Hey everyone, it's Curi here for this week's Mojo Monday.

So, given where a couple of days out from New Year's Eve, I thought i'd offer a suggestion that you might want to add to whatever you're doing with your New Year's kind of intentions.

It's not instead of setting goals or not instead of setting resolutions.

It just kind of works alongside them.

But I mean, speaking of resolutions, we know from research that most New Year's resolutions do not last much longer than a few weeks because motivation fades and life gets busy, and we often slip back into old patterns, which is not a personal failing, it's just how humans tend to work.

So before we rush into goal setting for the year ahead, I wanted to invite you to pause and reflect on the year that was.

So we had, of course, three hundred and sixty five days, which is a long time, and it's long enough to have days or moments of joy and pride, and moments that felt fairly neutral and kind of blah, and moments that were genuinely hard, and some challenges might have been manageable and others may have really pushed you right to the edge.

So Greg Creech, who is my mentor in Japanese psychology.

He has spent decades translating Marita therapy into practical, everyday tools, and he talks about the importance of reviewing the year with honesty and kindness, so not to judge ourselves, not to try and fix anything, not to fix the past, but to understand how we lived.

So yes, absolutely reflect on your achievements, and of course that matters, but I would also encourage you to spend time reflecting on the challenges, so you could ask yourself, how did I respond when things were difficult, what emotions showed up for me, How did those emotions influence my behavior, my choices, or my relationships.

Where did I cope well, even if I coped imperfectly, and where did I struggle?

And what does that tell me about being human?

Because the key here is around curiosity rather than judgment, because judgment tends to collapse us into shame or defensiveness, whereas curiosity really creates this space and it allows us to look at our experience with a little distance, without being consumed by it.

And I'll share a personal example from my own year.

So in twenty twenty five, one of my biggest challenges was Paul, who had opened the heart surgery, so as you can imagine, that brought up a lot of crystal ball thinking about what could go wrong, and saying goodbye before the surgery was really really hard.

Waiting for that surgeon's call was harder, and looking back, the worry was there, and of course it was because he's my husband and I'm human.

But I can also see that I managed myself reasonably well in a very challenging situation.

So I really intentionally placed my attention on the trust in the surgeon and the surgical team and on hope, rather than feeding that spiral of fearful thoughts.

So the anxiety around it didn't disappear, but it didn't run the show either.

So that reflection really matters, not because I did it perfectly, but because it helps me see my capacity So great Creech reminds us that reflect action is not about rewriting the past.

It's about accepting what happened, acknowledging our efforts, and leaning towards how we tend to respond when life gets hard.

So he consistently returns to attention, behavior, responsibility, and acceptance of our emotional reality.

So when we do this, something really powerful happens.

We make room for who we were, then we accept who we are right now, and then we quietly strengthen our ability to meet future challenges with a little bit more steadiness.

So as you head into the new year, I invite you to reflect before you resolve.

So let the year that was teach you something about your resilience, your limits, your values, and your humanity.

Growth starts with understanding ourselves, and I think this is a really good opportunity, a really good time to reflect on ourselves and the year that was, and then from there action will then follow naturally.

Thank you for joining me this week and I will catch you next Monday.

Sea