As we approach the beginning of a new year, how many of us are assessing all that 2025 brought us, acknowledging all that we achieved in the past twelve months, and, perhaps more importantly, realising all that we meant to do… and didn’t.

The pace of life appears to accelerate  ever faster, and there is so much to occupy our attention and fill our time – so many amazing activities, so much to see, do and participate in. How many of us have ‘to do’ lists which hardly ever get touched, diaries with notes of gatherings, meeting and events we sincerely meant to attend but never actually got to, fascinating books to read, films to watch, foreign journeys to make… which simply never happen.

Have you ever stopped to consider why these activities rarely seriously feature in your schedule, why you never get around to attending certain meetings, or why you never actually accept certain invitations to meet up with friends, and so on?

Could it be that while our rational mind decides that something might be feasible, enjoyable or even desirable, we don’t really want to engage with those activities or people. So, we prioritise everything else and continually shove all the wonderful things we never have time for to the back of the queue.

For example, since my teenage years I had longed to learn more about a certain healing therapy, but at that time there were very few people teaching it and those that were didn’t even happen to be in the United Kingdom. Thirty-five years later, it came to my attention that just the sort of course I had longed to attend was being finally being offered in the south of England. Eagerly I signed up for it immediately, with the proviso that there were a couple of other commitments which I had to attend to first before I could proceed with my new studies.

I have always led a full and busy life, but in this particular instance, the months drifted on and I still had not activated the distance learning beginning my new course. I felt conflicted and frustrated. At the end of a whole year of arguing with myself and justifying my actions to myself, I eventually reached the understanding that I no longer held my dream of such studies and didn’t actually want to do the  course at all. The confusion and guilt which I had been experiencing suddenly melted away, and I also realised what a weight  I had been supporting internally through my unidentified true feelings and unacknowledged decision not to go ahead with it.

For that is another great drawback to all the things we think we should be actively participating in but cannot persuade ourselves to engage in – they carry such an emotional and sometime spiritual weight of expectation, guilt and disappointment that we can sometimes be driven to mental inertia or total paralysis resulting in levels of stress which can produce a dire effect on our mental and physical health.

We live in a society which offers us almost limitless choices. Intellectually, you know that some of these are opportunities too good to be missed and that you should be gleefully grabbing them with both hands – so why aren’t you? The answer lies deep within your subconscious. our intuition is telling us ‘No!’, often for reasons which we cannot identify or understand even if they were explained to us, but at a deep level it knows what is best for us.

So, while you are looking at your new calendars and diaries and perhaps beginning to plan your new year ahead, spare some thought for how you feel – what makes your heart truly sing and what makes you feel flat and depressed. Listen to yourself. Trust yourself. Go with your gut feeling. Prioritise what matters most to you. Be honest with yourself – and possibly others around you who perhaps you have kept having to make excuses to.

Begin this year with the clear intention of being true to yourself. You will function far more efficiently, be a great deal happier and also release others from empty expectations which you can never realistically fulfil.

Happy 2026 – may this be the year in which you find your true self and the path you are happiest walking!