“True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake. It is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.”
– Brianna Wiest
This is my favourite quote, especially the second part. It is profound and strikes at the core of what, I think, many of us are struggling with in life… We often fail to be content with what we have and, for some reason, would rather want to live another life than the one we have been blessed with…
In this article, I would like to share with you at the start of 2025, some thoughts on living a life that we don’t want to regularly escape from. I cannot coin these thoughts as the universal truth, but as someone who could officially start to draw from my retirement annuities later this year, I have found that from experience these are useful. Therefore, I am calling them “tips”:
Tip #1 – Stop comparing yourself to anyone else
We cannot build a life that we are content with if we fall into the trap of comparing ourselves to others all the time. To get inspiration from others, yes, but not in an envious manner. Besides, if you do this, you need to bear in mind that you don’t know what is really happening in their lives…
I was coaching someone once who disclosed to me that he was jealous of one of his old schoolmates who achieved so much more after they left school a decade ago. I then asked my coachee if he would still be envious of his school friend if this friend just discovered that he had terminal cancer or that both his parents just passed away in a terrible car accident. He very quickly replied: “No!”
In life, we should only compare ourselves with the best version of ourselves. Otherwise, we will sell ourselves short every single time.
“Comparison is the death of joy.”
– Mark Twain
Tip #2 – Realise that New Year’s Resolutions don’t work
What happens when someone else lies to you? Well, you might agree that the obvious answer would be: “I would simply not trust that person anymore.” Previous studies have shown that roughly 80% of all New Year’s resolutions fail, which implies that four out of five times people make promises and don’t keep them, to the one person they cannot afford to lie to – themselves… How then do I trust myself and maintain that I am my own best friend, if I effectively lie to myself in this way?
“May all your troubles last as long as your New Year’s resolutions!”
– Joey Adams
Instead of making New Year’s resolutions, I believe in a simple, structured process of goal-setting and goal-achievement. This process starts with documenting your “Wheel of Life”, and then converting your dreams for each of these key areas of your future life into documented goals, which you review and adjust frequently. Such a process in my view forms the backbone to creating the life that you would like to live.
If we don’t take documented goal-setting seriously, as the first step towards achieving our goals, and we don’t make it part of our journey, we will at some point find ourselves in a place where we did not expect to be. As Zig Ziglar said, if you aim at nothing, you can be sure to hit it every time.
Tip #3 – Without Motivation, you will achieve very little
I am not a trained psychologist, although there are some overlaps in the work that I do and this field of study. I would like to share with you something that I have not read in a book, but figured out in my quest to find answers to life’s challenges… We will find it very hard to achieve what we want to in life if we don’t have Motivation. Otherwise, our success in trying to achieve something will be short-lived. If we have enough Motivation this should lead to us making the correct, deliberate Choices to support our goals. Finally, we then need consistent Discipline to sustain the execution of these choices to achieve success.
Let me try and illustrate my point here by way of an example – if I am serious about learning another language, I need real Motivation to make this part of my life journey. Otherwise, I will attend my first basic language course and then not even bother to prepare for the final exam. However, if I have enough Motivation, I will make the deliberate Choice to prepare for this exam, start conversations with people in this new language wherever I can, and attend follow-up forums where this language is taught – just to name a few. These choices will only be sustainable though if I have the required Discipline, which will then lead to achieving the goal of speaking this new language.
“Motivation is when your dreams put on work clothes.”
– Benjamin Franklin
Tip #4 – Understand the importance of Habits and Routines
At the start of 2025, I would like to suggest that you and I ask ourselves if we are happy with our current habits and if they support a life that we are proud to live. If not, we need to do something about it. A good place to start might be to list those habits that we would like to rid ourselves of. If we think we have the Motivation to ditch these habits, then we can prove it to ourselves by stating the following: “The last time was the last time.” If we are able to do this, it means that we are serious about it and in business to ditch this bad habit.
The following step, I would suggest, should then be to decide which new habit we want to replace the old habit with. I had a wonderful journey with another coachee last year where he finally managed to ditch the smoking habit and then bought himself a pair of running shoes to take up jogging as a replacement habit… Doing this one habit at a time will put us in a position where we create a whole new, better, life for ourselves. The proverbial cherry on the cake would be if we could make these new habits part of our routines to truly yield the benefits of living a life we are more proud of.
“We first make our habits, and then our habits make us.”
– John Dryden
Tip #5 – It is about Body, Mind and Soul
I once watched a video where Warren Buffet addressed a group of students, asking them the question: “What if I told you that when you get your driver’s license, I buy you a brand new car? The catch though is that this will be the only car you will ever drive to the end of your life…” Buffet made the point that we would meticulously and super-carefully look after such a car, but why then don’t we look after the only body that we have in the same way as we would look after the only car we’ll ever get to own?
Here’s the thing, and sticking to the car analogy – we cannot trade our bodies for another one, like trading in a second-hand car for a new one, after we have damaged or wasted it. This principle does not only apply to our bodies though, but also to our minds and souls. Only if we invest in our bodies, minds and souls in looking after ourselves, can we maximise our full potential as part of living the life that we would like to live.
“The best investment you can ever make is in yourself.”
– Warren Buffet
In order to facilitate meaningful change, we need to take charge of our lives to increasingly live “differently better”. My wish for you in 2025, and beyond, is that you would do exactly that – never underestimate to what extent you are in charge of living a life that you don’t need or want to regularly escape from. We have one life to live, so let’s live it well and do everything in our power to practice true self-care.
