how to have more self-love in the new year

this week, we're talking about how to practice more self-love in the new year and how to reflect on your mental health this past year: the ups, the downs, and how you can have more ups this year!

you deserve more self-love in your life.

welcome to small steps to self-love with bestselling mental health writer, shelby leigh!

every episode has a small step for YOU to take on your self-love journey.  tune in for today's small step about finding your why and screenshot this episode and tag me on IG @shelbyleighpoetry with your favorite takeaway. i'd love to hear!

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about shelby:

Shelby is a mental health author, who has grown an audience of more than 500,000 on social media who resonate with her work. Her bestselling book, changing with the tides, is a poetry collection about self-love, doubt, insecurities, and more. Her new collection, girl made of glass, is coming in January 2023 and is a collection about self-love, isolation, and fear. Shelby also edits poetry, runs an online poetry community, and helps authors market themselves and their books for more sales.

resources from shelby:

·        PREORDER MY NEW BOOK (and enter to win prizes here!)

·        check out Shelby’s mental health poetry books

·        Free self-love poetry print

·        Join the poetry club

·        Get help with marketing as a writer

connect with shelby:

·        Instagram: @shelbyleighpoetry

·        YouTube: Shelby Leigh Poetry

·        TikTok: @shelbyleighpoetry

·        Twitter: @shelbyleighpoet

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of Small Steps to Self-Love. I'm Shelby Leigh, your host of the podcast and a self-love writer. And today I wanted to talk about cultivating more self-love in the new year. It is almost the new year and for many of us it is a time of setting new goals and resolutions, trying new things and focusing on ourselves, which is all amazing, but it can also be a time of putting a lot of pressure on ourselves, setting a lot of new goals at once and being really hard on ourselves when we don't meet them.  

I am definitely a New Year's resolution type of person that I know that you can start a new goal or a new hobby or anything at any time. But there's something about starting with a clean slate and having this fresh new year ahead to try new things. So I'm definitely someone who loves New Year's resolutions. I know they're not for everybody and you don't have to set New Year's resolutions. But I do want to talk about today just going into the new year with intention to treat ourselves better to practice more self-love and self-care. Whether you write it down as a goal or not, or you have new resolutions or not, I think it's something that's so important to focus on. I would love for you to at least take a little bit of time to focus on how you can treat yourself better in 2023. How you can practice more self-love and improve your mental health. A lot of us focus on our physical health which of course can influence our mental health as well, but I would love for you to set one specific goal around your mental health, whether that is talking more about your feelings, whether it's to a loved one or a therapist, or making more time for yourself, carving more rest into your routine. 

That is absolutely one of my goals for the new Year. Trying to eliminate negative self-talk whenever you happen to insult yourself. Or think negatively about yourself in any way. Trying to focus on that and eliminate that as much as possible from your mind. It's very hard to remove it completely and it takes time, but that's another one of mine as well, and I'll be setting 2. The two that I just mentioned as I was naming off different goals.  

I think it's important not to flood yourself with the dozens of goals for the New Year. I've definitely done that in the past, and it can be really overwhelming and then you feel like a failure if you have to drop some because you're trying so many new things at once, it takes time to develop habits to break habits. So don't be hard on yourself at the beginning of this year if you are setting a bunch of new goals and not succeeding at all of them. Try two or three and make sure that one of them is focused on your mental health. I also think now is an amazing time to look back at this year and reflect on your mental health. If you journal, you might want to flip through some pages. Look at the months where you seem to be the happiest or the weeks that were really the. Hardest for you and reflect on why that is, how you helped yourself move past that. What you might have done differently and really reflect on how you can make more of those happy months or happy weeks or happy days happen again in the new year.  

For me, I am planning on doing an episode recapping my 2022 and talking about my mental health overall, but I think 1 trend was just feeling like I was constantly racing and running and sprinting and not taking enough time to breathe. That's definitely something that I want to work on in 2023. So that's something that I spent some time this month reflecting on and thinking about how I can make that happen in the new year.  

So my small step for you this week is to do the same to reflect back on this year, month by month or however you want to do it, and think about how you felt this year. What months were great. What happened that brought you joy? Were there times where you were feeling depressed or especially anxious or sad and you couldn't really explain why? Were there times where you felt so full of joy or content or peaceful? What were you doing during those moments and how can you recreate those moments next year?  

I want to share a couple of poems for you from my new book Girl Made of Glass. If you are watching on YouTube, I'm showing you the cover right now it is. So beautiful, I'm just so excited for everyone to see it in person because it's even more beautiful in person. But it's called Girl Made of Glass and it's my longest poetry collection. Yet it comes out January 24th and it is available for pre-order on most online retailers like Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and all the places. So if you're interested in grabbing a copy, definitely do. I would love for you to grab a copy. I'm also giving away prizes for pre ordering and I have the link in the description for how to enter to win those prizes.  

I wanted to read a couple of poems. For you this is. The first time that I've really read them and the last section of the book is a section entirely dedicated to love poems to myself and to you. So I wanted to read you a couple from that section to hopefully inspire more self-love for you in the new year, this one is from page 98 of Girl Made of Glass. I owe it to myself to love me. Not because my body has carried me through life and held me up. But because it has let me fall. It has cried with me, felt pain with me and still lives despite it all.  

And this one on Page 122 goes with the theme of growth and looking back at your year and reflecting on your growth, your mental health. All of that. Don't listen to anyone who tells you. Never look back. Self-growth is one of the most important reminders we have. To look back at who you were and to see how much you've grown. How beautiful it is to love who you are and never feel alone. There are 128 pages in this book, lots more poems to dive into and I definitely will read some in future episodes, but if you'd like to grab a copy for yourself, be sure to pre-order it so you can get the book on release day and read all of the poems in this collection, which I'm so excited for.  

Okay, that is all for me. It's a quick one today, but I really just wanted to remind you to reflect on this past year, your mental health, and go into the new year knowing that you deserve self-love and happiness. Happy holidays if you celebrate the holidays. There is an episode from a few weeks ago on practicing self-care during the holidays which I will link for you if you'd like to listen to that. I hope you have a great rest of your week. I'll be back next week with a reflection on the past year, which I'm really excited to dive into. And thank you as always for listening to the podcast!