An Intentional New Year

In preparation for a brand-new year, I always take time to reflect on the goals I set for myself in the previous year to better plan for the future. As cliche as it is, this little check-in is essential for my own yearly calibration. I like to see what I’ve accomplished, which goals I smashed and which areas could use a little improvement. My Goodreads goal, for example, was my biggest triumph of 2024 with a whopping 142 books, but normally my yearly intentions are not so quantifiable.

I found that the less I defined a goal with a certain number to hit (i.e. a goal weight of x pounds), the less stress it put on me throughout the year. I was still actively working towards my goal (i.e. getting healthier in general) but didn’t stress if certain benchmarks weren’t met at specific times. Basically, I gave myself the grace to not always succeed, which as a perfectionist, is a feat in itself.

I know this kind of arbitrary goal setting might not work for everyone, but it goes a long way in helping me stick with my New Years Intentions when others may give up a few months in. Most often, goals are set with a very optimistic mindset - we want to challenge ourselves to be better, right? Sometimes, intentions made in the hectic holidays aren’t sustainable for our normal day to day routine. Unexpected events occur that shift our priorities, our schedules fluctuate or budgetary needs change. Let your goals adapt as you grow, and don’t be afraid to change things up if those optimistic goals need to be tempered with a dose of reality.

We put so much pressure on ourselves to always be the best, always achieve more, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But we are a flawed species, which means that failure is inevitable. We need to hold space for ourselves when we don’t always measure up to our own high expectations without giving up on putting in the work. Give yourself not only the grace for failure but also the understanding that real life-changing habits take time to build and maintain.

Where I fell short in one year shows me what I may need to reevaluate going forward, taking stock of my priorities and why I focused on certain tasks but not others. Some I will phase out if they no longer serve me and others I will recommit to for another year if it is something I want to make happen.

I normally like to follow the less is more approach when it comes to goal setting, focusing on 3-5 intentions that still make me feel productive without getting overwhelmed. That being said, I was a bit more ambitious in 2024 with the number of intentions I set for myself. It was the first year I would be living alone in my own apartment AND it was the year I turned 30 - I wanted to smash it out of the park! However, it did prove to be a humbling lesson when I fell short in maintaining consistency and building good habits when trying to focus on too many tasks at one time.

With this in mind, I decided to come up with a more detailed game plan for 2025. I had seen a few tik toks about intentional goal setting and decided that adding a bit more specificity might help me maintain the habits I wanted to cultivate. I divided up my general intentions into 3 big categories - Glow Up, Growth & Passion. Beneath each category would be 1-2 intentions, the action steps I would take to make sure I could accomplish that goal, and then the end result I wanted to achieve. For example, my Growth category looked a little like this.

For Growth, I wanted to improve a skill I had already been working on last year - learning French and Italian. In the blue box, my end goal is that I want to be able to speak and read more fluently in both/either language. The green box shows how I am going to work towards that goal each week and the yellow box offers the different ways I can sustain the habit. So, when Duolingo gets annoying (as it inevitably does), I can fall back on listening to different language podcasts, utilizing workbooks or watching Youtube videos - anything that helps me get my 15 minutes of language learning in each day.

Too often, routines get stale and can lead to us losing interest or traction with our resolutions. I am trying to combat this proactively by creating a contingency plan with a variety of easily defined action steps. To hold myself more accountable, I also created a rudimentary checklist in excel so that I could mark off what I accomplished each day and track my progress by the week or by the month. It has proved to be a helpful visual reminder for what I’m doing well and what I need to work on if I want to reach my end goal (Sorry, guitar, I promise to get to you...eventually).

I know this post is likely to get lost in the overwhelming slew of tips and tricks for keeping up with those pesky resolutions, but hopefully if this finds you, it can provide a new perspective in how you view and set your goals. Any progress made is a win, so give yourself a little grace in 2025. We are all working towards something, and we are all bound to fail at some point in time. Just pick yourself back up, slough off what doesn’t serve you, and keep on swimming!