Be Your Best Friend: A New Year Resolution Worth Keeping

For a long time, I believed that being hard on myself was a virtue.

I grew up in a military family. As a single mother, a lawyer, and a first-time law firm owner, I believed that relentless self-criticism was simply part of discipline. I told myself that pushing harder meant I was strong, responsible, and resilient. After all, I had survived circumstances many people never encounter in a lifetime — fleeing my home country, living in a women’s shelter, navigating the immigration system, raising children alone, and rebuilding a professional identity from nothing. If I could survive all of that, surely I could survive being unkind to myself.

What I did not realize was that this unkindness was slowly eroding me from the inside. I was kind to clients, kind to staff and colleagues, kind to my children — yet I always placed myself last. Over time, that internal harshness became so familiar that I stopped noticing it.

A Resolution That Seemed Simple — But Wasn’t

At the beginning of this year, I made a New Year’s resolution that felt deceptively simple: I would be my own best friend.

I did not know how quickly that resolution would be tested. On January 2 — one day after setting the intention — I was driving from Kingston to Toronto for a full day of work. About forty minutes into the drive, a sudden thought surfaced: I had likely left my purse on the kitchen counter. I pulled over at an OnRoute stop and checked my briefcase. No purse. No driver’s licence. No health card. No cash. No business cards. No physical identification at all.

Turning back was not an option. My old internal voice appeared — sharp, unforgiving, and familiar. “How can you be this careless? You are a lawyer. How could you forget your purse? This is ridiculous.”

Then I remembered my resolution. I paused and asked myself a question I had never asked before: if this had happened to my friend Christine, what would I say to her?

I knew immediately I would never speak to her the way I was speaking to myself. I would tell her she had already done so much — that she was balancing work, parenting, and logistics across cities, that exhaustion makes mistakes human, that she had Smart Pay on her phone, trusted friends in Toronto, and the ability to problem-solve. So I replaced Christine’s name with my own and said those words to myself, out loud.

Even recalling that moment now, my eyes fill with tears. Not because of the forgotten purse, but because I realized how rarely I had ever spoken to myself with compassion.

Survival Does Not Mean We Are Unharmed

Like many lawyers, I am a doer and an action-taker. Since coming to Canada, I have completed almost every goal I set for myself — I took the LSAT while on Ontario Works, attended law school from a women’s shelter, completed articling, passed the bar, bought a home, opened my own practice, and supported my children. Yet internally, I was never enough for myself.

That internal cruelty surfaced in ways I could not ignore. When one of my children was diagnosed with several mental health conditions, I felt an overwhelming sense of failure — convinced I had been a bad mother, replaying every moment searching for proof that I had failed them.

Only later, with professional support, did I begin to understand a more compassionate truth: when we lived in a shelter I was dealing with my own trauma, operating in survival mode, and I did the very best I could with what I had. My children may need to find their own paths to heal from early trauma — that is a reality I must accept with humility — but it does not erase the fact that I made genuine efforts under impossible circumstances.

Learning Compassion Through Professional Failure

The same lesson applied to my professional life. In my first year of running a law firm, I made mistakes. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong service providers. Those decisions had real financial consequences.

My old instinct was to punish myself. But being my own best friend meant responding differently. Instead of condemnation, I placed a hand on my own shoulder and said something new: “You are doing a great job as a first-time business owner. You survived your first year. That alone deserves recognition.”

That shift did not erase the consequences of my decisions, but it changed how I carried them. Mistakes became lessons rather than verdicts on my worth.

Why This Matters

Achievement does not protect us from burnout. Professional success does not shield us from emotional harm. Without kindness, resilience becomes brittle.

This lesson feels particularly important for women, and especially for professional women. When I shared my resolution with other women in professional careers, many admitted they would never speak to a colleague or client the way they speak to themselves. Harsh self-judgment has been normalized in our profession — even celebrated as evidence of commitment.

But loving ourselves is not indulgent. It is not weakness. It is not a distraction from excellence. It is maintenance.

Since making this change, my children have noticed. They tell me I am calmer, more present, more enjoyable to be around. That internal peace has made me a better lawyer, a better parent, and a better human being.

Being your own best friend does not mean lowering standards or avoiding responsibility. It means replacing cruelty with compassion. It means allowing room for mistakes without humiliation. It means acknowledging effort, not just outcomes.

If you have not done so, I invite you to make this commitment with me — not only at the beginning of a year, but every day. Love yourself. Be your own best friend. You have already survived so much. You deserve kindness, especially from yourself.

This article was originally published in the Ontario Bar Association’s Sole, Small Firm and General Practice Section newsletter (January 2026). Read the original publication →