Be Well

• Citation: Vol. 48 No. 4 Pg. 20
• Publication year: 2023
• Pages: 20

BE WELL Vol. 48 No. 4 Pg. 20 Vermont Bar Journal January 2023

by Samara D. Anderson, Esq.**

BE WELL

Re-Thinking Your Approach to Happiness and Well-Being in 2023

"I don't call them New Year's Resolutions. I prefer the term: casual promises to myself that I am under no legal obligation to fulfill."

~ Anonymous ~

Another new year has begun and many of us may have started it by shining a critical light upon our lives with the goal of implementing changes for our greater good. As a result, some of us set high aspirational goals that may be difficult to achieve during the short and cold winter days. This is a seasonal time when our mood-stabilizing serotonin levels are already dipping, and we may feel mildly (or not so mildly) depressed. When we add the pressures of our challenging new year's resolutions to our uninspired emotional state, it can be a stressful recipe for self-inflicted frustration and disappointment.

Thus, this article is a proposal to re-think how we approach the new year, which may enable us to increase our overall well-being by making better choices and creating new habits. The goal is to breathe new meaning and a greater sense of purpose into your life by making simple, small, but profound adjustments. Essentially, take active ownership of the directionality of your life in a sustainable paradigm - not one that will leave you feeling disappointed and possibly in worse shape than when 2023 began.

The "Re-Thinking Concept" was created by Adam Grant^[1], an organizational psychologist and author who studies how humans find motivation and meaning in their lives. As attorneys, we are keenly familiar with the concept of intelligence, which is seen as the ability to think and learn information. But there is a different, and possibly more important, form of intelligence that may matter more in terms of increasing overall well-being: the ability to re-think and unlearn. We do not lose integrity by changing our minds. Instead, it can be seen as a mark of gaining deeper wisdom and understanding. It means you have actually engaged in a deeper form of learning. Something that I regularly teach in my mindfulness sessions and CLEs is the difference between "knowledge," which I see as the gaining of new information, and "wisdom," which I perceive as the integration of knowledge through embodied experiential practices. Wisdom cannot be gained by merely acquiring knowledge. It only comes from integrating that knowledge through...