Episode 9: Three Conversations to Have Before Setting Your New Years Resolutions

Happy New Year! The beginning of the year encourages a myriad of ways to set goals for yourself.

What are your New Years resolutions?

What are your goals for the New Year?

What word encapsulates what you want to accomplish in 2023?

Answering those questions, be they at the start of the year, midway through a project, or at the conclusion of an event, requires an effective self-reflection process. Ideally, said process happens both individually and in relationship, be that with a partner, a friend or family member, or larger community.

In this episode, Julia and Jeremiah describe three practices, rooted in our Evangelical upbringing, that can provide a structure for having these conversations.

1) Month and Review (6:30): Julia explains:

“Month and Review was a time for my family to reflect on three different things: answered prayer, prayer requests, and Thanksgiving and praise. So totally loaded with religious language that I don't use right now. Prayer requests, I would say, are desires. What do I want? Or if you're in the context of a partner or a family, what do we want?”

2) Grief Practices (11:00): Julia describes:

“The grief practice is a practice in which an individual, or in the case of my college, a group intentionally gathered to give name to losses, pain, injustice, trauma, disappointment, unfulfilled dreams, et cetera. The practice allowed us to mourn, to be angry at God, ask hard questions, cry, or whatever else we needed. What happened is that the religious structure was a new structure that was unlike the structure that I had for the first almost decade of my life. And that was a structure in a system which gave permission not just to me, but other people to grieve. And not only was the grief okay, but that the act of grieving, especially within community, was a sacred process.”

3) Process-Centered Evaluation (19:00): Jeremiah summarizes:

“As therapists, we talk about this it being much more important to attune to the way, the “how” an interaction happens between you and a client, than the specifics of what a person is talking about. That's the distinction between process and content, at least from a therapeutic perspective. We encourage self-reflection practices that move away from, okay, what is the specific content of how I'm sinning, I'm lying, I'm watching porn, whatever, to this process of, okay, how do I actually evaluate myself? What are the questions that I ask myself? What's the kind of dialogue that I have with myself that's meaningful, that's helpful? What kind of dialogue can I have with my classmates, with, my family members that can be helpful and meaningful?”

We use these processes to talk about our worst and best moments of 2023, knowing, as John Gottman reminds us, that for every negative interaction, it’s important to name five positive interactions. We also reveal our own individual and relational goals for 2023!

We hope you are having a great start to 2023! Let’s heal together!