There’s no universal elixir for life’s challenges – because your life isn’t like anyone else’s. What shapes your growth isn’t just what happens to you, but how you manage these circumstances and engage with the environment around you. The goal is personal wellness as defined by an evolving mastery of your most fundamental relationship: the navigation of your unique moment-to-moment, day-to-day environment.
Consider a few of the variables that might be playing out in anyone’s personal environmental equation:
- Making a job change
- Incurring a serious injury or illness
- Losing a loved-one
- Inheriting a financial windfall
- Experiencing violence
- Moving to a new town
- Falling in love
- Performing for an audience
- Observing a birth
- Witnessing a death
- Being moved by art or music
- Getting lost
- Receiving recognition
The list goes on. Each experience sparks emotion in you and will activate your coping strategies as you celebrate, mitigate, investigate, savor, solve, repair, or simply process that moment’s event. You will then learn, grow, adapt, and steer your way toward whatever comes next.
The book and card sort exercise are unlikely to reveal any big surprises. Instead, they will corroborate themes and patterns that are already familiar to you. Even if we don’t want to recognize it, most of us are acutely aware of the places in life we tend to stumble.
What we do with that information usually comes down to whether the cost of repeated stumbles is great enough to warrant making a change. You usually only stumble over the same rock a few times before you realize the need to adjust your course. At that point, you realize that you’re no longer willing to endure the consequences of no change.
So, before you lock into any New Year’s resolutions, sort the cards and peruse the book. Your commitment to growth might sustain longer if it’s targeted and personal. 2026 is the year of getting in sync and engaging with the world.