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Here’s my take on New Year’s resolutions and what I think many of us are ready to resolve and let go of.

ELISE:

All right. You know what’s coming. It’s New Year’s resolution time. I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions. I think that they’re typically more or less ungrounded, untrackable, unrealized. My dad, when I was growing up, used to essentially turn them into concrete action plans, which is very, very, very much my dad. He doesn’t just do things to do things. He really needs a goal. We couldn’t just ride horses around the land and the wilderness areas in our backyard.

We had to really have a goal, so we became long distance endurance horseback riders. So we would travel all over the Pacific Northwest doing these 50 mile, essentially marathoning with horses. And we couldn’t just ski. We had to have some sort of developmental goal attached to that. I clearly haven’t resisted that. I have somewhat embraced it even as an adult. I like to see where I’ve been and where I’m going. I like to write things down. I keep a physical planner, like the one that my mom always had growing up. Hers came from a drug company, obviously, because everything in our house was ... All the writing material in our house really was from drug companies. I do think to my parents’ credit that that’s the most that my dad would accept was pads of paper, drug samples for his patients and pens. Clearly there’s a lot more ethical slippage, particularly now, I think, between doctors and drug reps.

But yeah, we just got a lot of paper products. No boondoggles, no trips, et cetera. But my dad, on that note, he loves a freebie. He loves a logo t-shirt. He loves a mug. He loves a hat. It doesn’t really matter what his advertising, if it’s free and on offer, he’ll take it, he’ll wear it, he’ll rock it for you. Dad, I don’t think that you listen, but if you are, I do love you very dearly, and this is one of my favorite things about you. Okay. It’s a really random preamble for maybe an annual tradition. Last year I wrote about resolutions in the etymology and the way that I see resolutions, not so much as this is what I’m going to do in the new year, but more about what I’m leaving behind, what I’m ready to let go of, what I’m ready to resolve and leave in the past.

And so I’m going to do that again today, maybe as a bit of inspiration for the same process for you. I think some of these are probably universal themes that we are all working toward, but you likely have something else as well that maybe makes it to your list. And it’s, I think for all of us, been a wild year, wild, chaotic, really started with a forest fire at the beginning of the year for me. I was thinking about that and how I did ... It’s become an annual tradition, this eaching workshop with Satya Doyle Bayak that we do. We’re doing it again this year. And last year as a hexagram, I pulled danger and it just didn’t resonate even though I knew that the inauguration was coming, but it was all about danger. And I was like, “This is not for me. “ And a bunch of people on the call pulled the same hexagram.

And then what do you know? The Palisades Fire and broke out a few days later. So point taken, universe, point taken. But yeah, it’s been a wild year, although in many ways, for me at least, it’s felt like a quiet year, like a building year, head down year, continuing to sort of one foot in front of the other, continuing to grow myself up. I feel like I have grown up more in the past five years, eight years than I did in the preceding 20 years. And maybe that’s just a function of walking through the midlife gate. I just turned 46, so I’m closer to 50 than 40, which is quite wild. I’m sure like many of you, I still feel like a precocious teenager. I just can’t break out of this self-conception of thinking of myself as a 13 year old at the adult’s table.

I don’t know why that’s where I feel sort of calcified, but I think of myself as a precocious child. But this year in particular, I will say that I’m starting to recontextualize myself as an adult with adult things to offer. And it’s actually been a pretty profound shift for me, particularly when it comes to this first resolution. I’m going to give you three. Three is already probably maybe too many, but these are things that I feel like I’ve been working through in the past year or years, and I really want to be on the other side of them in 2026 if I’m not already. But the first one is outgrowing obligation. I feel like I have really outgrown obligation and that obligation in some way was a significant rudder for me for how I was guiding my life, feeling compelled to do things that people wanted me to do, to be who they wanted me to be, and fighting myself throughout.

And often I would say exercising obligation out of fear, anxiety, not wanting to quote, be in trouble, which is kind of an insane thing to say as a 46 year old, but that’s really the mindset of, “Oh, I just want to avoid disappointing someone, disturbing someone.” And it’s easier in many ways to say yes to things that aren’t that big of a deal or that I don’t mind doing, I can do this, but are a big deal. It’s just that slow attrition of self and energy. And I would say the more pernicious part of it is the stew of resentment that grows, right? And those moments of self betrayal that just build over years, months of selling yourself out in favor of someone else’s comfort or someone else’s desire. And so this idea of obligation, I really want to step beyond. I don’t want anyone to feel obligated to do anything for me.

That feels terrible. Even the idea that someone feels obligated to show up for me, I don’t like that. I don’t want that energy and nor do I want to feel obligated to anyone else. I just need to obviously look up the etymology of obligate.

