It seems hard to believe that another year has come and gone. When I was young it seemed that time moved so so so slowly. I remember being very clear in what I wanted and the agonizing pace at which time seemed move as I longed to reach the ages where I could achieve what I wanted to do. Now I find that the older I get the more I have to make a deliberate effort to slow things down and check in with myself to make sure I'm not just spinning my wheels or even moving away from what I desire. Without taking time to self-reflect and set new goals for ourselves we risk spending years without any real personal growth.
Now let me be clear that just watching myself type the phrase "set new goals" immediately made a part of my brain say "ew, no we don't like goals." When we're young our family and our culture largely dictates for us what our goals should be. From the first day of kindergarten to graduation day, the milestones we need to achieve what we want are largely assigned to us without us realizing it. Then we get to a certain age when we need to start setting our own more personalized goals.
When I first began learning about goal-setting it involved picking a specific desired achievement and then making a detailed list of objectives to describe how that goal would be achieved. If that works for you - great. For this Gemini, that is a far too rigid approach in most cases. Personally I like to take a more fluid approach toward personal growth. Like most people my enthusiasm waxes and wanes. Instead of feeling like I failed because I only practiced piano once this week instead of four times I try to focus on simple forward motion. As long as by the end of the month I've made some progress in my playing I will be happy with that. It doesn't mean I won't work as hard at it, I'm just eliminating that sense of stress and feeling of failure that comes from unnecessary check lists.
That being said, there are times when specific goal setting is necessary. There are some areas of our lives like personal finance, our jobs and even our health where we might need to be more hyper focused on completing specific tasks on a day to day basis. Maybe you like to keep a clean inbox or make a point to take a walk every day. Creating healthy habits is absolutely the foundation of long term personal growth. It's difficult to grow if we have too much clutter in our lives. Major changes however often require a different approach and an authentic emotional investment.
It's often an oversimplification to simply strive for a particular job position, body type or financial status. To really become motivated and achieve something that's going to be life changing we should, as much as possible, actually want to do it. If our New Year resolution is to "eat healthier" that shouldn't be the beginning and end of our goal. What do we really want to do? Improve our health? Learn new recipes? Be better at meal planing? Breaking major changes down into smaller parts allows us to create a process that can actually be enjoyable rather than a chore and make us actually want to stick with it.
Weight loss for example is a common New Year's resolution. For many of us though there is so much emotional baggage surrounding weight and food that this task can quickly become overwhelming. Instead of focusing on such a broad goal we would likely be better served by choosing a related goal. We could make a point to walk daily, or eat vegetarian a couple of times per week. If you're a gadget geek trying something like the FitBit might be fun.
Whatever goal we have it should resonate in a way that we get excited about what we're trying to achieve.
Be Well,
- Nicole
