Are You Ready to Throw Out The New Year, New Me Nonsense?
What is the purpose of this podcast? Get people on my email list.
Live intro - Hello my lovelies. Welcome to 2024 and the newest season of the Moving Toward Better Podcast! Tis the season for people to talk about all the changes they’re going to make to themselves to have a better life, and I’m here to call BS on that because in my opinion, it’s a setup for failure. Why? Because we try to do too much too fast and we burn out or we try to criticize ourselves into doing better, and that only works for a very limited number of people. For others, it is absolutely the best way to insure you will give up, probably before the end of January, and you’ll feel like a failure before the year even gets started. Who wants that? No one. The good news is that I’m seeing more and more people changing that idea, and it’s thrilling because I know there’s a different way, and it feels so much better.
To clarify, I love change. That may sound weird, but I do. The important part of that is that I believe in manageable change that stretches you without burning you out. I cannot tell you how many years I’ve made big, audacious goals that were well beyond my ability to achieve them, and by February, or even mid January, I felt like a failure because I failed. Yeah, that was fun. Why? Because I had no freaking idea how to achieve anything I set out to do, and the amount of learning and growth necessary was overwhelming and debilitating.
Have some things stuck? Yes, but in every case, it’s because it’s something I can manage. For example, for years I struggled with keeping a decent looking home even as a stay at home mom. I honestly thought that when I decided to stay home with my children I would easily get my “ish” together and keep a pristine house that looked like my mom’s. Guess what? It didn’t happen. Why? Because I tried to do things like my task oriented mom, and I am not that. I had great fun being a mom. I loved hanging out with my kids, but the housework and house management was overwhelming. Why?
My mom’s way of doing things didn’t work for me, and trying to do it her way made me feel like an absolute failure. It took me years to figure out that it was because we have very different personalities, and what works for her doesn’t work for me. She is a detail oriented task person who loves routine. I am a big picture, people loving person, who loves variety. It took a lot of digging and getting over my own “stuff” to find a way to take care of my home that works for me, and I assure you, it doesn’t look anything like my mom’s way of doing things, but it works for me, and I’ve taught several others to create their own system, so they can have a home they love that energizes rather than depletes them, and it’s so much fun to see them do what works for them and feel good about themselves. Let me also say that my mom’s way of doing things isn’t wrong. It absolutely worked for her. It was wrong for me, and I needed something very different because my personality is very different from hers.
Everything I teach is based on working with our personalities rather than against them, and that’s why I think a New Year, New Me model is a disservice to nearly everyone. For those who are new to the podcast, when I talk about personalities, I use the DISC personality model of behavior and refer to people as D or Driven, I or Inspired, S or Supportive, and C or Cautious. Also, I was taught to work toward people’s strengths rather than focus on how to change them or focus on their faults because when you focus on strengths, you see the most amazing transformations. It’s like magic when someone “gets” themselves, so let’s get into this.
To start, Driven and Cautious personalities are task oriented. Inspired and Supportive personalities are people oriented, and that is so important to understand. If you give people oriented personalities a list of tasks, it’s a guarantee they will fail, unless they have other built in incentives to do the tasks. If the list you give a task oriented person does not suit their personality, they won’t do it either, and I’ll talk about that in a minute.
Starting with the D personality, they love and seek challenges while most of the other personalities avoid them. Why is that important? Because so many of the productivity, habit building and success gurus are D personalities. They actually prefer being human doings and love the feeling of checking off the goal list. The trick with the D personality is that they respond best when they have quick, easy tasks that they can check off quickly. They’re not much for detail, so anything long and drawn out will annoy them. They like to move quickly and the more they get done in a day, the happier they are. What they often lack is remembering the human factor in their very busy process. The stories of people who get everything they want and lose everyone they love is a cliche for a reason, but when the Driven personality can balance their work with their people, they thrive. Their time with their people may look different than other personalities, but when they find that sweet spot, it’s like heaven for them and the people who love them.
I have had several Driven clients who are business owners, wives and mothers, and they often struggle with that because when they are happily working in their business, they have this nagging thought that they might be neglecting their family, but when they’re with their family, they wonder if they’re neglecting their business, and they never find peace, and that’s where I come in. We work out what’s “enough” on both those counts. For instance, one mom really detested doing the “traditional” mom things like cuddling up and watching movies with her kids, but she loved taking hikes with them, so guess what? They took hikes and had a great time, and bonus, her husband enjoyed cuddling up and watching movies with the kids, so sometimes he would do that, and she would get extra work done at that time, and it worked for her, for him and for their family. Isn’t that awesome?
