Welcome to UnFuck Your Brain. The only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism, and coaching to rewire your brain

and get what you want in life.

And now here's your host, Harvard Law School grad, Feminist Rockstar, and Master Coach,

Kara Loyenthyle.

Hello, my chickens.

Welcome back.

We're doing our second day of our three-part series on resolutions, goals, but specifically

New Year's Eve resolutions, and why I love them, I love setting them, I love keeping them,

I even love when I fail, and I need to try again.

And why I recommend you do as well.

So last week I gave you my defensive resolutions, why I think they get a bad rap, why they're

actually really important, and what purpose they serve in our lives.

If you miss last week, go back and listen, it's super important to understand the purpose of a resolution, in general, in order to choose one effectively. The short version is that the

purpose of a resolution is to help bridge the gap between the values we have for how we want our lives to actually be and the

familiarity or stagnation that our brains always default to choosing because it's

comfortable and familiar and it is energy conserving to just stay where we are.

So again, go listen to the whole episode, but that is the very short summary.

So this week I want to talk about how to actually choose a resolution. The next logical step of what I taught in that last episode is that when it's time to choose a resolution, we need to use our values to guide that process. And this is not really how we normally try to set

resolutions. Normally we think of what we need to do better or how we need to be

better and usually that means we're actually navigating by shame.

So normally what we do unconsciously is we zero in on an area where we feel bad about ourselves

and we feel ashamed or guilty or not good enough, and then we set a

...