This is the latest article from Neil on surviving the holidays…

I hope everyone was able to use the tools I recently shared to improve your experience and relationships with family.

And as we all near the end of 2022….

I hope everyone will be doing some reflection, if you haven’t already, use this powerful time to assess life and reset your aim.

At the turn of each year, I always journal on questions like these…

What am I most proud of? What successes can I celebrate?

Followed by the hardest ones:

What promises did I make to myself that I didn’t fulfill?

Who or what did I make more important than my needs and goals?

And what do I most want to improve/do next year?

Answering those harder questions is crucial to self-correction, which is crucial to becoming a better you.

At the same time, it’s also important to not be your biggest critic, but to constantly affirm and love who you are and how far you’ve come.

It’s not only possible to get better each year, but let’s strive do so—not out of some cultural obsession with endless progress, but simply because of the way happiness, healing, and fulfillment work…

Alexander Lowen, the psychologist and founder of Bioenergetics, once wrote that “happiness is the consciousness of growth…”

When you’re engaged in the process of growing, and watch it happening in real time, the reward is a profound sense of meaning, joy, and “rightness.”

Just as acorns are meant to become oak trees, we’re meant to unfold whatever our fullest potential is…

And whenever we stagnate or get stuck along the way, we intuitively know that something is wrong. We don’t feel much happiness…

Instead, we begin feeling increasing amounts of despair and frustration—knowing there’s so much more potential within us, yet we seem trapped and unable to do anything about it.

Although those harder feelings might seem bad at the time, they’re actually a good thing…

They’re a sign that we need to make a shift, do something differently, and address unknown forces within us that are sabotaging our growth, so we can continue expanding and evolving.

Next time, to support you in nurturing that ongoing evolution, I’ll talk about the essential keys to break out of stagnation and unlock the consciousness and happiness of growth in 2023, so you can start the year on the strongest possible footing.

That’s coming in just a few days.

For my latest post go here: https://www.neilstrauss.com/neil/sticky-emotional-reaction/