Why ‘Auld Lang Syne’ Still Resonates Two Weeks Into the New Year

Why ‘Auld Lang Syne’ Still Resonates Two Weeks Into the New Year

 

We are already two weeks into the new year, but I still catch myself humming “Auld Lang Syne” in my head. I can’t be the only one, right? The melody has this haunting quality that sticks with you, even long after the confetti has settled and the excitement of New Year’s Eve is a distant memory. It’s as if the song keeps tugging at something deep inside, reminding me to pause, reflect, and appreciate the journey so far.

What’s the Deal with “Auld Lang Syne”?

So, what is it about this song that makes it so unforgettable? “Auld Lang Syne” is a Scottish folk song written by Robert Burns back in 1788. The title translates roughly to “old long since,” or more simply, “for old times’ sake.” The lyrics reflect on old friendships, shared memories, and the passage of time—ideas we can all relate to, especially as we close out one year and start a new one.

Burns asks, “Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind?” Of course, the answer is no. The song encourages us to honor the people we’ve met, the moments we’ve lived, and everything that’s shaped us along the way.

Why We Sing It on New Year’s Eve

I’ve always wondered why this song is the one we turn to when the clock strikes midnight. Why not something more upbeat or festive? The truth is, “Auld Lang Syne” has become a tradition because it’s not just about celebrating the new year; it’s about looking back on what we’ve been through and the people who’ve been a part of it all. Singing it marks a moment of transition—not just from one year to the next, but from one chapter of life to another. It’s about recognizing what’s come before, while getting ready for what’s next.

Why It’s Hard to Shake Off

You know how some songs you can just listen to a couple of times and then forget? Not “Auld Lang Syne.” There’s something about it that lingers. Maybe it’s the way the simple melody and the wistful lyrics bring up so many emotions—nostalgia, gratitude, even a little sadness for things we’ve lost. It captures the essence of time and change in a way that resonates deeply, even long after the year has ended.

Taking Time to Reflect and Reset

In life coaching, I often encourage people to do a personal audit of the past year—taking a moment to reflect on what went well, what didn’t, and what we’ve learned. The start of a new year is the perfect time for this kind of reflection. It’s a chance to appreciate how far you’ve come and set your sights on what you want to achieve in the year ahead. Whether it’s making space for new relationships, focusing on personal growth, or accomplishing specific goals, taking the time to reflect helps you reset with intention.

This song always feels like a natural cue for this kind of reflection. “Auld Lang Syne” is a reminder to honor the past while also letting it go, creating room for the new. As you hum the tune (or maybe just hear it in your head a few weeks after the year begins), it’s the perfect moment to think about what you want the next chapter of your life to look like.

What are you Afraid of?

What are you Afraid of?

What are you afraid of?
What if you apply for that job (or 50 jobs) and you don’t get it?
What if you ask her out and she says no?
What if you go out with him and it’s not everything you hope for?
What if you throw the party and no one shows up?
What if you tell your family the truth and they reject you?
What if you publish your book and no one reads it?
What if you try something new and you end up hating it?
What if you get the screening and find out it’s cancer?
What if you try and fail?
What if you get fired?
What if they don’t like you?
What if you talk to him about that thing and he breaks up with you? 
What if…
Sometimes we get so up in our heads, we’re afraid to do anything.
We spend our whole lives just going through motions and focusing on urgent tasks, putting out fires, but never taking a risk to go after what we really want.
We continue down the same path because it’s well-worn and comfortable.
But what if we’re traveling in a rut? What if we’re going the wrong way entirely? What if we need a course correction?
If you feel a nudging in your heart, a desire to do something bold and different, I’d love to chat with you about it.
Because, what if it turns out amazing?
What if they love you?
What if it is cancer and you catch it early and take care of it swiftly, and go on to live an amazing life afterward?
Or what if you do realize you only have a little time left? Would you live differently?
Wouldn’t you rather know? Wouldn’t you rather try?
You can always pivot. You can always go down a path and turn around and come back home, make a slight course correction, or hop onto a new trail.
(I’m all about the pivot. I’ve pivoted more times than most people, and I’ve learned how to bounce back from failure, heartbreak, and loss. I’d love to help you with this!)
Because you only have one life to live – and it’s yours. You are worthy. You are important. You are special.
No matter what has happened. No matter what mistakes you’ve made.
The Top Three Questions I Get Asked About My Life Coaching Business

The Top Three Questions I Get Asked About My Life Coaching Business

As a life coach and breast cancer survivor, I often receive questions about what I do and how it can help others, especially those going through challenging times. Here are the top three questions I get asked, along with my responses. I hope you find this insightful and inspiring.

