Selecting Next Year’s Goals

As December arrives I always start interviewing new habits, goals, and skills to see what I will reach for in the new year. Some years I do it with angst, urgency, and desperation. Usually when that happens, I’m feeling behind, or worried that I’m not really getting anywhere in my life.

Have you felt that?

It’s as if life can be chasing you, and standing still all at the same time. In angst-ridden years, I often hyperfocus on goal planning, and usually color code an impossible regimen for the first 28 weeks of the new year. It's enough to make a person cry (and I usually do). 

Chances are, if I don’t realize I’m terror-planning before January 1 rolls around, I learn just how impossible my plan is when the first few days happen only by holding my breath…and with the first stumble, I spiral into an inexorable "behindness" that even I can’t dig my way out of.

Plan gets shelved. I feel dejected. And usually the lightbulb goes off, realizing I did my new year’s dreaming from inside the nightmare of unresolved anxiety. 

I could try to tighten my image by saying “it’s been years since I’ve done this to myself.” But that would cover an important truth. Terror-planning is a thread that runs through my personality, a way of coping with the big, existential fears of my life. When I feel like my life isn’t mattering enough, I try to plan my way to becoming more valuable.

That’s what I’ve learned lately, and it has changed everything.

Most years, I have stacked too many new-year-goals and fresh-start-habits on January’s shoulders. Now I’ve come to understand why I do this, and it’s shifting the burden of year-end planning. 

Do I have six different new planning journals sitting in my office right now, waiting for a final evaluation and selection for 2022? Yes. yes I do. But the reason I can write about it with a smile today is because I’m starting to understand that goal planning is a way to grow and be more fully engaged in daily life; it’s not a way to matter.

I do have a purpose in life, and I find days spent honoring and chasing that purpose deeply meaningful. But that purpose dictates how I spend my daily energy. Goal planning is about selecting strategic areas of focus so that I can consistently amplify and expand my ability to serve my purpose.

This year in particular, I’m thinking about selecting an intentional number of goals to pursue, and giving myself permission to focus on them. Not trying to improve every area of my life at once, or advance on every goal equally; I want to make strategic headway.

In part I think I’m encouraged by this because I just finished a successful 13-week sprint. For once I used a guided journal by Best Self that was intensive and thorough, trying to give weight and attention to 3 major goals for those 91 days. 

I had 3 Goals:

• Establish a Robust Writing Practice
• Create Substantial Value for Clients + Prospects
• Increase Physical Strength + Vitality

The ways I succeeded and failed in those 13 weeks was informative. I saw how the areas where my goals were more focused made it harder to delude myself that I was making progress. It also made it easier for me to “mindlessly” follow through on my intentions, and that generated genuine progress. Both things were super helpful.

The guided, physical journal pages forced me to prioritize, and to choose among competing goals and tasks. They also forced me to identify a true goal, and clarify the key factors, actions, and behaviors that would genuinely move me on that goal. 

During the past 13 weeks, I made progress. Actual, quantifiable, and internally resonating progress. And in the immediate aftermath I am forced to acknowledge that the things I didn’t pursue played an enormous role in my success.

It’s stuff I stopped acting like I was working on that freed me up to actually work on what mattered.