Start the new year with calm confident motivation

Before you step into the new year, take a moment to ensure you start 2024 with calm and confidence in your brain and body so your motivation lasts all year long.

When you highlight the ways you grew more well in 2023, you start the new year well, with greater calm and confidence.

This is one way we strengthen our Well-skills at Exercising Well. By reflecting on what went well with an open, curious, and kind inside awareness you power up your ability to lead your well-being.

Well-skills are what you do to shift your cells from the stress state to the well state. It is not a mental activity because stress is not just a brain state, it is a whole person state.

Well-skills take proactivity. They are not the default mode while living in our modern society. Here is how to recognize and highlight your brain and body Well-skills of 2023 so you bring them into 2024.

How your brain keeps you calm and motivated in the new year

🧠 Your brain will default to the negativity bias so you survive. In our modern-day world, there are plenty of real or potential ‘threats’ in our face every moment. The negativity bias gets stronger the more information we digest from the media. Even well-meaning health tips start with what could go wrong if you don't do them!

The more aware we are of this use of stress to sell and motivate in the media, the more we can strengthen our Well-skill to counterbalance it.

How did you intentionally strengthen your Well-skills by feeling and expressing gratitude, self-kindness, and self-compassion this year?

Any time you

•  gave yourself words of encouragement, expressed gratitude for the support

• found the positive in a challenging situation you shifted from stressed to well

• choose acts of whole-person self-care when you are feeling scared, mad, or sad.

• seeped in, really savored feeling peaceful, joyful, or strong to build and embodied reservoir of well-being.

How your body keeps you confident in your motivation in the new year

🕺Your body will default to use it to keep it. In our modern-day world, with automation to make life easier, budget-friendly, packaged long shelf-life foods, our body ages at a more rapid pace, quietly losing mobility, strength, and stamina.

How did you tell your cells:

•  to keep mobility strength and stamina for the specific activities you want and need to do to enjoy life to the fullest for as long as possible?

• Take small mindful stretching moments during the day to release stress-tension reduce inflammation and completely clear the stress state

• Did strength exercises that mimic movements of daily life, done mindfully so you feel your strength and your whole person remembers you are strong.

• Danced, walked, biked, swam, ran or moved in any other way continuously for self-care, alone or with others at a level that restores your energy and sense of calm, focus, and connection.

Take a moment to write this down, say it out loud or highlight these moments of being well now in 2023. Even if it was sporadic or fleeting give yourself "credit".

As you do, remember how it allowed you to thrive in that moment, how you felt well from this whole person self-care.

Choose any of those Well-skills that would be worth carrying into 2024.

Pack your bags and let's move into the new year with greater calm and confidence in your ability to be well now and thrive.