imagine an exasperated breath out and me pinching the bridge of my nose right about now…
I need everyone to start throwing the idea out of the window that you need three new years resolutions and that you can only make them at the end of the year. And I need everyone to start doing the “let’s throw pasta at the wall and see what stuck by the end of the year” approach.
Yes, obviously, prioritize your pre-established health goals (I accidentally wrote “wealth” there…we’ll take it) if you those. HOWEVER, nothing quite beats setting 20 goals and achieving 8 of them, when you know you wouldn’t have even tried half of them if you hadn’t cast your net wider. It’s prioritizing progress over perfection. Which, you know, kinda what we should aim for in the hellscape that is vaguely points around.
You’re allowed to reach the goal badly, ugly, weirdly. Your life is a giant experiment of an experience anyway so might as well have a bunch of finished things with character instead of a thousand regrets over things you didn’t even attempt. Goal reached is goal reached. Even if you wore a stained shirt all the way through it and made ten typos along the way that you’d rather forget. There’s a reason we tell a lot of uni students that “Bs and Cs get degrees” (I feel weird saying this so casually while I’m an A student for the first time in my life because uni suits my learning style better).
There is this wonderful (not) thing a lot of us do that I call “Oversampling” (I think that’s from Systems Thinking). You look at a task and immediately your brain samples every outcome or problem like you’re Dr. Strange in Infinity War and you end up making progress on nothing. Well, let me tell ya, it’s certainly easier to make small progress on your goals if you have a bigger number of goals. At least you’ll procrastinate a goal with another goal. And on the way you might find the dopamine to sit down and figure out how to make some of the other goals easier for you to reach. Because, believe it or not: You’re the only person that makes up the rules and frameworks for your goals. Nobody else. Your workouts don’t have to be 30 minutes. Your books don’t need to be 250 pages or more. Your posts don’t all have to be interesting to the majority to have an impact.
Please learn to stop yourself from being a purist about reaching your goals. Audiobooks count as books that you can count towards your reading challenge for the year on Storygraph. 15 squats during an ad break of something is more of a workout than you had before in your life. Literally nobody is watching you to boo you about doing it the objectively wrong way. And holy shit, don’t get me wrong, I too struggle with the invisible audience (is that an autism thing or just a thing for some of us in general? I digress).
Another thing you need to start considering is if you prefer the difficulty of a goal over the actual achieving of that goal. Because if you like it for its difficulty you might want to stop beating yourself up about still not having achieved it. Some of us also struggle with that weird dip that happens in intrinsic motivation when the finish line of a project or task is approaching. I have noticed the tools used for executive dysfunction help here as well. Starting small, calming the nervous system, all that jazz.
I’m currently started on about five of my goals and I’ve finished two for the year already. Because messy progress is something I simply prioritize. I also have to mention that some of my goals are obviously ongoing goals and I haven’t found my ideal way to quantify those yet without it being oddly punishing if I don’t achieve them a particular week/month. However, what I DO do is track my weekly wins again this year in a weekly review session. This week, for example, I finally got my last grade for my third semester (an A) and have officially have half my degree behind me now. Which feels very much like a win as a first generation academic. On my goals list my education goals are about what will be at the end of the year. Have I kept my grade average? Have I stayed on track with course load? But the wins are already happening in the now and if I didn’t track them I’d forget they were progress as well. A lot of people, sometimes me included, are in the camp “I don’t see or celebrate my wins because in my head I was supposed to reach them.” But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make an effort to find them and feel grateful about them. I can tell you from experience, your monthly, quarterly or annual life review will feel much happier if you actually see every new experience that is remotely positive as a win.
One of my weirder goals for the year has been to grow my LinkedIn. And since it’s my procrastination fallback I’ve already almost reached it not even halfway through the year. Which is useful data for me. I can see that goals without pressure on them are clearly easier to reach for me often time. Sometimes I do need the pressure (for uni for example) but most goals need structure or a system more than they need pressure and a loud inner critic. Don’t mentally hustle culture yourself. Nobody will hunt you for sport if your reading goal was 12 books for the year and you only got through half a book so far because you haven’t found the ideal way to progress on that habit/goal yet. Accommodate yourself, make it easy for yourself, then still give yourself grace if the easy version still doesn’t get done. I certainly still haven’t finished a book this year and I know exactly which ones I want to finish, but uni goals have simply been taking priority.
Bottomline of all of this is: Stop thinking there are rules to this goals shit. Start throwing a bunch of goals at the wall and see which ones stick. Track your wins and stop letting your inner critic become you.
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