Episode 46: NYRT #5 – Make Mistakes Early

Welcome, welcome to the fifth episode of our New Year’s Resolution Tips series. Y’all, we are so close. We are literally days away from 2023, and I am so freaking excited, and I am so freaking excited in advanced because if I am being totally honest with you, it is November fifth when I am recording these podcasts because I like to batch and I like to get them done ahead of time.

Anyway, what I want to talk to you about today is the first week of the new year and what to do. And there was a version of me in the past who would get so uptight about January first. I would tell my parents or whoever was helping me schedule my trips back in college that I needed to be back at my house and couldn’t be in Sweden (my grandparents live in Sweden), I couldn’t be at my other grandparents’ house in Pennsylvania. I wanted to be back in my own space by January first because I wanted to have the perfect amazing January first because, somehow, that was going to make the rest of the year amazing if I had the perfect January first? I’m not really sure, but I would get extremely frustrated if, as a college student, I started January first a little bit hungover (as one does) or I slept in because I was up really late. That would derail my whole mentality.

It wasn’t until I made a shift, I would say, two years ago that really made a difference. That shift is what I’m gonna tell you about today, which is that I want you to do your best to make a mistake in the first week. If your goal is to be more diligent with workouts, I want you to skip a workout. If your goal is to clean the kitchen every night, I want you to go to bed without the kitchen cleaned. I want you to do your best to mess up within the first week of the year because then you get the opportunity to come back from that mess up.

Here’s the thing. You are not gonna go the whole year on a linear pathway to your goals. There is no way that you are going to go the whole year checking every single Vox, never skipping a habit, never making a mistake. I guess, if it’s really empowering for you to believe that that’s gonna happen, I guess go ahead and believe it. But, for me, it’s more empowering to believe that life is gonna happen and I’m gonna be a person who makes mistakes. Even my best, most futurist, most Karin 62.0 self, even she makes mistakes sometimes. The way I get from Karin 1.0 to Karin 62.0 isn’t by not making mistakes. The way I get from Karin 1.0 to Karin 62.0 is by learning to rebound better when I come back from those mistakes.

So, coming back to the first week of the year, I actually encourage myself to mess up in that first week, to have an imperfect first week. Maybe I’m traveling, maybe I’m road-tripping back from somewhere, maybe my house isn’t as clean as I want it to be, maybe something goes wrong, maybe my gym is closed on the first day of the year so I can’t workout even though it’s a Monday or whatever. I encourage myself to pay attention to all the things that do go wrong, that I do mess up in that first week because change is not about getting everything perfect. Change is not about getting checkmarks in a row. Change is about how you react to the day that goes unchecked. Change is about how you react to challenges.

And so, during the first week, you have this amazing opportunity to mess up the canvas you’re painting on and to figure out how to make that work, to figure out how to rebound from that, to figure out how the, quote, “new you” responds to challenges because, really, (I’ll say it one more time) getting to the goal you want is not about perfect linear progress towards that goal. It’s about you getting better at reacting to the moments when you are off-track, when you need to pivot, when something goes wrong, when you’re disappointed or frustrated in yourself. Changing those behaviors is what is going to actually change you into the person that you want to be.

It’s a short episode today, but that’s what I’ve got for you. Do your best to mess up within that first week and practice and play around with rebounding from that mistake.

Happy freaking New Year, y’all! I cannot wait to see you! I don’t see you, but I cannot wait to talk to you in January, and one thing I want to say is that we don’t have everything totally planned yet, but be sure to keep your eyes out on my Instagram account and on our website karinn4.sg-host.com pretty much today through January second, because New Year’s is my Super Bowl, and I love, love, love to put things on sale, have unique opportunities, bonuses, things like that. There’s gonna be a lot of opportunities for you that are gonna be debuting on Instagram that I can’t tell you about right now because I am too far ahead of myself when it comes to these podcasts, and so, I don’t know what we’re gonna do yet. But stay tuned over there.

Happy freakin’ New Year! Cheers to becoming our 2.0 selves next year!