1️⃣ What do you do as a life coach/what even is a life coach?

As a life coach, I guide individuals through personal and professional challenges, helping them to set and achieve their goals, find clarity, and cultivate resilience. Think of me as a partner in your journey towards a more fulfilling and joyful life. I provide support, accountability, and tools to help you navigate life’s ups and downs, especially during challenging times like facing a breast cancer diagnosis and recovery.

2️⃣ How is life coaching different from therapy?

Great question! While both life coaching and therapy aim to help individuals improve their lives, they are quite different. Therapy often focuses on healing past traumas and understanding emotional issues. Life coaching, on the other hand, is forward-focused. It’s about setting goals, creating actionable plans, and making positive changes. I help clients build a vision for their future and work towards it.

3️⃣ What qualifies you to be a life coach?

My qualifications include a blend of professional training, personal experience, and a deep passion for helping others. As a breast cancer survivor, I understand the unique challenges that come with this journey. I have developed the 5R Method, a unique process for building resilience, and offer a course called B.O.U.N.C.E – A Course in Resilience. Additionally, my background as a nurse, author, and life coach equips me with a holistic approach to support my clients effectively.

If you have any questions or want to learn more about how life coaching can help you, feel free to reach out. I’m here to support you on your journey.

How Coaching is Different from Therapy (and Why Both Can Work)

How Coaching is Different from Therapy (and Why Both Can Work)

 

I often get asked how coaching is different from therapy, and which one is better to try.

 

Here’s what I tell my clients:

 

Coaching and therapy are BOTH incredible tools. It depends where you’re at in your life and your current struggles as to which one you want to choose. (It could also be extremely beneficial to do both at the same time.)

 

Therapy can help you work through problems and issues, and can be a treatment for mental illness. Coaching can help you truly create the life you want. 

 

Coaching is more future-focused, while therapy tends to be about processing the past. 

 

Coaching can save you money and time as you work through something difficult. It can help you move forward in a powerful way and create the future you want, regardless of your past. 

 

Coaching helps you see things in a new way and handle situations differently. It takes esoteric ideas and turns them into practical tangible solutions. 

 

It breaks down complex pathways into actionable steps. 

 

A coach can’t cure your anxiety…but she sure can give you tools and strategies to regulate your nervous system and manage your own emotions effectively.

 

Both a coach and a therapist can help you feel heard and seen. And sometimes that’s the most important place to start. 

 

Are you dealing with something big and scary… or exciting and happy, but still overwhelming in its magnitude? I’d love to help. Let’s hop on a call and see if my 1-1 coaching program would be a good fit for you.



Moving Along the Illness-Wellness Continuum over a Lifetime

Moving Along the Illness-Wellness Continuum over a Lifetime

This is not my typical blog post, but a paper I had to write for my GCU nursing class. Since much of my creative juices are currently being directed toward nursing school, I figured I might as well publish some of my work here on my blog!

Moving Along the Illness-Wellness Continuum over a Lifetime

Danielle Tantone

Department of Nursing, Grand Canyon University

NRS-434VN: Health Assessment

Geraldine Bazzell, RN, MSN

1/31/21

Just over a year ago, I was enjoying a peaceful September afternoon at the park with my youngest daughter in the midst of a crazy stressful life: three kids, nursing school, working nights at the hospital as a nursing assistant.

The blazing summer heat had broken, and it was finally cool enough to enjoy the outdoors in Arizona. My cell phone rang, and my doctor gave me the life-changing news that I had breast cancer. But I was neither shocked nor alarmed. I was high-risk and had gone in for a biopsy two days earlier after my mammogram showed some microcalcifications.

I had done my research, so when she told me that the biopsy had revealed high grade, Stage 0 ductal carcinoma in situ, the earliest form of breast cancer, my mind went right toward making a plan and focusing on all the silver linings, of which there were many.

I had just turned 45 and I was at a healthy weight, eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly. I decided almost immediately that the best treatment option for me was a bilateral mastectomy with reconstruction. Yes, I could have chosen “just” a lumpectomy, but by choosing the double mastectomy I avoided chemotherapy, radiation and even hormone therapy, all of which, to me, were far more invasive than simply removing the breasts which had served me well but were no longer strictly necessary.

I believe that the healthy mental attitude I chose to adopt during this health ordeal was just as important as my physical health, and despite my serious disease diagnosis, I stayed in a state of overall wellness throughout the entire ordeal.