Yeah. I mean, the etymology of obligate, it comes from oblige towards, to bind, to bind towards, which is kind of fascinating because you probably heard this before, but the etymology of religion is relagari, so oblige is obligare, Latin. So to bind towards, whereas religion would be to rebind, to come back together. It’s interesting that they’re connected. I’m not quite sure exactly what that means or how I would contextualize that, but yeah, the old French meaning as it moves through time, it becomes bind by oath, so it has a legal connotation to it as well. And I don’t want that. I don’t want to be compelled to be with anyone or to do anything for anyone that I don’t absolutely choose freely and of my own volition. So that’s the frame I’m using. And part of that has been learning how to understand my own energy and my own body and to sometimes push against advice that actually doesn’t work for me.

It’s interesting. I was just talking to this woman partly about human design and for human design fans, you’ll know what I’m talking about, but I have an emotional authority. I’m a manifesting generator. Everything except for my head and my ashna, those are both open, but everything else is defined. And I have, I think it’s a sacral authority or an emotional authority, which I think you hear that and you say, “Okay, so your emotions are your authority.” That’s how I had always understood that. I’m not a human design expert. And for some people, that’s true, but for me, it’s actually the opposite. What I was told, and this actually, I have all these different lines. Some people have one, I have three out of the four, but her point was when it comes to a decision, you’ll experience every single potential emotion of the outcome of that decision.

So you’re going to experience emotions like a wave. You might feel excitement and then trepidation, then anxiety, dread, fear, you’re going to feel everything and there’s no point along that emotional wave or arc on which you should be making a decision. There’s no full body yes, there’s no full body no.

And I have to wait until the full emotional wave moves through me and then literally sleep on it and then make a dispassionate decision later and that in those moments I’ll know it will come to me without energy, without emotion. I’ll just know exactly what to do, what’s the right choice, whether I actually want to do something or not. And so that’s actually really helpful because I’ve been trying to tune into my emotions in the opposite way, understandably of getting reconnected, getting more, less associated, more embodied, and then using that as a compass. But when it comes to big decisions, no, I’ll be operating off of other people’s emotions and the emotion of the opportunity rather than my own intuition. So that was really interesting and helpful. And then the other sort of antidote to obligation, I would say, is to really use my body, I guess, or myself as a tuning fork for joy.

And I am responding to things truly from a place of, does this feel joyful and will this be fun? And again, it doesn’t work 100% of the time, but that’s my new tuning fork/way of considering possibility is where is the joy? Where is the joy? And as you guys know, it doesn’t mean that I’m scared of the harder things at all. I think that’s where I live. I like splunking in the shadows with people, holding lights for people, for myself, but joy. I think that there’s joy in that for me. I like that type of work.

So that’s the first thing that I’m really trying to outgrow and leave behind, which is obligation. I am not here for it. I don’t think any of us are really here for it. And this doesn’t mean a shirking of responsibility or that I don’t show up when I say I’m going to show up or I’m not going to do what I intend to do, but I’m not obliging myself to anything unless it’s joyful or really feels like something that I feel called to do rather than compelled to do. This brings me to my next goal, I guess you could call it, or way of conceptualizing my life and how I want to show up, which is that I am prioritizing freedom. Now that sounds kind of silly, I know, but I’ve been thinking a lot this past year about a lot of my money stories and scarcity mindset and getting underneath the hood of that towards what really wants to be reconciled, which isn’t money, it’s freedom.

And it goes again to this idea of obligation, but the way, it’s really the way in which whenever I sense freedom or move towards freedom, which to me is an energy that’s associated with ease, spaciousness, stillness, there’s some old piece of programming in me that snaps awake and hits a whip and is like, “You can’t do that. You can’t do that. It’s too much. I’m going to manufacture scarcity so that you enslave yourself to something, so that you take on a job you don’t really want to do, so you get breathless around completely irrational fear mostly.” And so it’s not abundance. I have plenty of abundance in my life. It is for me about freedom, and that means being able to use my time, my energy in the way that I want, and having complete faith and trust in my ability to decide how to move forward, what to prioritize, how I want to spend my time.

And I think that I run an old script, which is hilarious, but it goes back to college or maybe boarding school when I had this not very helpful revelation that I did better, my grades were better when I took extra credits.

