Tag: Go Team 2026

A drawn of a gold star Go Team 2026: Be Kind To Yourself (Again) (Always)
ADHD · fitness · Go Team · goals · habits · motivation · self care

Go Team 2026: Be Kind To Yourself (Again) (Always)

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team!

Since I need constant reminders to be kind to myself, I feel safe in assuming that other people need those reminders, too.

Here, I’ll say it big so we all get the message.

Please Be Kind To Yourself!

There’s a lot going on it the world. There’s a lot going on in your life. You probably have lots of stuff to do. You’re probably trying to adjust to normal life after the flurry of December, no matter what you celebrated (or didn’t celebrate) last month.

That’s a lot of stuff to be carrying and working on all at once.

And, if you are also trying to build a new habit, change an old habit, or trying to expand your life in any way, then that’s even more work for your poor brain.

The only way to proceed, the only way to make any change, the only way to adapt to new circumstances, is by being kind to yourself.

As you forge ahead towards the life you want, you are going to have easy days and challenging days.

Some tasks will be really hard.

Some things will feel impossible.

Sometimes things will be so easy you will wonder if you did them wrong.

All of that is part of the process of change.

In fact, it’s all part of the process of being a human.

If you are mean to yourself when things are hard (or if you dismiss your efforts when things go well), you won’t be making them any easier, you’ll just be making yourself feel worse about them.

However, if you remind yourself that these ups and downs are a normal part of being human, a normal part of change, if you decide to treat yourself with compassion, then you will actually be making the hard parts a bit easier.

If you celebrate your efforts – even if things felt easy, you still DID them – then you will be reminding yourself that even easy tasks matter.

And that self-compassion, that self-kindness, will help you see yourself as a person who keeps moving towards the life you want, tiny step by tiny step, instead of getting trapped in judging yourself for imperfection.

So, again, always, as a favour to me, please, please, please:

Be kind to yourself in your thinking, in your planning, and in your doing.

When you choose self-kindness, you aren’t ‘letting yourself off the hook’, you aren’t ‘lacking discipline’, you are creating the circumstances for your own ease, happiness, and success.

Being kind to yourself can be hard work sometimes* but it is totally worth it.

With that said, here’s your gold star for today!

No matter where you are in your thinking, planning, or doing, I hope you’ll accept this gold star in recognition of your efforts.

The scope and volume of our efforts will vary from task to task, day to day, and person to person, but they all count.

Even the effort to assess your capacity and then decide how to proceed is gold-star-worthy.

It takes work not to just react to the ambient pressure around you and that counts, just as all of your other efforts do.

Go you!

And…

Go Team Us!

A drawing of a gold star
A drawing of a gold star with rounded corners. The star is sprinkled with dots of darker gold and is trimmed with green. The background of the drawing is a somewhat irregular green grid with a gold dot in each square and the drawing is framed in green.

*Isn’t it kind of weird how *easy* it is to default to being mean to ourselves and how hard it can be to choose self-kindness? Yet, being mean to ourselves in the moment makes it harder for us to get where we want to go and being kind to ourselves will make things easier in the long term. Odd, right?

Go Team 2026: How do you want to feel?
ADHD · advice · fitness · Go Team · goals · habits · motivation · new year's resolutions · self care

Go Team 2026: How do you want to feel?

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team!

One of the things I love about Yoga With Adriene is how often she returns to the idea of ‘Find What Feels Good’ when it comes to a yoga practice.*

I think it is a great guideline for many practices but particularly for movement practices because so many fitness instructors and influences are all about what looks good or about burning calories or about crushing one thing or another.

I feel decidedly meh about all of those things but I feel GREAT about leaning into ways to feel good about the practices I am bringing into my life.

And I am hoping that as you work towards expanding your life in whichever ways you choose, your feelings will be a key factor in your decision-making process.

It is worth figuring out how to make your practices feel good to you.

In fact, “How do I want to feel?” can be one of the most important starting points in any project** because it gives you some criteria for choosing activities, timelines, conspirators, and actions.

Once you know how you want to feel, you can identify what actions to take, how and when to take them, and who to take them with.

And considering how you want to feel gives you a bit of extra motivation, an extra sense of why you are choosing to do what you are doing.

When it comes to fitness and wellness, your feelings aren’t just about feeling good, bad, excited, or whatever, they can also get specific to the practices you are considering.

You can ask yourself “How do I want my legs to feel?” or “What does strong feel like?” or “How does ‘feeling energetic’ show up in my body?” And then you can decide how to work towards those feelings/how to track them/how to motivate yourself in the search for them.

And, of course, my ADHD brain won’t let me get away without considering this possible hitch:

Sometimes, the thing that will feel good in the long term doesn’t feel good now.