Wellness has many components: physical, mental and emotional. Though it can be pictured as a continuum, along which we all move back and forth throughout our lifetimes, it is actually a multi-dimensional concept that is hard to completely understand on a one-dimensional model. One can be sick in terms of disease, but rate high in terms of overall wellness, or one can be free of disease but not enjoying a state of overall wellness at all (Wellness, 2018).

The goal is to be not just free of disease, but in a state of optimal wellness as much as possible over the course of a lifetime. As nurses, it is important to be aware of our patients’ – and our own overall state of wellness and not simply look at whether or not we are experiencing symptoms of disease.

The origins of the Illness-Wellness Continuum

The health-illness continuum, originally conceived and published by John Travis, MD, MPH in the 1970s, provided a nice picture to show how optimal wellness was achieved by moving past simple absence of disease to higher levels of wellness. The idea was a combination of the Lewis Robbins’ health risk continuum created by Lewis Robbins and Abraham Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.

However, the model makes it hard to understand the fact that it is possible to be physically ill but oriented toward wellness, or physically healthy but suffering from an illness mentality, and the continuum is rarely a perfect line. Even if someone is sick, in a disease state, they can still be doing very well in terms of overall wellness (Wellness, 2018).

More About the Illness-Wellness Continuum and Travis’ Work

Moving from the center to the left shows a progressively worsening state of health, while moving to the right of center indicates increasing levels of health and wellbeing. While medical treatment such as drugs, herbs, surgery, psychotherapy, etc. alleviates symptoms and brings a patient to the neutral point, the wellness paradigm can be utilized at any point on the continuum, and directs a patient beyond neutral. This idea of true wellness does not replace treatment, but works in harmony with it (Wellness, 2018).

A state of emotional stress can lead to physical and mental disease, even cancer, and true wellness is not a static state. In fact, it’s not as important exactly where a patient falls on the spectrum so much as in which direction he is headed. Even dying can be done from a place of wellness (Wellness, 2018).

The Importance of Understanding the Continuum in Patient Care

The health-illness continuum also interacts with the continuum of patient care. In a healthcare system that is often criticized for focusing on acute conditions rather than wellness and prevention, thinking of wellness in terms of a spectrum has advantages for everyone involved. A truly patient-oriented system of care “spans an entire lifetime, is composed of both services and integrating mechanisms, and guides and tracks patients over time through a comprehensive array of health, mental health, and social services across all levels of intensity of care” (American Sentinel University, 2020).

Such a system would provide high-quality and cost-effective care for patients using community-based services such as home health nurses, telemedicine, disease management programs, informatics, and case management. Nurses are essential within this continuum of care. They support treatment, help educate and guide their patients toward better health outcomes (American Sentinel, 2020).

Nurses must consider not only the continuum of care, but also pay attention to where each patient is within his own health-illness spectrum, always remembering to look at the patient holistically. A nurse’s role goes far beyond simply treating disease. She can have a tremendous value in promoting overall wellness on every level.

Nurses’ Personal Place Along the Health-Illness Continuum

On another note, nurses must pay close attention to where they, themselves are along the continuum as well, since they can’t very well take care of others if they aren’t taking care of themselves first. Studies have shown that nurses experience more musculoskeletal disorders, depression, tuberculosis, infections and occupational allergies than the general public. Nurses’ shift work was shown to lead to sleep deficiency, lack of exercise, cardiological and metabolic problems, and even cancer (Letvak, 2014).

And while the nurses’ health is important, it is not just about them. Studies also show that nurses who work with physical and mental illness experience more medication errors and patient falls, and offer an overall lower quality of patient care provided (Letvak, 2014).

According to the ANA, “A healthy nurse lives life to the fullest capacity, across the wellness/illness continuum, as they become stronger role models, advocates, and educators, personally, for their families, their communities and work environments, and ultimately for their patients” (Letvak, 2014).

The ANA offers many levels of support for nurses on their own journey along the health-illness continuum.

Health is in a Constant State of Change

A person’s health is always in a state of continual change on every level, moving from health to illness and back again. His condition is rarely constant. The health-illness continuum (see figure 1-1) illustrates this process of change. Each individual experiences various states of health and illness throughout his life. But it is actually the individual’s response to the change, rather than the change itself, that affects his health most profoundly (Brookside, 2015).

Figure 1.1 (Brookside, 2015)

Adaptation to a chronic disease can be considered a state of wellness. If one person is in great physical condition, but suffering from depression or substance abuse and unable to go to work, while another is living with a chronic disease like diabetes but functioning fully within his life, which one is at a higher level on the health-illness continuum (Brookside, 2015)?

