It’s a complete cliché to blog about New Year’s resolutions. Most resolutions for most people aren’t maintained and they are quickly back to their old habits. Arguably such commitments served their intended purpose—to expediently alleviate the tension they feel from not living their life fully.
There is also the question—if this is something you should be doing, why aren’t you doing it already? Well this can lead us to some pretty helpful places. Because despite this I think the new year can be an opportune time to make some significant changes. It provides a kind of timed interrupt, a shakeup of existing patterns and most of all an energetic shift. These moments in time matter not least because people think they matter, and with understanding and solid intentions change is not only possible but certain.
However to make it count it’s important to first understand why exactly most resolutions fail. The first reason is that they do not target change at the right level, targeting only surface appearances rather than deeper causes of behaviour. A second and related reason is that often change isn’t truly desired, while relief, from the tension that falling short of ourselves produces, is. A third reason is that often simply the wrong kind of change is targeted—in keeping with the need to keep up appearances, only superficial and socially-approved ideas are selected, often with that familiar, compliant, half-jokey tone that says ‘we all know I’m not really going to stick to this…but humour me and play along with my self-deception anyway.’
Enough of that. If you’re interested in making 2026 a year when you become more yourself than ever, here are seven unpopular but actionable resolutions which you might not have considered. They are intended to be pragmatic rather than theoretically comprehensive.
1) Embrace Suffering
Returning to one of western society’s core cultural roots for a second. Jesus coming to earth and bearing his cross. Think about it—why would God himself come to earth and suffer? Would God not be beyond such drudgery? And if not then what hope is there for us? But air this out loud in any western psychology workshop and see the negative reaction. Regrettable, because this might secretly be the most beautiful idea that there is, and is the true ‘cure’ for suffering.
The single biggest reason why most cannot stick to their New Year’s resolutions is because they are built on shaky attitudinal foundations. The cause behind the problem remains unaddressed, which is the person’s stance towards suffering itself and their willingness to confront it. Because they are still arguing with their own mind rather than seeking to understand its messages.
This resolution is not a single action but a change of attitude that permeates all others. It starts with understanding. Suffering and discomfort of all kinds are generally regarded in the east and west alike as nothing more than a problem and an inconvenience to be eliminated. Even the significance of God coming to the earth to suffer is lost on most people. Meanwhile the top line message of western culture today is ‘you don’t have to suffer if you don’t want to—we have all kinds of inventions to help with that.’ But suffering is not something dealt to you by God; it is an intrinsic necessity of the fabric of existence itself, and to deem it as wrong, explicitly or implicitly, is the ultimate entitlement.
What if you considered that suffering is not only not the problem—it is the solution. Just as Sufi mystic Rumi said “the cure for pain is in the pain.” It is not something to be feared in itself—although it’s perfectly normal and to be expected that you will. The voluntary energetic confrontation with suffering is not only the route but the mechanism by which all individual progress occurs.
Embracing suffering is not the same as masochism or seeking suffering out. But it is about being willing to confront the tension and listen to the language of your mind and body—the basis of all relationship.
If you do nothing else, try this resolution. Or if no other resolutions from this selection resonate with you, use this one to help guide you through whatever other change you do choose to make. Whether your resolution is related to health, weight, relationships, addictions, career or anything else, understand that the tension you experience along the way is not a mistake; it is the work and its resolution. Knowing this doesn’t provide relief in the ordinary sense—if it’s only relief you want then you’re already off track—but it does change your relationship to suffering, and ultimately is what precipitates genuine change and freedom.
2) Open up to the meaning and symbolism around you
Having chosen to listen to the language of your body and mind, next you can open up the conversation even wider.
Symbolism is everywhere and in everything, and speaking its language can give you insight into your journey and direction, the deeper dynamics beneath surface appearances, the trajectory of outer events, and the real intentions and motivations of the people you encounter—even if (especially if) they do not know them themselves. All of this naturally serves great utility towards your own growth, guiding your direction and giving you more information with which to make decisions.
Trying to individuate without openness to meaning and symbolism is like trying to land an airliner with your eyes closed. This doesn’t mean you need to be ‘fluent’ in symbols in a way analogous to your native tongue. The nature of symbolism is that it can in principle be understood by anyone and doesn’t require specialised training. Its meaning is not fixed like spoken language but rather the purest and most natural expression of whatever it is that needs to be expressed, arising necessarily. But this also means it cannot be entirely clear cut and requires the intention of the receiver to get on board for its meaning to be understood. The message is contingent on the interplay of both the conscious mind and the unconscious.
Therefore the first and most important aspect of tuning in to the meaning and symbolism around you is to set your intention to do so. This simple act sets the ball in motion and leads to everything else. See if you can notice the themes behind your experience happening at multiple levels, manifesting in multiple ways. Notice when and where what you experience reflects your inner world and vice versa, and where similar signs or symbols show up across different sources.