For example, the feeling of having strong abs will be great in many ways but doing plank right now may not feel good at all.

In fact, the effort required may feel downright discouraging.

And I am not going to suggest that you put a lot of energy into convincing yourself that something you don’t enjoy feels good (but if that works for you, have at it!)

Instead, I am going to suggest that you find something that feels good about it – maybe you can focus on how good it feels to check that exercise off of your list, or how good it feels to see the number on your timer creep up, or, even, how good it feels to stop!

And you might spend a bit of time digging deep into your imagination to generate a sense of how it will feel to have strong abs, the things that will be easier for you to do, the way your body will respond to future challenges as a result. Perhaps knowing you are giving a gift to your future self will help your sacrifice feel good in the moment.

I have a lot more to say this topic but I don’t have a lot of time to say today so I am going to pause the discussion here and get to the gold star portion of our post:

Here are your three small gold stars for your efforts today. You can award them to yourself for three separate things or you can pile them all in for one thing.

I know you are working on things, whether you are at the thinking stage, the planning stage or the action stage.

And I know your capacity will vary from day to day.

Please celebrate whatever the you of today is able to do, no matter how small, because your effort counts and your work matters.

Be kind to yourself out there!

Go Team Us!

A drawing of three small gold stars
A drawing of three small gold stars hanging from strings at the top of the notebook. In the bottom right corner and the top left corner there are a series of curved black lines that alternate between being filled with a gold stripe and featuring a line of black dots. The background of the whole image features a bunch of small black dots.

*In fact, Find What Feels Good is the name of her app.

**In many other contexts – relationships, presentations, web design, displays, “How do I want them to feel?” can also be an important question but it is less relevant for your fitness and wellness, of course!

A small drawing of a cartoonish gold star with a smiling face Go Team 2026: You Can Pick Something Fun
ADHD · Go Team · goals · habits · motivation · self care

Go Team 2026: You Can Pick Something Fun

Christine Hennebury

Hey Team!

Here we are in day two of 2026, and I have a reminder for you when it comes to new habits, resolutions, and activities:

YOU CAN PICK SOMETHING FUN.

I know, I know! We get so many messages this time of year about crushing our goals, and about dedication and determination, and about how hard we must work to be better, better, better.

And to that, I say, “Meh.”

If that kind of approach inspires you, then please forge ahead.

BUT

If that kind of talk makes you feel kind of tired and worn out before you even start, then please remember that your new year doesn’t have to be filled with that stuff.

You can choose a fun path that will lead you where you want to go.*

That might mean picking fun or whimsical activities or it might mean being fun and whimsical while doing a more straightforward activity.

If you wanted a fun or whimsical fitness goal, you could try a new dance video every week or you could challenge yourself to find specific items on your walks (kind of like a scavenger hunt.)

If you want to get stronger instead of lifting weights, you could pick items around your house that you’re going to practice lifting.

If you want/have to do ordinary activities and you can’t find a fun version, you can choose fun outfits or accessories, specific music or podcasts, or ask someone fun to keep you company while you get things done.

The main message here is that trying new things, taking on new habits, adding to your fitness or your wellness levels, does not have to be a slog.

I just want you to be kind to yourself, to be good to yourself, and to be able to expand your life in ways that will be satisfying for you, without feeling like the whole thing is a punishment.

Expanding your life may take effort, it may take focus, but it doesn’t have to be awful.

The days of “no pain, no gain” are long behind us.

When it comes to any fitness or wellness goal you might have this year, there is probably a fun way for you to achieve it, or, at the very least a way, to have more fun in the process.**

REMEMBER: Just because something is fun doesn’t mean it’s not working.

So, Team, please be kind to yourselves out there and try to make things a little more fun when you can.

Go Team Us!

Here’s a happy gold star for your efforts today:

A small drawing of a cartoonish gold star with a smiling face

PS – I have been seeing a lot of people using punch cards and bingo cards to keep track of their plans and resolutions this year and that seems like a pretty easy way to add some fun to the process. If drawing isn’t your thing, you could type your plans into blocks in a table/spreadsheet or you could use a site like this one.

*For example, a few years ago, one friend of mine decided to spend the year trying different types of tea and another friend resolved to add more colour to her wardrobe. Now, those aren’t fitness goals, but I could argue that they are wellness goals. And pursuing those goals definitely added more fun to my friends’ lives.

**I get that not every part of every thing can be fun, some tasks and activities just have to be endured, but we don’t have to use that as an organizing principle for every goal.