That’s what happens when the Driven personality is in balance and realizes the importance of the relationships in their life, but that’s rarely in someone’s New Year, New Me rhetoric. Because I focus on personality I know that the D and C personalities thrive on routine and a set of tasks. Having a list gives them a feeling of calm, and in the case of the C personality, they even enjoy making the list. A Cautious personality would be adrift without a list, and while they may not complete it, they find great peace in having it. I remind them to include the more personal side of life, so they have a complete and fulfilling life, now and in the future.
Often the C or Cautious personality has a very long list because they want to change everything, but the pressure of doing “all the things” is more than any human being could accomplish. They sincerely want to improve everything, and they get waist deep before they realize they are too deep to accomplish everything they set out to do. Now, understand that they can often do more than the average person because they have a detailed plan of what they want to do and how they want to do it, but they often take on so much they exhaust themselves. Their super power is their planning ability, and when they learn to moderate the amount they attempt, their ability to succeed is almost assured. If not, everything can go wrong for them, and that is devastating for them.
If you think I’m kidding about that, I know several C personalities that still agonize over decisions they made years ago, and they have a very difficult time forgiving themselves for things they feel they should have known better about, including things they honestly had no control over, but they think they somehow should have known. The other thing that the Cautious personality struggles with is asking for help. They think they should be able to handle their business, and when they’re out of balance, they can’t get it right but neither can anyone else. Sometimes it takes a pretty major event to shake things loose, and that’s what happened to someone I know recently.
To respect this person’s anonymity I am changing her name and a few of the details of her situation, so let’s call her Gertrude. Gertrude always wanted a perfect Christmas, but she never quite felt like she pulled it off. Truth be told, I always felt a little intimidated and sad when I compared myself to Gertrude because her holidays always seemed so amazing and mine paled by comparison. She always had the highest of expectations, and she always felt like she fell short. A couple of years ago, though, Gertrude was injured and couldn’t do all the things that she normally did for the holidays, and it nearly wrecked her. The hardest part for her was asking for help and accepting it when it was offered, but to have anything even close to what she normally did, she needed help. I can tell you that it wasn’t her favorite holiday, but it may have been the best thing that ever happened to her because you cannot believe how much Gertrude appreciates what she can do, even if she can’t do it all, and it is a wonderful and extraordinary thing to see. Things that once seemed a chore are now either left out or appreciated in a new way, and that’s what leaning into your personality can do for you.
Moving into the people oriented personalities, New Year, New Me mentality is especially dangerous for the Inspired and Supportive personalities. Why? Because almost every guru or master who offers the latest system to change everything about you is almost guaranteed to be task oriented. They will give you checklists, weekly, monthly and maybe even daily plans to keep you on track, but they lack a major understanding of the people oriented personalities. The Inspired and Supportive personality types are not task oriented, so all of those lists and plans are overwhelming and not helpful. In fact, that can be downright damaging because one look and the S and I personalities feel like a failure before they even start, and if that happens, they won’t start at all.
A short, simple list can keep them on task for a time, but they would much rather be working with people than working on tasks. They generally don’t love their lists, but they do much better in the productivity realm when they have them. They personify the meme from the Lord of the Rings that shows Gollum saying, “We must do the dishes, but we hates it!” That’s often how the Supportive and Inspired personality types feel about routine tasks.
The Inspired personality is the personality type that struggles the most with routine because to them, that is not fun. They thrive on variety, so even the thought of routine can be exhausting, deflating and even anger inducing for them. And I know there are people out there that would simply say to grow up and get over it, but to those people, I would challenge them to try to make every day fun and filled with people for a week and see how exhausted they are at the end of it. That’s how the Inspired personality feels when they are faced with too many routine tasks. It’s also why the Inspired personality does so much better when they work with someone else on nearly every task, and when they get that support, they can make incredible progress and do incredible things.
I happen to have an I/SD personality, and I characterize myself by saying that I want to be a badass, but I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings to do that. Because I know my I personality so well, I learned how to make the mundane fun or at least pleasant. I work with others whenever possible, and music is often my savior. I’ve mentioned this before, but when I work on my podcast ideas and I script things out, I almost always listen to music. That was especially important with this podcast because there is some construction going on near my neighborhood, and without headphones and music to distract me, the sound of the construction would have kept me from being able to concentrate on my work.