That said, for symbols to have any meaning, they cannot be entirely random either. While the meaning of what shows up is unique to the experiencer, there are also collective meanings to symbols, and a study of symbolism can greatly aid in their interpretation for the subject. Study tarot, study astrology, read books on symbols, keep a dream diary, commence an active imagination practice. These are all actionable resolutions you can commit to on a daily or regular basis.
By the way, the significance of symbols can be understood by examining the word’s derivation. It comes from the Greek ‘symballein’ or ‘symbolikos’ which means to ‘throw together.’ A symbol is where the conscious and unconscious, or explicit and implicit, meet. The symbol is a pure expression of an implicit reality being expressed where and when consciousness perceives it. In other words it is the way in which you know the unconscious and therefore the seeds of your own potential and the signposts in realising it.
3) Tell the truth, no matter what
At danger of sounding absolutist here. There’s never a time to say never (or is there?). There may well be times when lying is necessary (although I haven’t encountered one in a long time). Yet when you believe anything absolutely, the situations you find yourself will have a funny way of calling your thesis into question sooner or later. See yourself as the picture of honesty? That’s not an image that can be upheld forever.
Nonetheless, in practical terms, a course correction here can often be helpful. I’ll never forget being imparted a ‘lesson’ in a school assembly many years ago by a row of teachers that lying is OK when it’s to protect someone’s feelings. No, it isn’t—at least not for this reason and certainly not as a blanket rule. But their looks of satisfaction in sharing this revealed that it wasn’t really other peoples’ feelings they were protecting. See resolution 1. All too often the justification for lying is a rationalisation for grasping at relief for oneself, not for the genuine benefit of someone else.
Have you ever felt thankful to someone for lying to you? Has it ever landed with you in such a way that you really felt it was done for your benefit? Or did it simply erode trust and render you incapable of believing anything that person said or suggested henceforth? I recently asked this very question to a room of 20 or so people and not one of them said they had.
Perhaps I should point out that ‘not lying’ is not the same as being tactless. That is a fairly typical way in which this particular shadow dynamic can play out. Those who have built a life being very caring and kind—and often genuinely are—sometimes find it difficult to engage with the wholesome aspects of their opposite for fear of being tactless or seen this way, or some other fear along those lines. But the shadow work in these cases involves precisely facing up to this very fear, as the world throws up more and more situations requiring an ever finer line to be walked.
I’ve been focusing here mostly on the dreaded ‘white lies’ but of course the same can be said for any kind of lie, no matter the justification. A lie in itself is designed to paint a false or misleading picture of reality to the one you know to be true, and is therefore inherently split in its nature. It leads not to symbolical but diabolical outcomes. The unstated half cannot simply be buried and forgotten about.
Many understand this much too, but where it still goes off the rails is in ignoring that not all forms of communication are explicit or come in words. To ‘paint a misleading picture of reality’ can be done through tone, implication, body language, even how one dresses and moves. Any attempt to play up to an archetype is a kind of lie, and yields similar kinds of consequences, even if the person doing it doesn’t know what they are doing. There are no ‘outs’ for other kinds of lie including lies of omission, tone or appearances. Again, see resolution 1. Morally, it’s not so much that lying is ‘OK’ or ‘not OK’ but that every lie creates a dissonant split that will lead to consequences.
Try telling the truth no matter what, and see what happens. See the tension arise where it didn’t before and embrace the opportunity to deal with it.
4) Bring your whole self to work
Good for you if you’ve found your ‘whole self’ in any context, let alone work. You probably don’t need to work at all in that case. But indeed if you have it’s more likely you are suffering from a bout of ego inflation.
That said, the need to circumambulate the self applies just as much in work as in life outside of it. Work done well is an expression of you, what you yourself uniquely have to offer, synthesised with what the world really needs as it is configured today. This is one reason why no one else can ever successfully prescribe to you what you should do for work. Because your full contribution, whatever your job title, hasn’t been invented yet. It must be invented by you. And the only way you are going to move closer to it is by regarding work too as a kind of spiritual practice and even a training ground for discovering more about yourself and the world, not suppressing it in the name of, well, something else.
What else could possibly be worth this kind of loss? Sacrificing your own journey is not true sacrifice—it is self-contradiction. Without the self there is nothing to be conscious and nothing to experience the fruits of your labour.
Many suppress whole aspects of themselves even harder at work because they believe the truth will harm their career or their productivity in some other area. Or so they say, but more often than not it is due to the fear of judgement by others if their hidden aspects should surface, with the ‘noble’ aims of work serving as the guise. Said another way, work is where they go to avoid themselves, not become themselves. There is no true productivity without honesty, only a semblance of it.
