Richard Hogan: These are the four questions to ask yourself to make 2023 better for you

Richard Hogan. Picture: Moya Nolan

Last week, I spoke about New Year Resolutions and how they often end in failure. I suggested that rather than making any huge declaration of change, perhaps it would be more beneficial to hear how you are talking to yourself and attempt to change that voice and make it more positive.

Priming your brain

I gave you a simple task to do over the course of the week, write out three things you would like to say about yourself and then look for examples of them during the day.

This was designed to start priming your brain to become more positive in its orientation.

I also explained that there is nothing as important as the story you tell yourself about who you are and what you are capable of. I sit with clients every day and hear how they speak to themselves.

I interview that internalised voice and write out some of the terrible things it is saying to them, and I ask, “Would you say that to me?”

The answer is always a resounding, “No way”. The voice generally says the same thing, “You’re not pretty”, “No one likes you”, “You’re a loser”, “How could anyone love you?”, “You’re ugly”, “You’ll be found out”.

The list could go on and on. It is impossible to thrive in your life when the narrator of your story is so doggedly pessimistic and talks to you in such hurtful and destructive ways.

The importance of the narrator

When the narrator is negative like this, it prevents any joy from coming into your life because the voice is filtering out all the positive comments and moments you experience and only brings the negative comments and experiences to your consciousness.

So, we have to work to make the filter less negatively oriented. Good thinking habits are like good physical habits, you have to be intentional about them.

And remember, thoughts are not facts, they are just thoughts.

Often clients come into my clinic because they feel their life is not going the way they want it to go, or they are stuck in a bit of rut and need help navigating their way out of it.

Don’t focus on the negative

I have noticed that people can view one negative aspect of their life as representative of their whole life experience.

They selectively abstract a negative experience or emotion and believe, as a result of this negativity, everything in their life is not going well.

The four pillars

When I’m working with clients on the idea of life fulfilment and happiness, I break it down into four pillars.

• What is their relationship with their body like?
• What is their relationship with themselves like/how do they talk to themselves?
• What is their relationship with family and friends like?
• What is their relationship with work like?

Before I look at these four pillars I ask clients to rate their happiness out of ten. After they have done this I ask them to score these four areas each out of ten and then analyse the results.

So, for example, clients might say that their happiness and life satisfaction is, 3/10 but then when they score the above four categories it might look like this -

• Body 3/10
• Talk to self 4/10
• Family 8/10
• Work 7/10

Understanding your happiness

From this example you can see that not all of their life is going badly. In fact, family and work is at the higher end of the scale, that doesn’t require too much adjustment, but how they talk to themselves and their relationship with their body is causing them distress. That is the area we will focus on and develop strategies on how to improve it.

Now, the client has a very real and broader understanding of their happiness and how to improve their levels of happiness in their life. Do this over the next week.

Think about your levels of happiness and those four pillars, what areas in your life need attention, and what must you do to bring about change into your life.

We can all myopically look at our life and think things aren’t going very well, but if we get more sophisticated in our analysis we can really start to make significant improvements in our life, because we know what areas need work.

Reflection is key

Happiness isn’t the summit, it’s the journey.

The climb. Happiness isn’t some abstract elusive thing, we need to gain more understanding about what makes us happy and do more of that.

Such a simple thing really, when you break it down like that. Our life is busy, our world is more complex than ever before, but we still have the same needs we had starting out on this human adventure, we need to be connected to each other and ourselves.

We can lose ourselves with all the busyness of life. But if we sit down for a moment, reflect on our life and start to make some simple changes, 2023 will be better than the year that has gone before.