Also, recently, my son and I started working on a business together, and because of that, the way I approach my work had to change. Last year, it was very willy nilly and not a great year for me overall. While talking to my son about it, he suggested a work schedule, and I could feel myself bristling. I knew he was right, that I needed a schedule, but I did not like the idea. It took some finagling, some arguing and some concessions of both of our parts, but we finally came to a place where we both could be happy. For reference, my son’s personality is S/CI, which means he wants to do things right with some quiet recognition. We make a great team when we remember what each one wants, what each of our strengths are and that in the end, we succeed best when we work together.
Both my son and I have the Supportive personality in our mix so we know that the S personality often does the routine tasks for the benefit of their people, but without some appreciation, they can become extremely resentful. Their people might think their resentment is coming out of nowhere or the S personality is being petty, but I assure you that the Supportive person is using so much energy to help out their people that they are neglecting themselves in the process. Yes, that is not the responsibility of other people, but the Supportive personality finds it so easy to help others that they can easily put their own needs to the side, and it only takes a few kind words to make everything they’ve done seem worthwhile. I truly believe that this personality is the most damaged by the New Year, New Me mentality because the Supportive personality is just that, supportive. They love to help others and love to be part of a team, but they are also susceptible to manipulation and people pleasing when they’re out of balance, so tread lightly with the Supportive person because you can break their heart and their spirit, and in my opinion, that doesn't’ make them weak, it makes the person who breaks them a jerk, and that’s the best word I can use for them.
I’ve worked with supportive women who have been the victims of abuse, both physical and mental. I’ve worked with supportive men who have been ridiculed for their soft demeanor, but I am here to tell you that it’s the S personality that truly holds society together because these are the people who can love the unlovable, redeem the trespassers and foster peace in the most loving ways. These are the people who prop you up when you fall and dive into the pit with you when you’re in your darkest times. They are the healers and deserve to be treated as such.
We all know that person, don’t we? The one who makes us feel whole just by being in their presence. Are they perfect? Of course not, and I’m not implying that at all. What I’m saying is that they make us feel loved, and when you feel loved, you walk through this world differently. You look at other human beings differently, and you have hope and faith, and the Supportive personalities absolutely give that to us at every turn. Remember to treat them accordingly, even when they get off balance.
So, how do you know which of these personalities you are? First, you can take an assessment. If you go to the Moving Toward Better website and hit that Take an Assessment button. If you really want to live better, getting to know yourself and those around you better is the easiest and fastest way to do that. You start to understand the motivation of your people, especially if they’re different from you, and I know this one from experience.
You see, I am the lone outgoing person in a family of reserved people. I am a morning person in a family of non morning people, and I have learned to soften both of those things in certain moments. My family is mostly task oriented, and I am people oriented, but because we’ve learned about each other’s personalities, we get through life so much better. I talk to my children differently because they receive input differently. They understand that the rest of the world won’t be so caring, but they know that their mom can meet them on their terms and will always do her best to communicate with them in ways that work for them. And in case you feel like that’s disingenuous, I would challenge you to think about how you speak to a two year old versus a college professor, how you behave at a funeral versus a party. We all adapt to situations, and I cannot think of a better way to show my children respect other than to adapt to their style, especially in tense or difficult times.
I would also suggest that this is a great thing for couples to learn, and I will be offering a class next month to do just that. Stay tuned for that, but in the meantime, think about this. Rather than focusing on New Year, New Me, you can focus on being a better you based on what works for your personality. You don’t have to change a bunch of things. You merely need to lean into what makes you, you, and that is a much easier way to improve your life than trying to be something that you’re not.
In a fun twist, when I work on my podcasts, I listen to music, and as I was making a note to lean into what makes you, you without changing, the song Defying Gravity came on, and that’s what leaning into your personality feels like. It’s like giving yourself permission to get into the zone and stay there much longer than you ever have. Will you have to adapt occasionally? Of course. Will you find that less distasteful when you spend most of your time in your zone of excellence and genius? You bet, but you and your life are worth that. So what should you do next? Go to the Moving Toward Better website, take your assessment and schedule your Personalized Personality Strategy Session to start your journey. If you’ve already done an assessment with me, I have a special tune up offer for everyone on my email list, so if you’re not on that list, head over to the Moving Toward Better homepage and join our email community. There are so many wonderful things coming in the new year, and I would love to have you join us on the journey. Sign up and find out what it is. Love you all!
Show Notes
Are you as sick of the New Year, New Me mentality as I am? I think there’s a much better way to start the year, and that’s what we’re talking about today.
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Intro and Outro music licensed from Melody Loops.