So I started taking, this is in college specifically, I think I needed essentially four credits a semester to graduate and I started doing maybe some semesters I needed to take five, but I did six credits a semester and I double majored in art, fine arts, which was so fun. It was actually like art therapy. That’s how I felt about it. I never took myself seriously as an artist, nor would you if you saw my work to be completely fair. And it’s funny because my husband went to RISD, he’s an incredible artist and craftsman and so fastidious and so skilled. And it’s really funny to me that I’m an art major or I double majored in English and art because I lack his skill and I definitely lack his attention to detail. But I did it because I loved it and I felt completely liberated from any success metrics because everyone knew.

I wasn’t pursuing an MFA. I didn’t think I was going to have a gallery represent me. I didn’t call myself an artist in the same way it’s taken me however many years, 40 years to call myself a writer. I just said I was an arts student and it was fun and I loved it. I need to actually get back to some making more things because it’s a bit like a meditation for me. But anyway, back to six credits a semester, that’s when I would find myself excelling is under the pressure of time constraints and being overwhelmed. And I think in my mind I decided that’s the only way that I could be really productive is to overwhelm myself and put myself into sort of a stress response, which isn’t a great way to live. And I’m offering this because it hasn’t created a lot of freedom in my life.

I’ve overextended myself and over committed myself and then found that I don’t have as much free time as I would like or as much time to spend with my kids. And so part of freedom is making sure that I’m only committing to things that I really want to do and then also remembering that I can have faith in myself, that I do get my stuff done and I do it with actually a lot of joy. I mean, you guys might think this is sad, but I don’t think this is sad. As mentioned, it was my birthday a month ago and my birthday came this year the day after Thanksgiving. My favorite is when my birthday is on Thanksgiving because then it can really escape notice. I’m not a birthday celebrant type, although I love getting older. I am really grateful to get older. I don’t have any anxiety about getting older.

I relish it, but I just, I don’t need a party. And it’s mostly, again, it goes to this idea of obligation, but I hate when people feel bad when they miss it or like they need to do something. I just, it feels like obligation and I don’t like it. But it was my birthday on Black Friday and we were all home and Rob was asking me what I wanted to do and I went for a long walk and I was like, “I want to cuddle with the kids. I want to be home with you guys and I want to spend a couple of hours in the back, but in close proximity to you or if anyone wants to hang out with me, while I do it, I just want to work on my book for a couple of hours.” And that’s what I did. And then we went out for a delicious dinner at Felix in Venice, but I really enjoy it.

I love it. It’s fun. And so anyway, it goes to having faith, trust in myself. I love my work and I will get my work done and I will prioritize it without needing a cattle prod, self-applied by me to make it so. What I would also add is that within, under this Russian doll of freedom, it’s just everything else. I don’t want abundance for abundance’s sake. Yes, it would be nice to be liberated from any feelings of scarcity or anxiety about supporting my family, etcetera. And wrapped up in that, it is wrapped up in freedom, which is I want to do the work I want to do. I don’t want to have to worry about commercializing it or marketing it. And so freedom is my top line goal and part of that is abundance. Part of that is working for who I want to work for if I want to work for anyone versus working for myself.

Part of that is not enslaving myself to any algorithms, which is unfortunately a big part of being a writer, a podcaster, or anyone else in this space. It’s really all of us or any of us who are looking to find audience or market. You have to enslave yourself to these algorithms. It’s quite wild and it’s pretty sad. And I’ve watched this particular cycle move through media in all of its formats over time and it’s just the same cycle. And I feel like it is currently right now it’s YouTube. It feels like the Instagram bubble has burst, the algorithm has dramatically changed just even in the last month or two in ways that are exceptionally perceptible to friends of mine who are very reliant on Instagram and then suddenly it’s like your entire ecosystem, the floor falls out of whatever it is that you’re trying to do.

It’s really scary, I feel for them. Newsletter, it’s why I care so much about newsletter and podcasts because it feels ... I can’t reach you all podcast wise, but at this point, Spotify and Apple are reasonable partners. There’s no real way to gamify a podcast, an audio podcast, and so it doesn’t carry the same threat of building an audience and then losing access to that audience that comes with Instagram. It’s also why I care so much about email and Substack, which they have up until really this year, been a great partner for writers. Now they’re trying to become a social media network like everyone else and the game has changed. So it’ll be interesting to see how that shakes out, but I’ve been watching that unfold without trying to get too worked up about it. But I think the news space now is YouTube and I have a lot of friends who are in the podcast space and I tend to be more anxious and fearful than the average, but I don’t want people to be losing their shirts, chasing audiences on these algorithmic platforms that they don’t own and where everything is fickle and you’re never quite sure what the actual impact of your work is on those platforms because you’re competing with the desires of the platform.

