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Start The New Year with Reflection, Resolution, Resistension
The new year is already here. Whether we are ready or not, it’s already here. Yet, here at Act Global, we don’t want to go facing this year without reflecting on what happened after the last year. We don’t want to go through these 52 weeks without having a plan. We are going to prepare for what is going to happen in the next 365 days.
So, on December 24th 2022, Act Global held a small session on how to face this new year and reflected on what happened last year. In this discussion, we want to focus on three main aspects, which is “Reflection, Resolution, and Resistance”. As we conducted these events at the end of the year, it was the perfect time to self-assess, have flashbacks, and speak deeply about what next year’s resolutions would be. Because sometimes, when the resolution has been set, we are stuck in the feeling of idleness. We are becoming sluggish and less interested in our new year resolutions, which is why, as every new year comes, the resolution we make is less significant over and over.
As we did not want to stick to our new year resolution over again, we invited Fitryanda Akpewila, a professional psychologist, to share with us why we keep making new year resolutions without being able to achieve what we desire to have to.
More on Fitryanda, she is a Clinical Psychologist and Master of Psychology at Gadjah Mada University. Fitriyanda now works as a Clinical Psychologist at Arifin Achmad Riau Hospital and is an Associate Psychologist at the Welas Asih Healing and Development Center and WorkMi by Ibunda.id respectively. Fitrianda is also active on the online counseling platform SharingCerita.id. She is a recipient of the outstanding community award scholarship from the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia. In addition, she is also active as a speaker and publishes publications on psychology. With her background, we want to hear what she takes on this annual problem.
Before we went deep into the main issue. Fitriya told what reflection was. According to Fitryanda, reflection is a mental process that is carried out to foster an understanding of ourselves, what values are adhered to, what we think, feel and do. As we do the reflection, it is important to acknowledge the mistake we made. Mistakes contain potent lessons, but only if we think them calmly, see where we went wrong, mentally revise, what we are doing and act on revisions. That is why, reflection comes first and strategic action.
It’s very easy to self criticize ourselves, and most of us are very hard on ourselves. However it is very important to balance things and see our achievements and what we are proud of too instead of criticizing ourselves for the things we should have done better. The best way to make sure that we don’t only highlight the negative is to journal our day so we can remember all the good and bad in life in the previous year. Therefore we can reflect, accept and learn from them wisely.
Another important aspect of her sharing is that she wants us to remember the timeline in an orderly fashion when we do reflection and resolution. She stated that the timeline of reflection is in the past, while the timeline of resolution is in the future, but the one who makes all the decisions is living in the present, which is why acknowledging that we are living in the moment is also an important part of making reflection, resolution, and ending up in resistance to what is coming.
As the year goes by, we surely do not want to trap in the whole lying-to-yourself resolution right? We don’t want to be people that Nostress sings about. We dont to make a new resolution every year but it is only a chit chat tal all over again. As she closes her session, Fitrya wants us to deeply know that the best way to evolve from our past experience is to reflect, accept and learn from them.
Written by: Harrun Arrasyid