The invention of AI is beginning to show us this now in a very tangible way which many can relate to through their own personal work lives. Some tasks can be automated, and to a higher quality, faster speed and lower cost than a human could ever perform it. Other tasks will remain forever outside the remit of artificial intelligence—the truly human work of confronting tension and synthesising reality into existence (again see resolution 1). An AI cannot produce anything ‘truly new,’ but only machinate what already exists (recognising patterns based off vast existing data sets). It turns out that quite a lot of what humans have been performing as ‘work’ falls into the latter category, but the shift occurring is a move towards the former. It’s happening whether we like it or not, and in that sense it’s a good thing. Spirit moves forward despite the will and resistance of certain individuals. One trend on the forecast is an increasing visibility of what human ‘work’ really means and consists of.
There’s never been a better time to drop the resistance to your ‘whole self’ at work. Better to do it proactively than wait for it to be forced upon you by the spirit of the times. What’s the worst that will happen? That you might lose the position you were never built for anyway. There are logistical and practical considerations here, and the arc of progress may be long, but at least you know it bends towards selfhood.
The Personality Dynamics Assessment available at makeitconscious.com/pda is a good place to start. The results are free and there is also the option of a report that goes deeper, including how you can use AI specifically based on your personality type.
5) Reduce your coffee (and caffeine) intake
This might not sound like a very compelling resolution and the payoff might not be obvious. Partly because the effects of caffeine are quite insidious, affecting you apparently only mildly and yet persisting with a long half life in the body. And secondly because of how ubiquitous it is and how generally unexamined its negative effects are. I’m certainly not saying that ‘coffee is bad,’ or that you ‘shouldn’t have it,’ only that one does well to become aware of all the ways in which it affects them. So maybe you can understand why one might reduce alcohol, smoking or sugar intake, but why bother reducing caffeine?
Apparently some people aren’t that affected by caffeine. I am sceptical of this claim, especially coming from the individuals themselves. Although it’s true that different people are more and less sensitive and are affected differently, there is no one who is immune to the laws of physics. I think normally what is happening in such instances is that they are simply unaware of how caffeine affects them. This is not the same as being unaffected by it. The positive and negative effects of caffeine are two sides of the same coin. There is no getting one up on the universe in this way. But you cannot know how best to consume caffeine, if at all, if you do not know its negative effects.
One way to understand the negative effects is simply to reduce and cut your intake. You can even view this as an experiment. I recommend being careful of suddenly quitting if you are a heavy, daily drinker, because even a sudden reduction of 25% of your usual amount can bring about a very difficult withdrawal. If you are in this category and believe you are not negatively affected, see what happens approximately 25-30 hours after your last cup. Do not attempt this when you have an important event the day after or no access to help or emergency brakes if you should need it. There is no way around this encounter, only through it. See resolution 1. But that doesn’t mean you have to approach it aggressively either.
In fact for regular drinkers, quitting coffee can be one way to bring about a forced encounter with just the kind of material you need right now for transformation. Caffeine tends to move the mind towards a more focused, action-oriented, even polarised way of existing. There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but it can set aside for a time other material that might be vying for attention. Physical signals from the body being a key one. Indeed much of the tiredness experienced after caffeine wears off is not merely chemically induced, but physically induced due to missing the subtle cues that help you align your actions with what is actually needed—telling you when to rest, when to shut your eyes, when to take it easy and when to push harder. Some people note they can get sick after heavily drinking coffee daily for a while and it’s for the same reason—because they’re less in tune to the subtle signals which are designed to protect them from misusing their energy and hence falling sick. Likewise the irritability some people report is often attributable to the ignored content necessarily forcing itself to the surface at unwelcome and inopportune moments, and on occasion can even take control of the conscious mind completely, leading to outbursts or other regrettable actions.
This is the most pragmatic suggestion in this list. I’ve included it because it’s just such a commonly overlooked factor to consider if things don’t seem to be working out for someone. When life just feels inexplicably hard and painful, i.e. with no otherwise clear cause, checking your caffeine intake is a good place to start. Sometimes the remedy is simply to wean off of caffeine. Trying this will give you information either way.
Again this is not to demonise coffee—I drink it myself—but to be conscious of all of its effects, not just the positive and desirable ones, allowing you to find the right way for you. This might mean reducing it, switching to other drinks or only drinking it on certain days, or every other day. For some it might mean quitting entirely. Whatever the way forward for you, hanging out with the opposite idea, and experiencing the other side, can’t not yield value.
6) Practice Bare Attention every day
Awareness is where the rubber hits the road in inner work, and where all energetic exchange occurs. Bare attention is the act of being aware of your direct, raw experience, prior to meaning and interpretation.
