Nurturing our own sense of curiosity

The start of a new year often brings up thoughts of new possibilities and images of what we’d like to accomplish in the year ahead. With this often comes the new year's resolutions where we commit to things like losing weight, exercising more, quitting smoking etc. And while those are admirable aspirations, the reality is that by about this time in January it’s easy to feel disappointed with our lack of progress and abandon what seemed so do-able just a couple of weeks earlier!

So now that we’ve all had some time to move past the hype of New Year's Eve and settle into the year ahead, imagine for a moment what it might look like if this was the year you nurtured your sense of curiosity.

Now maybe you’re already a naturally curious person but how often do you extend that curiosity to your own experiences and do so in a nonjudgmental way?

Adopting a curious nonjudgmental approach to our experiences provides us with a wealth of information about our own needs and can fuel the type of observation (think data collection) that can truly guide our self-care practices.

Without curiosity we are destined to approach self-care in haphazard way, not unlike the researcher who designs experiments in the absence of hypotheses or data collection and then wonders why she isn’t making progress.

So as you move through 2023, what are even some small ways you can bring a sense of curiosity to this year’s self-care journey? The data you gather will be invaluable.