A drawing of a metallic gold star Go Team 2026: Three Things
ADHD · advice · Go Team · habits · motivation · self care

Go Team 2026: Three Things

Christine Hennebury2 Comments

Hey Team,

Welcome to 2026! Look at you, rocking this new year already!

As you probably know, every January I post daily encouragement posts to help all of us (including me!) find our footing in the new year.

These posts aren’t just cheering you on (but I do a fair bit of that!), they are intended as gentle reminders that it is ok to find things challenging and that doing things in your own time and your own speed is a great way to approach new ideas.

And to get us started, here are three important ideas that will be woven through this month of posts:

1) You’re good. Just as you are. You don’t need to be fixed.

I get really squicked out by the whole ‘New Year. New You!’ and ‘Improve Yourself!’ and ‘Become A New Person’ vibe that permeates this time of year.

I know that most people probably don’t take it as literally as I do (Neurodivergent? Me? Whatever do you mean?) but, to me, it feels like those messages are telling people that they aren’t enough, that there is something wrong with them, that they need to be ‘better.’

I don’t love that for us.

So, instead, I would like you to know that you are GREAT as you are.

Sure, there are things in your life, in your approach, or in your day-to-day that are frustrating, tiring, or unsatisfying, and you may want to shift those things to make your life smoother, more fun, or more interesting but those things aren’t YOU.

There is NOTHING wrong with YOU.

You can expand your life and your routines and your capacity in any way you choose.

If those expansions help you feel good or help you feel more satisfied, forge ahead.

But please, please, please, don’t feel that you NEED to do these things to be good enough.

You are already good enough. You are, in fact, great and anything else you do is just adding to your magnificence.*

2) The daily gold stars are for everyone. You have nothing to prove.

You can approach the new year in whatever way works for you and I will award you gold stars for your efforts.

(Yes, I know that many people only expect gold stars for results but my ADHD and I do not approve of that. We have little or no control over our results, and results take a long time. Our efforts though? We have control over those and they are happening right now. So I like to award gold stars for our efforts – big and small – so we can feel encouraged to keep moving towards the things we want for ourselves.)

If you find the ‘clean slate’ feeling encouraging and helpful, then go right ahead with your goals and plans and activities. Gold stars for you!

If you find all of that a bit overwhelming and you want to move slowly into the new year, the meander along at your own pace. Gold stars for you!

If you are just carrying on with what already works? Gold stars for you!

If you are waiting to figure things out? Gold stars for you!

Gold stars are for effort of any size or shape.

Even the teeniest effort counts AND your effort doesn’t have to look like anyone else’s.

3) You don’t have to have everything figured out to get started.

I know, some people have their plans for the year all set out and they are ready to dive right in on their schedule right away.

Others have just a vague idea of some things they might want to do this year but the details are sketchy at best. **

And many of us fall somewhere in between those two.

But here’s the thing, you can move towards the future you want either way.

If you have a plan, do the next step in your plan.

If you are just working from a vague idea, then you can do anything and it will help you wrap your mind around your goal.

For example, if you want to get stronger but you don’t know exactly what that means for you yet, then do one leg lift or one arm circle. Sure, it won’t make you instantly stronger but it is a step in that direction and it gives you a little bit of momentum.

Or if you want to have a meditation practice, you can take one long, slow, breath and focus carefully while you do. It won’t give you instant inner peace but it’s not going to do you any harm and it will probably feel pretty good. And, again, you’ll have done SOMETHING that moves you closer to where you want to go.

And really, even the most detailed plan is just doing the same thing – it’s ok to figure things out day by day.

So, Team, there are three key elements to get you started and here is your first gold star.

Please remember that you get a gold star for your efforts no matter what those efforts look like today.

You may have jumped out of bed for a workout, you may have decided to spend a little extra time breathing slowly over your tea this morning, or you may do anything in between or beyond – any of those efforts are about taking good care of yourself and they earn you this gold star.

Go Team Us!

Please be kind to yourself out there.

A drawing of a metallic gold star

*For any readers (like me) who have to immediately react to comments like this with a “You don’t know who is reading this! They may not be great!” or with a bunch of thoughts about why this doesn’t apply to them, consider these two things

1) Great doesn’t mean perfect. When I say that my readers are great, I mean that they have lots of great things about them and that they are fundamentally good people doing the best they can with the resources they have. I firmly believe that most people are pretty damn great but they just don’t realize it.

2)If you think that my comment about *YOU* being great doesn’t really apply then maybe you can consider the possibility that it *might* apply instead of trying to tell yourself that it is a fact. Maybe approach it like this: “What if Christine was right and I am doing better than I realize? How would I do things differently if that was the case?”

** This is where my ‘Planuary’ approach to the year can come in handy.