2023 is here! Which means it's that time of year everyone starts thinking about making New Year's resolutions or completely avoiding them because you already know the outcome. For some, it feels like a fresh start, and you're ready to take on the world. For others, a new year can feel daunting or even scary. This year I'm taking the opportunity to reframe my thoughts about goals; I want to set intentions for the year to give me space to get off track, but it doesn't mean I failed.
Goals tend to have the pressure of standards or expectations you have to meet by finding the right behavioral pattern and motivation to help you achieve them in order to feel good about yourself or your life. This can be exciting for someone who's competitive or in the right headspace. For others, this is too much pressure to even begin, much less maintain. Intentions, on the other hand, give you the opportunity to desire with the space to make mistakes, experience setbacks, or never even start.
When setting intentions, also consider shifting what the end goal will look like. For example, many people want to lose weight, be on time, drink more water, start that degree they've been putting off, etc. I think the ultimate goal is to feel better about myself or my life. If that's the case, then I want to shift how my intentions look. For example, instead of losing weight, I want to be more intentional about listening to what my body needs. If my body needs rest, I wanna give it rest by setting boundaries, taking vacation, or turning down an invite so I can just do nothing. If my body needs laughter, I want to find a friend and laugh over a bottle of wine one night or coffee one morning or watch a comedy that makes me laugh. If my body wants to release suppressed anger, I want to identify what I really feel such as betrayal, loss, or disrespect and then take a long drive and listen to music that lets me fully feel it. I don't have to let it consume me, but I can allow myself to feel it for a time and then figure out how I'm gonna move forward. Instead of focusing on being on time, this year I want to be intentional about giving myself permission to make room for my boundaries. It can be difficult to set boundaries in order to be on time if we don't believe our needs matter just as much as others.
The whole point with intentions is to do things that make you feel better about yourself and your life without feeling like a failure. When you shift your perspective on your goals, and the expectation of these goals, then you give yourself space to try again. Sometimes you had enough goals from the year before you're still working on and you don't need any new ones to pile on top. Your intentions shouldn't be something that determine your worth or value, but rather something that adds to your life. If you're having trouble figuring out what you want for your intentions or how to translate your goals into intentions, I encourage you to reach out to a therapist to walk with you on this journey. Therapy is not just for a crisis or childhood trauma. We can all benefit from an unbiased opinion who can see things about ourselves or our situations that we can't see when we're in them.
Happy New Year!
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