I treasure these days between Christmas and New Years' when I take the time to zoom out, reflect, and plan for the year ahead. Previous reflections have led me to make big changes like giving up TV or going vegetarian, and they invariably help me feel more acceptance and self-compassion about the year that has passed.
Sometimes New Year’s resolutions can seem like a binary assessment of what we don’t like about ourselves that we’ve decided to “fix”, or, they might bring up the fear of failure and disappointment related to not sticking with our resolutions. If you think about New Year’s resolutions this way, I invite you to add more nuance and gentleness to how you think about reflection and intention-setting. It’s possible to set intentions or resolutions not from a place of fear or dissatisfaction but from a place of love, gratitude, and belief that you can do better. It’s possible to start with tiny habits that help you build trust with yourself and that compound into big changes over time. Change is inevitable. We can’t control much of what will happen in the future — but we can set positive intentions for how we want to show up.
Here are some ideas — crowd-sourced from previous Quiche & Questions discussions on the topic — for how you might reflect on the past year or plan for the year ahead.
Reflect on the past so that you can do better in the future
There are so many forms that this can take, but the general idea is that identifying what’s worked well in the past and learning from our mistakes can help us choose better goals in the future. Here are some exercises you might try:
- Do More/ Do Less: Get a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of each side. On one side of the paper, write down all of the things that accounted for a disproportionate share of your misery last year in one column, and all of the things that brought you enormous joy in the other column. Be specific! Look at both lists and look for themes. Then, on the other side of the paper, fill one column with things you want to do more of in the next year, and the other column with things you want to do less of.
- Year Compass: If you’re looking for something more involved, you might also try YearCompass (http://yearcompass.com/). I’ve done this several times, and not only have I learned a lot from the exercise, but it’s been a valuable resource to be able to return to throughout the year. This year, they added a supplement to help people make sense of the craziness of 2020.
- Journaling, especially on what energizes you and what makes you feel alive.
- Mapping or card sort exercises. If the prospect of writing feels daunting to you, card sort or brain mapping exercises can help you loosen up and surface insights. For card sorting, pick a prompt or topic (e.g., potential goals or things you might want to do in 2020) and then move the cards around to spot relationships and themes between the different ideas and to notice what feels more or less important to you.
Start a habit
The ability to form and maintain habits is a really powerful meta-skill that has changed my life. For most of my life, I thought of myself as someone who didn’t and couldn’t form habits. Then I read The Power of Habit. I strongly recommend the book, but in case you don’t read it, here are a few key takeaways:
- Identify a consistent trigger, behavior, and reward. Triggers work best when they are tied to a time of day, entering or leaving a location, after waking up or before going to sleep, before or after meals. You can also stack habits on top of one another so that one triggers the next.
- Start with a very small, completely achievable habit so that you can begin to build trust with yourself. Deeply understand why you want to start the habit and really commit to it.
- Minimize friction and obstacles. (I started with an exercise routine that required no gear and that I could do in my living room.)
- Plan ahead for what you will do when it’s hard to stick with the habit. (When I gave up TV, I planned that when I wanted to watch TV, I would listen to a podcast instead).
- Allow yourself a way to “cheat” that still “counts.” (When I started my morning exercise routine — squats + lunges + squat-jumps + pushups — I allowed myself to “count” the day if I just did the squats)
- Social accountability works.
Set a concrete goal
A general guideline I might suggest for this is to approach it the way you would approach setting a goal at work. Make it specific, with a specific timeline, and come up with a plan for how you are going to meet it, who is going to help you, and what resources you are going to need. Practical tools and ideas that I’m experimenting with (can’t quite recommend them yet, but would be happy to talk more about them and share learnings):
- Planning & Scheduling. I’ve put together a spreadsheet with each month of the year across the top, my big projects down the side, and the main actions I’m planning to take each month for each project in the cells.
- Task management. Getting Things Done by David Allen (podcast interview) — helpful basic tools and framework for personal productivity. I’m using the OmniFocus tool that’s based on this methodology.
- Budgeting. I’m relatively new to budgeting, but 2020 certainly helped highlight its importance! Last year, I started using You Need a Budget (YNAB) on the recommendation of a trusted friend.
- Setting an intention or a direction. Setting an intention or direction can be a nice alternative to a resolution because it does not focus on a particular outcome and is therefore not as likely to fail by February. Especially if you don’t have a particular outcome in mind for your year, an intention can help you focus on the direction rather than the destination. From our discussion, it sounds like an intention or direction really works best when it can be used as a filter for making decisions. For example, my one-word intention for last year was “conversation” — and I used it to remind myself to resolve challenges in “conversation” with others, rather than making assumptions about others or writing emails that only told my side of the story.
Create a philosophy of life.
Where an intention or direction can help you evaluate unforeseen opportunities, a philosophy of life can help you more concretely assess whether particular choices or opportunities align with your values and the kind of person you want to be in the world. This can be as simple as Brené Brown’s two top values (hers are faith and courage) or you might come up with something a little bit more complex. I first encountered this idea of a philosophy of life in Irvine’s book (below) and stumbled upon the first draft of mine when someone asked me the question: “What five things do you want to be able to say about your life when you die?” Additional reading:
- A Guide to The Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irvine
- Dare to Lead by Brené Brown
Find support and inspiration in community
Find places and people that support you in the ways that you are trying to grow or the habits you are trying to form. The Great, Good Place by Ray Oldenburg talks about the importance of “Third Places” (first being home and second being work) where everyone chooses to be there, where people can try on new identities, understand and learn from the people around them and figure out how to solve collective problems. For example, the community and wealth of knowledge that develops around a hardware store.
