Every year around late December and early January, I see posts on social media about new year’s resolutions. I’ve made a bit of a tradition of writing about this phenomenon, whether it’s giving tips about setting effective goals by being more specific or reflecting on the need for baby steps toward change rather than planning to overhaul one area of your life all at once. There’s something about the process of resolution-making that both inspires and annoys me. Here are my thoughts for this new year’s rant: How many of us are setting goals based on the person we are, and how many of us are making resolutions that we hope will transform us into someone else? 

Over the holidays, I watched a documentary about Mister Rogers. One of the songs featured on his iconic children’s TV show, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and explored in the film, began like this:  

“I like you as you are 
Exactly and precisely 
I think you turned out nicely 
And I like you as you are.”  

He said that every child needed to hear that message, because it’s not something that children are told. I realized that adults don’t hear this either. No matter your age, this message has an impact.  

A lot of new year’s efforts have the noble goal of adding value to our lives. Health-related habit changes can bring us energy and vitality. Ambitious goals can help us achieve the things that we wish to. At times, though, these efforts are inspired from without instead of from within. We’re told to be this way or that way, and we take the things the world tells us to be and turn them into our yearly aspirations for self-improvement, which we may or may not carry out. Rather than being accepted and accepting ourselves exactly as we are, we treat ourselves as things that must change.  

What if we took this decade as a time to be more ourselves? We could set goals that take who we are and accentuate it. Goals that celebrate the best parts of us. Goals that nourish parts of ourselves we know are there but don’t always express. Or we could set aside goal setting for the time being and take time to be.   

There are things I’d like to do in 2020, but I’ll take my old self with me as I do them. No “new me”… just a new year, a new decade, and whatever they happen to bring.