Where I See Myself on the Continuum

I have always thought of myself as an overall healthy person. I know my body well and I take care of it. However, I have not ruled out the possibility that the physical and emotional stress I was under in 2019 actually led to my breast cancer. I was dealing with a lot and I was working the night shift, which has been proven to throw off the body’s circadian rhythm. Some studies even show a link between shift work and cancer (Yuan, 2018).

So, in that moment, I was heading toward illness. However, the fact that I was being regularly screened and took prompt action to treat the cancer, and the fact that I chose to see all the blessings in my diagnosis turned me around toward the wellness end. Facing illness with eyes wide open, trusting God and having a strong support system are huge in terms of wellness.

Conclusion

As an aspiring nurse, I find it encouraging that we are learning about the health-illness continuum. I feel very strongly that good healthcare is so much more than simply eliminating disease. As nurses, we can have an impact of the overall wellness of our patients and the entire community. The patient care experience, like the human experience itself, is about so much more than just staving off disease. Nurses can have an impact on a person’s entire life through their compassionate caring, empathy, education and love. A good nurse can encourage, inspire and comfort her patients, promoting dignity in the most embarrassing of situations and helping a patient turn back in the direction of wellness no matter how sick they are.

It is important that nurses do not forget to treat themselves as their most important patient, taking care to get enough sleep, exercise, healthy food and mental, emotional and spiritual stimulation. It is a stressful and important job we do. We hold our patients’ lives in our hands. We must never take our own health for granted or think that it is unimportant.

I am grateful that I got cancer. I am glad I got to experience what it is like to be a patient. I am grateful that they caught it early and that through my journey, I have been able to encourage so many others – to get regular screenings, to not be afraid of bad news, but to welcome it because getting the news lets them do something to fix it, and to face their challenges with grace and faith.

References

American Sentinel University. (2020). What is the Healthcare Continuum of Care and What Are the Different Nursing Roles Within it? The Sentinel Watch. Retrieved from https://www.americansentinel.edu/blog/2020/02/15/nursings-role-in-the-continuum-of-care/

Brookside. (2015). The Health-Illness Continuum. Nursing Fundamentals 1. Distance Learning for Medical and Nursing Professionals. Retrieved from https://brooksidepress.org/nursing_fundamentals_1/?page_id=115

Letvak, S. (2014). Overview and Summary: Healthy Nurses: Perspectives on Caring for Ourselves. OJIN: The Online Journal of Issues in Nursing Vol. 19, No. 3, Overview and Summary. Retrieved from https://ojin.nursingworld.org/MainMenuCategories/ANAMarketplace/ANAPeriodicals/OJIN/TableofContents/Vol-19-2014/No3-Sept-2014/OS-Healthy-Nurses.html

Wellness Associates. (2018). Key Concept #1: The Illness-Wellness Continuum. Retrieved from http://www.thewellspring.com/wellspring/introduction-to-wellness/357/key-concept-1-the-illnesswellness-continuum.cfm.html

Yuan, X., Zhu, C., Wang, M., Mo, F., Du, W., Ma, X. (2018). Night Shift Work Increases the Risks of Multiple Primary Cancers in Women: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of 61 Articles. Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. Retrieved from https://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/27/1/25

Danielle,

Thank you for sharing about your diagnosis and a bit about your journey with breast cancer; this is a perfect example of how emotional health impacts our placement on the continuum. Good discussion of each section of the assignment. This is one of the best submissions I have had for this assignment. See comments throughout for learning opportunities.

Geri

 

How Do You Do Spring Cleaning During a Pandemic?

How Do You Do Spring Cleaning During a Pandemic?

5 Timeless Tips to Refresh and Renew Your Home for Spring, plus a bonus 2020 quarantine tip.

Spring Break has been extended indefinitely, and we are suddenly spending a lot more time at home.

Perfect time to tackle all those home improvement projects we never have time for? Well, maybe… if you aren’t also trying to work from home, learn to homeschool, and deal with the up-and-down emotions of five very different people who are not used to spending quite so much together time!

In theory, we’d all have even more time for Spring Cleaning this year: time to disinfect from top to bottom, KonMari the whole house, re-organize the pantry, clean out the garage, and finish all those little projects we don’t usually have time for. But the reality – at least at our house – has been pretty different from the dream. Nevertheless, I am counting my blessings every day, still looking for silver linings, and finding ways to cope with new stresses and hardships.

This article was originally published last year in EastM Magazine a beautiful local lifestyle magazine distributed in our area. But the tips are pretty timeless, even during a pandemic. Perhaps especially so. It’s not so much about Spring Cleaning as about giving our homes and our lives a little refresh, a renewal – which is more relevant than ever right now.

(more…)

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