It’s good to stop and assess your priorities.

What direction you’re heading in, and what choices lay ahead.

Regardless of the road you’re on, staying still or doing nothing won’t propel you anywhere.

But sometimes goals and targets can be moving objects, and the things you’ve always wanted to reach might become smaller as you move closer.

Has the desire changed or was the goal just a projection of something you thought you wanted; a destination you thought would change everything? Some kind of escapism.

Maybe you’re being asked to confront an uncomfortable truth or reality and you have to sit with this until the future ahead feels a bit clearer.

Sit with your thoughts, what are the non-negotiables? What are the things that spark the most enthusiasm? What are the basic joys you might’ve over looked?

There will always be a flux and flow of change – but think about what you are basing your identity on. What are the long term values.

This year you have so much opportunity, and the choices that you make are all down to you.

Integrity: Life is too short to make decisions that you don’t support. As long as you act with integrity and aren’t basing your decisions on external factors you’ll be on the right path.

Gratitude: It shouldn’t take things to go wrong for you to realise what was going right. Learn to live in the present and appreciate what is in plain sight.

Make it happen: Don’t waste time on the things that you aren’t passionate about. Focus on what you really want to do. Prioritise your passion for music, travel, the hobbies that you enjoy – and being creative.

Health, mental health & wellbeing: Protect your boundaries, listen to your intuition and take care of your body. Always know your worth and pay attention when others show you who they really are.

Switch-off to digital noise: Social media and Instagram can be a distraction and if it isn’t benefitting you, then don’t get consumed by it.

Music: Make it happen.

Transform, grow and change: Look back at this in a year and be able to recognise the growth, the learnings, and the change for good. You’ve learned lessons for a reason and now you can implement the learnings.

Learn to let go: You’ve changed but that doesn’t mean you need to spend your time proving and convincing it to other people. You’re on a new path, for a reason, so keep going.

Reflecting on the end of the year is so important, mainly to see how far you’ve come. It’s also a time to work out how authentically you’ve been living and whether you’re following your instincts.

Nothing is mapped out how we plan it and curveballs are always going to happen along the way to change your perception, and maybe push you onto a different course.

Sometimes it’s hard to decipher what the lesson of a learning is – vs what direction you should actually be moving in.

The biggest fear is remaining stuck, not moving forward at all, and not learning the lessons.

Living in your head and thinking about the decisions you need to make is a big indicator that it’s a good time to start acting and stop analysing.  

Sometimes it’s hard to know the true measurable impact of what a ‘pandemic’ means and how it can really impact you.

It’s such a broad all-encompassing term and because it’s so broad, it makes it easy to detach yourself from its meaning and to, kind of, not really have any connection to it all – mainly just as an outside-in observer.

But seeing the word every day, reading it, hearing it, speaking it – and yet still sometimes it’s hard to associate it as a real tangible thing, something that affects you.

And then over time you realise that the small things can build up, when you thought about how the pandemic was affecting you, at one point you might not notice at all, and now on the other side of the tunnel you can look at how much has changed – and how many individual moments you’ve had to react to.

The threat of poor health, the risk of long-term fatigue, fatality, and a vaccine narrative underpinning most of your daily life and conversation isn’t normal, it’s scary, yet somehow, we’re forced to normalise it and we do normalise it. And in a way that’s traumatic. Mentally and physically.

It takes away a lot from you over time as you get used to responding and risk assessing of what would normally be a normal situation.

But it also gives you a stark reminder of your place in the world, how much your body does for you on a daily basis, eat sleep breathe, just to stay healthy, the incredible natural science of it all – and simultaneously the sheer luck that you also have free access to healthcare and medical consultation.

If you saw the world in a rose-tinted glass before, maybe now you just had to adapt to a better sense of realism, maybe its an ageing process, but it’s definitely a by-product from an unprecedented and unexpected situation.

Sometimes you can be left with a feeling of what can only be described as guilt. How you once reacted and responded to a situation may have changed, maybe now you have more freedom again, maybe things have changed – but yet you’re still aware of what you could’ve went through, what you did face at one point – and the fact that some people might still be in a crisis situation. The worlds an unpredictable place and it can change in an instant.

Is it okay for you to move forward. What are other people facing. What kind of fragmented situations are left.

It’s hard to continue ahead, free from guilt – but it’s also important to recognise those feelings and separately be able to respect that your mind, decisions, and circumstances can change.

Living in truth, in the present, is all you can do when uncertainty is always a factor.

One thing I became more conscious of last year was social media – making sure I was aware of how much time I would commit to it and remembering to not let it get blurred with my reality.

One way you could describe social media is like a vacuum – and once you’re in that funnel you become part of a content creating loop.

At the time you think this is your own identity but how much of what we post is subconsciously influenced by social media peer pressure and algorithms?

Even now I look back at things I’ve personally posted, even a year ago, two years ago, and don’t connect to what I wrote at the time or associate with it. I guess that’s natural but it’s interesting to see how social media platforms can start a domino effect.

For example – gay hashtags on Instagram are predominantly populated with bodies (literally, just bodies) that some would say fit an outdated beauty ‘ideal’. This creates a cycle of people looking to replicate these images as they see this type of image receiving a high number of like and comments – and therefore equate it to perceived success.

Referring to my own previous posts, I can see how the content I personally put up is almost like a version of me that had been run through a filter of hashtag/algorithm friendly language. And in this case, play up to the #gay Instagram subculture.

This is just one example. There are many more – and various subcultures of Instagram – but they all effectively operate in the same way. And to an extent, prevent people from being their true selves.

