How to Change Your Own Labels (for the New Year)

A few years back, I wrote a blog about shedding labels about others and how that can help us re-frame other individuals and learn from them.  But what about the labels that we’ve applied to ourselves? 

We all walk around with a vision of ourselves, full of labels… healthy, alert, grumpy, busy.  Those labels then expand to phrases:  I’m bad a math, I stink at writing, I’m terrible at gardening.

And then over time, they solidify into groups, professions, and age brackets:  over 50, under 21, working, non-working, carpenter, lawyer… but how can we, for the New Year, re-examine these labels and LABEL a newer version of ourselves?

1. First, decide to make the change.
2. Next, come up with some new labels.
3. Then, call each one out to yourself in the present tense (which is the most powerful way, to assert yourself).
4. Follow through to establish a routine where the new label is part of your life.

From today onwards, I could become AM a painter, a pastry chef, or a piano player.  I could become AM a reader or someone who stays up past 10pm.  I could become a meditator or even a dancer, MEDITATE, DANCE, and PLAY pickleball every day (hopefully, not at the same time).  Assign the labels that you want to yourself, whatever they are.

As a writing exercise, I once had to write my own obituary.  It’s more eye-opening than grim!  Trust me.  Go ahead, write about yourself.  What would make you happy to have as your legacy?  What labels do you want associated with you? Notice that I didn’t say, what would others write about you. 

It’s a New Year, and you get to pick the nouns, verbs, and adjectives that make you swoon about yourself, even if they are brand new qualities that you don’t currently possess. 

But they can be new labels that are associated with a new you with a bit of follow through.

In one of my favorite movies, Serendipity, there is a powerful scene where one friend writes the obituary for another (instead of a “best man speech”) and has him read it while he’s alive.  The movie has nothing to do with death… it’s actually a very funny, poignant scene in a great romantic comedy about fate that leaves you on the edge of your seat, repeatedly, in the sweetest way!   Once you watch the movie, the next time it’s playing on tv, you’ll be compelled to re-watch it!

It’s only the 8^th day of the New Year… what labels will you wear in 2022?

-Roopal

UPDATE:  As a follow-up to my blog late last year about Diwali, I was overjoyed to see one of my favorite TV shows, formerly Sex and the City, now renamed, And Just Like That, have an episode where the main character, Carrie Bradshaw, attends a Diwali party in Indian clothes! It’s a small thing that’s a big deal…  where the media goes, the masses will soon follow!