5 key themes to shape your personal growth in 2023... Here are mine

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As I personally don’t make New Year’s resolutions, I found myself reflecting on the busy year that just passed while pondering the year ahead. I asked myself, in the bigger scheme of the 2020's decade, how did the last year go and how do I want the next year to turn out?

While there were quite a few things I would have changed about last year, I'm a forward-looking person who needs to be striving toward goals in every sphere of life. Stagnation is my greatest fear. I need to know I'm making a positive impact. It is the most important measure of my life, in my eyes.

My self-reflection unveiled five key themes which I believe will be important to shaping my personal outcomes over the next 12 months. I'm sharing them in the spirit of transparency in case they might also be relevant at this stage of your own life. Enjoy.

1. Ask yourself: How am I creating the conditions for the future I say I want to live?

One of the most impactful books I’ve read in the past few years has been Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna. In the book, Jerry asks what might be the deepest self-confrontational staring-into-the-abyss question one can ever ask, “How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?”

Having meditated on that statement since first reading Reboot in 2019, and re-reading it every year since then, my perspective of the world around me and how I choose to respond has changed significantly. It hasn’t been an easy journey, but invaluable and essential to who I have become today. As I ponder the year ahead, I’ve altered that statement and asked, “How am I creating the conditions for the future I say I want to live?” Taking a page out of Hugh Jackman’s daily routine, I’m exercising my agency and manifesting my future.

The message: The life you want to live isn’t accidental, nor is it a lottery ticket or delivered by a beautiful dove from the sky. It takes intention. It takes hard work. And it takes community. Are you creating the conditions for the future you say you want to live? Start today.

2. Do you exhale at the end of your day, finding yourself gratified and content by the purpose of your work, like you are contributing to something greater than yourself?

If you find yourself with even the smallest spark of a desire for something greater, follow that spark with fervor as if you’re in the arctic tundra in search of fire for warmth. That spark may not be a raging fire (or maybe it is), but it’s important to listen to what that spark is telling you. Don't purge it.

The message: Don’t start stacking up the obstacles in your path. Visionaries keep their sights locked on a picture of the future they believe in and truly obsess about. They work backwards from that vision, not from their starting point, which may feel defeating and overwhelming. They continually ask themselves, What do I need to get there?, instead of Look at how far away I am.

3. Don’t let unfinished business rob you of your future.

Unfinished business can mean many different things to different people. It can refer to relationships, partnerships, projects, or ideas. For me, it was a bit of everything, but mostly projects I started and felt obliged to see through to completion. I simply felt powerless to walk away from unfinished work I had started, particularly anything in the public domain where I felt everyone was expecting to see something completed. The sense of shame society places on us is immensely powerful in our lives.

The problem with this is it becomes a type of baggage you carry. Over time it builds up and gets heavier and heavier, keeping you from reaching Base Camp, where you’re meant to find much needed rest and provisions for your final trek to the peak of the mountain. You end up in an endless cycle of burnout trying to satisfy these obligations to no avail. In the long term, you are being robbed of your future because of this baggage.

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Nathan Cooley, founder of Boulder-based outdoor adventure nonprofit Deep Water Soul Care and certified IFS (Internal Family Systems) practitioner. My time in IFS therapy has had profound effects on my life, equivalent to when I began meditation many years ago.

The message: Learn to identify your own blockers and build up the courage to face your own demons. Don't believe for one second you have to do this alone.

4. Admit to yourself that your time here is limited. You won’t accomplish everything you set out to accomplish. And that’s ok.

Nobody likes to discuss the topic of mortality. Well, unless you’re Orin from Parks & Recreation. But the reality is there nonetheless. Despite our efforts at life extension or cheating death, the 2nd law of thermodynamics, otherwise known as entropy, will rule the day. (Sorry Elon.)

This isn’t meant to send a message of doom. Quite the opposite. It’s meant to bring to the surface what is truly important in our lives and what we should be focused on. There is a tremendous peace to be found when you finally accept you won’t cross off everything on your bucket list, while also granting yourself the agency to affect change in the world and accomplish incredible things.

The message: Don’t take a day for granted, and get comfortable moving on to new things when the time is right. Don’t wait until you get older to know that life goes by fast. Start now and live to the fullest every day.

5. Your feelings of anguish, grief, and desperation are not in vain. You are not alone. You are not a wreck. Just human. As a matter of fact, during those most trying moments is when you are open for real growth and when others need to hear your voice. Don’t be silent. Find an outlet where others can benefit from what you're going through.

James Baldwin, one of the most important authors of the 20th century, was featured in a profile in LIFE Magazine in May 1963, where he said,

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive. Only if we face these open wounds in ourselves can we understand them in other people. An artist is a sort of emotional or spiritual historian.”

One of the reasons I’ve always gravitated toward memoirs and autobiographies is how close I feel I get to the author and their struggles. I was never interested in the glossy success stories on the covers of magazines. Like James Baldwin, I wanted to know there were others out there who shared my own pain. As James Baldwin put it, these “emotional historians” had “connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.” Their words offered him solace through decades of immense pain and heartbreak. And his words have done the same for me many years later.

The message: Words have power. Your words have power. Use them to heal and elevate others.