So back when I was a magazine editor in my early days sort of in online media and everyone was spending tons of money to create studios for Facebook Live, chasing the Facebook algorithm at the time. And then a lot of those sites, a lot of those people just went bankrupt. The algorithm changed, the fire hose turned off and they had no distinguishable brand, they had no real relationships with readers and they had no way of accessing these people again.

So anyway, sort of a random aside on media, but like I think about that in the context of freedom too, of what’s a vanity metric versus what’s the role of marketing in that ecosystem versus standing and just doing your thing and having faith in the universe that it will reach the people it needs to reach. It’s like that Anne Lamont “lighthouses don’t run all over islands trying to be lighthouses, shining the light for people. They just stand there and are a lighthouse.” So this is again, the push pull always, right? But I want the freedom of being a lighthouse of just standing, creating, moving forward, finding satisfaction and peace in what I’m doing without hooking myself or enslaving myself to growth engines that I don’t control and that might or might not be real.

So that’s number two. That’s prioritizing freedom. And then number three, the final one is just accepting myself, which in some ways I feel like I’ve been accepting myself since I was a we little kid. I’ve always been quite comfortable with myself, a little bit of an outsider, insider, introvert, but I really feel like I’ve entered the next phase of this. Let me just caveat this. I work on myself, as you guys know all the time. I am trying in earnest to grow myself up alongside all of you, and I’m always seeking out my blind spots and looking for opportunities to grow and become more conscious and more aware. And I’ve done a lot of work and will continue to do work to accept myself as exactly who I am. A friend texted me about a mutual friend’s party and she was like, “Are you going to go?”

And I was like, “No, because you know what? I’m both ... I’m a lazy introvert socially.” And again, this goes to sort of how we open this conversation, which was about obligation, but no, I’m not going to go because I find with every year that passes, I have less tolerance for relationships that don’t enrich my life. I have less tolerance for small talk, even if the small talk is with someone amazing. I have definitely have less tolerance for transactional relationships or anything that just doesn’t feel juicy and good. I have zero tolerance for betrayals or drama. I don’t want any part of it and accepting myself has been giving myself permission that that’s okay. I don’t need to have hundreds of friends, particularly if I have the close friends that I do have who I really cherish. And it’s okay to have distance. It’s okay to create space.

It’s okay to have really good friends and people I love who I only get to see once or twice a year. I think I was fighting myself on that or feeling a lot of anxiety about how back burner my social life has been, just having two youngish kids and a very full career and now I’m just embracing it and actually it is how it is, not because it’s needed to be that way, but because I really like it that way and I would so much rather be home with my kids and Rob than at a store event or a dinner party where I don’t really feel called to be. And I’m just going to trust myself to make those decisions and And it doesn’t mean, I mean, I love people. If you haven’t noticed, I love people and I love to get into it with people.

And I was laughing. I was at a friend’s birthday party this weekend and I drove to it with a good friend of mine, , which was great because we got to begin and end the night with each other and catch up. And then for the duration of the party, I didn’t want to mix and mingle. And I sat on a couch with my plate of tacos with Cara Natterson, who I don’t know if you guys have encountered in the wild. She’s a pediatrician who does a lot of great content for kids around sex ed and bodies and whatnot. She’s wonderful. But I sat with her husband, Paul, who’s a cardiologist and we just had a great ... It was just fun. It was so fun. And that was my night. That was my party. I didn’t talk to anyone else except for them and yelling.

And I was like, “That’s a great night. I don’t need more than that. “ And so I think when I think about accepting myself, it’s accepting that that’s not only how I’m wired, but that’s how I want it to be. I want to go deep rather than wide and I want to be mostly a recluse. And then simultaneously, I love being out in the world. I also had so much fun this year doing events with small groups of women and chatting with people, hearing their stories, yucking it up. I love that too. But yeah. So when I think about accepting myself, that’s largely what I mean, because I also feel like a lot of my, not a lot of my friends, but I think we see this in the collective, this anxiety, this FOMO, this, do I know the right people? Am I being invited to the right things?

What am I missing out on? Is all of life happening outside of my own experience and then being served up to me on Instagram? And I never really had that much anxiety about it, but that whatever anxiety I did have is gone. And I wish you all peace with that. And I wish you all deep relationships with however many people you choose to maintain intimacy with. For some of you, that will be many, for some of you that will be a few. And I wish for you really clean contracts and a really clarified vision of what it means to love each other and support each other and show up for each other without obligation, the utmost of freedom, and to go where we feel called again and not compelled. I just, I think that’s where all the joy is. I think that’s where the flow is.

I think that’s where each of us can come alive and feel most ourselves. And I want more of that for all of us in the new year. So thanks for listening. I will be back on the first day of 2026. So yes, just in a few days from now. I’ll see you guys soon.

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