Say you feel symptoms from caffeine or nicotine withdrawal, or of being judged by your coworkers, or the temptation to tell a ‘white lie’—or perhaps you feel moved by a symbol or any other powerful meaningful experience—what is it you are actually experiencing? Is it meaning, movement, tension, cravings? Yes, in words. But what is it really? Really as an experience it is none of these things. It is just…what it is. Which is…what? Well there are no words that can capture it.
Rather than run the risk of overcomplicating this, here’s an exercise you can do which serves as a starting point for how to actually do this and begin instilling it as a habit.
Directing your attention to your direct, raw experience is a habit you can adopt for going about life, as well as practiced in a dedicated way in an exercise. One benefit of this is that you tend to compound matters less beyond their real remit, no longer adding problems to problems through misinterpretation. The aim is not to eliminate or ignore meaning like nihilism or stoicism, but to interpret more accurately the truth of what is happening by opening up to an often ignored aspect of consciousness. Sometimes the answer leads in the other direction to which many modern spiritual traditions assume—no, what’s happening in my world really is a problem and needs addressing outwardly as well as inwardly; not for me to stand there like a cow in the rain. Eventually it becomes a reflex and changes your very attitude and fear towards suffering itself.
Of course growth does happen without deliberate bare attention or a technique with a name. Whenever you are conscious of something, change is happening. Life would not have gotten very far if this was not the case. Likewise the ability for humans to direct their minds consciously is a feature, not a bug. It’s just that like with any feature it brings with it results that it does not intend.
In recognition of these facts, bare attention makes experience a deliberate and focused choice. Likewise a lack of it is often what obstructs meaningful change. If you are not willing to feel what you really feel, instead banishing it to the unconscious parts of you, then much of the more significant transformational shifts awaiting you simply cannot happen; or they will be forced to happen eventually through some outer calamity that compels you to withdraw your attention away and give it to the thing that matters now.
As for implementing this as a resolution, you can do a dedicated exercise on a daily basis, which in turn will train you to do it reflexively as you go about your days.
7) Do some dedicated inner work every day
This can include meditation, active imagination, even yoga, qi qong and tarot. Dedicated inner work is any exercise where you dedicate your entire focus to your inner nature and inner reconciliation. Doing this in a dedicated way matters and yields powerful results because of the intention and directed nature of the activity. There is nothing else you are doing in those moments other than coming to know the self.
There are many different ways of doing this and all of them are helpful and sometimes necessary. Likewise, commit to any one absolutely and you will be sure to have problems eventually. What does it really communicate when someone has ‘daily meditation since 1995’ as their Quora bio? All kinds of things that 30 years of meditation evidently hasn’t shown them.
This is not to talk down the value of meditation. There is tremendous value in the understanding it can bring into the nature and state of your mind, and the work of reconciliation that it facilitates when practiced honestly. Basic meditation also serves as useful ‘training’ that can help and support you in maintaining concentration and bare attention in all other kinds of inner work. But like with all pursuits the holy grail is to reach a place of harmony and respect for your whole mind, not repression and inner master-slave dynamics born of self-denial. Meditation done well allows what needs to happen to happen.
Active imagination takes it to a different tier. This technique coined by Carl Jung, despite being widely underutilised, is in a way one of the most naturally human things you can do, put forward as a psychological technique. The practice of inner alchemy, it involves consciously engaging with the images and symbols of your own unconscious mind, entering into an interaction and coming to terms with them. This is just the kind of practice that can help prevent someone from falling down a 30 year rabbit hole of conceit, or assuming that the images they encounter must be past life memories. Again, provided it is done with the right intentions. Since the unconscious, true to form, does not lie. You can read more and try active imagination yourself here.
Somatic practices including yoga, qi qong and bioenergetics operate at a similar tier, since they can also bring about significant feeling based shifts that meditation alone cannot address.
Symbolic systems, especially tarot, also have a significant part to play. These operate on a higher level still, offering the visionary blueprint (for example as a birth chart), macro level and situational insight, operating just as any other symbol by interfacing with the unconscious mind.
All of these have their place and yet be careful about overly committing to any one of them absolutely and indefinitely. Do not be married to a technique. The idea is to move forward through synthesis, not to impose your will or superego onto existence. Instead, my suggestion is to set out to do something every day—whatever the context, day and situation call for—working dynamically in developing the relationship between all aspects of yourself.
Perhaps I’ll share a final bonus tip, which is to accept from the outset that you’re not going to do any of this perfectly. Doing it perfectly is not even the point, but insisting on perfection is ironically what often leads to falling short in practice. It makes that tension mentioned at the start—between the need for relief on one hand, and to address your problems on the other—harder to reconcile.
With all that said, I hope you have enjoyed reading this post and wish you a happy new year for 2026! It’s going to be a momentous one.
