd shows up with reality and your perfectly engineered resolution doesn't actually fit the contours of your actual lived life. So third, it relies heavily on willpower as the main fuel. The unspoken story is something like this. If you really wanted this badly enough, you just make yourself do it. I mean, every day, no matter what. Which unfortunately ignores the environments that you're in, the systems or lack of them around you, your nervous system, your mental health, past trauma, neurodivergence, and just basic human variation. So when resolutions start to wobble, we usually don't say, ah, I see what's happening. Here, this structure just wasn't designed for a complex, dynamic life. What we do say is some version of, I guess I just don't have what it takes. And if that's you, I just want to say you're not broken. You're not uniquely bad at follow through. You're capital H human. A lot of the resolution containers that we have been handed simply aren't designed for real, messy, beautiful human lives. So what if we change the container? What if instead of a resolution, we tried the Unresolution? So let me be clear about something up front. When I say unresolution, I'm not saying stop caring or give up on yourself or just drift and see what happens. And I'm definitely not saying that goals are bad or that things like success, scaffolding, or other frameworks that really do help you achieve bigger, meaningful, more long term, sustained things no longer matter. In fact, everything we're talking about today is meant to play well with those kinds of structures. It's the stance underneath them that we're talking about here. Beyond resolution is less about what you aim at and more about how you hold those aims. Think of it as three big shifts. So pillar number one, direction over dictate. And by the way, for those who are listening in, if you didn't listen to the last Thursday episode of mine where we talked about closing out the year and the myth of the clean slate, I'll share here that for that and for these first two episodes to start out this year, feel free to listen along. Feel free to pause and respond to some of these ideas and thoughts and questions and prompts in real time. Take out a journal, a notebook, whatever feels good to you. Or we will include a PDF, one sheet that you can just download and go through all of the core ideas and questions and prompts in the show notes. So just take a look at the show notes when you're done and click the link and you'll be able to download this free PDF, one pager with basically all the key ideas, prompts and questions in this episode. Okay, so pillar number one, direction over dictate. So instead of starting the year with this rigid quantified commandments list, lose X pounds right? Every day, never do. Yes, the unresolution invites you to start with a direction. So what is that? Well, a direction is more like a compass heading than a finish line. Things like move toward vitality or move toward deeper connection, or move toward creative expression, move toward calmer evenings, move toward feeling more rooted in my body. Notice that those things are actually not vague affirmations. They're specific enough to feel real, but also open enough to allow different expressions over time. A dictate says, do this exact thing in this exact way every day or you failed. A direction says, keep steering your life in this general way and allow yourself to adapt how you do that as really as you learn. Okay, so that's pillar number one. Pillar number two is about experiments over edicts. So once you choose a direction, and you can pause and do that now if you want, or just come back in again, you know, like do the work, do the notes in your notebook, your notes app, whatever, download the PDF and you'll be able to follow along. Right? So experiments over edicts. Once you choose that direction, the traditional resolution move is then to craft an edict. I will do X every single day this year. I will never do Y again. I will hit Z by this date no matter what. Right? So if you're saying to yourself that, you know that my dictate is, or my original thing is, my resolution is I'm going to, you know, like I'm going to lose ten pounds. And then once you get to the what am I actually going to do to make that happen? The edict says, I will eat only 12 calories a day this year. Don't do that, by the way. Please don't do that. I will never eat anything that is not on my okay, approved foods list. Or I will hit this very specific weight by this date, no matter what. Right. In an unresolution world, you don't start with an edict. You start with an experiment. An experiment sounds more like, hey, for the next two weeks, I'm going to try a 10 minute walk after lunch and see how it feels. Or for the next seven days, I'm going to put my phone in another room after 9pm and just kind of notice what happens. Or for the next three weeks, I'll experiment with blocking 30 minutes twice a week for creative time and track whether it energizes or depletes me. If you're looking to improve your nutrition for the next 10 days, I'm going to try and eat, you know, more plants with my food. Experiments are time bound. They have clear, modest parameters. They expect to be adjusted and they generate information, not judgment. So you're not asking, did I prove I'm disciplined? You're asking, what did this experiment teach me about my life, my energy, my desires, my constraints and reality? Okay, pillar number three. Here is review over judgment. Review over judgment. What does that mean? So this third shift is about building in regular, gentle reviews instead of these harsh verdicts. So in a resolution mindset, when something isn't working, we usually either ignore it and push harder, or we declare it a failure and just abandon it in a wave of shame. And again, I am raising my hand here. I have done this myself so many times in past years and past versions of myself. An unresolution. Instead, you schedule a short, recurring. Just check in with yourself once a week, once every two weeks. Whatever feels right for your life, you ask, okay, so what worked? What felt harder than I thought it would? And notice I didn't use the word should. I didn't say, what felt harder than I thought it should. Well, what felt harder than I thought it would? Because we're taking the judgment out of this. Ask, what surprised me? What didn't I see coming there? What just totally surprised me? Wow. Who knew? Ask, what did this reveal about the life I'm actually living right now? Not about the fantasy life or the perfect resources and constraints and willpower. What did this reveal about the life I'm actually living right now? Right now. And then we want to ask, given what I've learned, do I want to keep this experiment? Tweak it, or let it go? Has it served its purpose? We'll get more concrete with this later. But that's the heart of the unresolution. These three pillars. A direction instead of a dictate, experiments instead of edicts, and a review instead of judgment. It's kind of like a living relationship with change. Not a once a year contract that you're terrified to break. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Okay, I have to tell you, I.
