Are you struggling to hear all the “Happy New Year” wishes and secretly can’t wait for this period to be passed? No? Just me then.

I am aware that turning the calendar over one day doesn’t erase all that has gone before and the ‘miserable’ side of me can feel irritated that at New Year we experience a barrage of positive wishes. We exist a whole 365 days a year after all!

I feel huge pressure about the expectations that others and I put on myself. This year I will be; healthier than before, more social, more fun loving, more spontaneous or just ‘more’. What is ‘more’? I interpret it to be ‘better’ than before, less difficult, less serious, less depressed... and yet all these parts of me are me and need attention.

I find myself thinking about the parts of me that others would like to change and the parts that I would like to lose too. However, I recognise that I, like many others, are a complex mixture of all of our parts – the good, the bad and the ugly.

This reminds me of Raymond Meredith Belbin who writes about ‘Team Roles’ and describes how we all have a ‘team role’ which describes how we behave based on our personalities and talents.

When Belbin describes each role he explains that each has a ‘strength’ and also it’s opposite, which he calls an ‘allowable weakness’. In fact he goes as far to say that if we focus on improving our ‘allowable weakness’ we are in danger of diluting our strength. Wow! Imagine if we were to allow ourselves the luxury of accepting all of our parts, even our allowable weaknesses?

So my fellow Moodscopers – what I wish you this New Year is that you find the courage to embrace all of your parts and give particular attention to those ‘allowable weaknesses’. Let us all accept all our parts with tolerance, acceptance and maybe eventually compassion.

Anne

A Moodscope member.