This is a question I struggle with, and one that leads me to a new day planner, a new haircut, a new member of the pack, a new career, etc. Something external to me that I hope brings some sort of scaffolding that gets me to feel whatever it is to feel like a fully actualized human. Of course, we all know how that goes, most of the time.

There are pieces of this that I want to pull apart though. It’s easy to dismiss all the talk at the change of the calendar about “new year, new you” and/but people do change. Women diagnosed with scary diseases start walking every day. Men faced with alcohol problems stop drinking as much. Children failing classes turn their grades around and go to universities. These are gross generalizations and also, truths. I know at least five people in each of those categories who did these things. They faced a challenge and changed their behaviour for the long term in order to feel “better” and achieve their “goals.”

Is feeling better and achieving goals being “fully actualized”? Maybe. If I think about how actualization is used in psychology (a la the pinnacle of Maslow’s hierarchy), I get to something about reaching ones potential, desiring to be more of oneself (more you!), reaching ambitions, being one’s “true self”. A new haircut or day planner isn’t going to get me there from here.

Indeed, I think there is a lot of pablum dished out to intelligent folks about how to get from here to there — find awe, be accepting of yourself, don’t compare yourself to other people, practice mindfulness, be open to new experiences, go for a walk outside, keep a gratitude journal. These are all outstanding practices but we need to talk about how hard they actually are to follow through with. I say “pablum” because these ideas are frequently handed to us in “10 ways to be a better person in 2025” lists as though they are exceedingly easy. Most of us feel like failures when we look at the ten years of gratitude journals that are filled out for the first three weeks of January and then blank for the remainder of the year.

Where are we so far? We can agree that we probably do want to make changes in our behaviours. We know people how have made significant, lasting changes that mattered to their experiences of life. We frequently are told what to do, and how easy it is to do. We still aren’t self-actualized. Where’s that missing step? Why are the actions that will help us with change so hard to enact?

There are many components to that question, but for today I’m thinking about how January isn’t a time that’s built deep into our bones for change. Our bodies feel other times of the year as times of change like the change of a season, or a solstice. The light in January isn’t so different from the light in December or February, especially when compared to the light in April. The weather in January isn’t so different from its neighbouring months when compared to July or August. Why would our bodies feel that January is a time for changing? Cognitively we work on a year that starts in January, but physically, our year might start at the winter solstice as the light starts to return, or the spring equinox, when the energy of the world is upflowing and growing. These times make more sense from East Asian Medicine as well. We’re set up to fail in January. This is when we need to still be hunkered down, keeping warm, storing our energy for the return in with spring. This is when we plant the seeds that are coming, but they aren’t growing until spring.

When I think about the people I know who really changed their behaviours, they often had something personal happen that got them there. Often it was a medical diagnosis, or the end of a relationship, or the death of a loved one. Something big shook their worlds and they responded with clear behavioural change. When I talk about transitions and transformations, that’s really what I mean. We hit a space where life is suddenly not like it was yesterday, and we need to respond. Our response is going to depend on so many things, and/but we do have the ability to make good choices. We’ve all made many already.

Thinking about ourselves in the broader world helps us see why things work (or don’t) and when we have a greater chance of success. This first pass doesn’t get us to exactly what actualization might look like, but it does get us to some ways we can think differently about that January gym membership.