But one of the key things to remember is that Instagram is an image based platform. So the clue is really in the name. And when most people think of image, they think of the term ‘your image’ which sparks connotations of something you can control, edit, and project. Essentially your own brand.

But brands were designed to be brands. People were not.

Once when I had therapy to help work out my next steps during a difficult time (job, relationship, location collision) I remember my therapist talking to me about another client she had (strictly confidentially with no details given out) and how this client was an influencer who also, like me, was going through the motions with her job.

Anyway, I remember her describing how her client had got to the point where she was completely miserable but hell bent on creating an outward lie to her followers. Constantly refreshing her stats page to check for new likes and comments – and spiralling into a black hole if posts performed worse than normal. This caused her to completely reshape how she would present herself (but it wasn’t really herself, it was what she thought people thought she should be).

For a while now, I’ve all but cut out my Instagram time (my latest screen report was 10 minutes a week, small victories) but recently when I logged on – I couldn’t help notice endless posts of peoples faces, lots of selfies, some nicely edited scenic shots in front of winter snow – basically just a flood of perfectly edited posts. And for me it was a bit of a wow moment.

It was so eye opening to me, recently I was reading about how this latest UK lockdown has been the hardest for us mentally and physically but – again you would never tell or see that on our social timelines, as even our worst moments will go through a double filter and sense checked before uploading for public approval.

But the long term issue here is the constant dependency on other people’s social media validation. Surely that can’t be good or healthy for anyone.

And ultimately, this is naturally going to prevent you from posting authentically, and really displaying how are you, for fear of a negative response – or god forbid, no likes.

But maybe the biggest takeaway here is – thinking outside of the algorithm. If all of your social media accounts were deleted tomorrow, how would you think, feel and act. Ultimately you need to be happy with the version of yourself that’s presented in reality, not algorithm.

There’s nothing like the month of January to get you thinking about what you should be achieving, changing and improving. And putting a tonne of pressure on yourself…

I also think I never properly reflect on my age, 29, and the fact that this year I’ll actually be turning 30. It’s crazy to to me.

I’m pretty sure I’ve always stayed in some protective bubble of labelling everything as ‘being in my 20s’ and now suddenly I’m on the edge of the cliff of that decade – and can’t even comprehend how quickly it’s happened

Perhaps the biggest fear factor is the lack of safety net. I guess when you’re young you can make rash decisions, jump around, be a bit sporadic and blame your mistakes on your age. But it definitely feels like there’s a shift.

It’s not to say it’s a bad thing being older, wiser and responsible – it’s more to say that you don’t really have an alternative option anymore.

So naturally it makes me think about goals, almost like a midlife crisis. What have I put off for too long, what do I still need to fix – and what dreams do I need to let go of.

Being a future gazer I would love to see how things pan out five years from now. Especially since the change from five years ago in my life has been so monumental.

I also think back on being 21 and the burning ambition I had with no fear factor. I think about if that will come back or if it’s just the way you think when you’re young and have no concept of cities, jobs (and real life).

One of the greatest advantages to getting older though is becoming self-assured, knowing who you are and being self-reliant.

I think that, combined with the fact that you’re more aware of life being finite, really helps you to be more mindful and appreciate the things you might’ve taken for granted when you were younger.

Are we confusing goals, achievements and the perception of success with happiness? And what happens if we reach the ‘success’ that we desire and still don’t feel the happiness we thought we would…

It feels like we’re surrounded by so much information these days; opportunities, success stories, go-for-your-goals memes, followers, digital productivity, wellness podcasts – that we’re all essentially on a fast-paced treadmill, trying to race to the finish line of success, and be completely perfect at the same time. Whatever that looks like.

We’d like to think that we’d have learned the mistake of buying into the 90’s American Dream – two cars, big house, how-to-be-successful books, being openly monetary-charitable, attending life coach seminars and the rest of it – but it doesn’t feel like things have changed much – because a new generation is basically consuming the same mantras, but in a digital guise.

We already discovered that those pillars of perceived ‘success’ turned out to be, well basically a lie, so it’s interesting we’re still desperate to strive for material, monetary and social goals as though it will be our golden ticket to being happy.

“Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.” – Albert Einstein.

We’re under such a microscope these days, and in some ways, everyone is in the public eye. Our perception of success and what’s good for us is surely warped by a conscious or unconscious bias to what people think of us. Largely fuelled by a social media led culture.

How will our next job update look on LinkedIn, what response will the next photo of me get on Instagram, how is everyone I went to school or university with doing in life vs me. How interesting does the persona I’ve made on Twitter look. You can see it all, in real time. Surely that’s not healthy for our true selves – and we all know it isn’t the full picture of others, either.

At this point I feel like it’s almost a universal truth that some of the tools to happiness include gratitude, awareness – and most importantly giving back (to others) … therefore, effectively having a sense of empathy.

But I don’t think these moral rules were necessarily ever going to take into account the virtue signalling culture that would flood into humanity.

Can we give back, do good, and live our lives with gratitude without having to share and promote it to others? Because true selflessness does not require a need for validation.

It makes me wonder how many of us have become so smokescreened by the information we consume so regularly on digital channels, and our new world culture, that we can no longer identify what makes US happy, we’re only good at making our persona happy.

Leading with intuition

This year I want to keep striving to follow my intuition more – and tune off as much as possible from external sources that I think (could) skew what makes me truly happy.

So, leading with the things that give you a sense of connectedness and purpose. And by contrast, avoiding the temporary highs; the things that look good on paper and match a description of what is successful to society.

Surely, staying well connected to your intuition, despite external blocking factors, is the best way to live your life, be truly connected – and happy.