Harnessing the Power of New Year’s Resolutions & Annual Themes- A Personal Story.
New Year’s resolutions have been a thing for as long as I remember. I’m not certain exactly where the tradition started, but I assume that shortly after the hustle and bustle of holiday gift unwrapping and the effects of the eggnog wore out, someone woke up feeling they needed a fresh start. The word “resolution” in a google search brought back this definition, “a firm decision to do or not to do something.” The most important part of that definition isn’t the word decision, it’s the word “firm”.
Similar to setting goals and objectives for yourself and your team at work, which you’re asked to do via formal strategy sessions, project planning and eventually performance management systems, there’s no reason not to do something like this on a personal level.
I’ll share what has worked for me for many years.
This is me being more transparent and vulnerable here.
The “Theme” for the year.
For over a decade now, I’ve had this thing where I take stock of the things I’m proudest of and the things that were pitfalls or otherwise “learning lessons” for the year. I reach deep into my gut and think about what the main thing I should focus on in the upcoming year, and if I could coin that in a single word (or occasionally a phrase) what would that be. That then becomes the theme I give the year. Surprisingly I remember most if not all annual themes. I’ll share one year was Clarity- I wanted to focus on removing the noise and fog in my life and apply the law of attraction to making things clear and concise. Whether it was speaking more clearly, or asking more clarifying questions, or being more purposeful with everything I do, the intention was to be very clear and search for clarity where there was ambiguity. Another year was the year of Clean. That year I focused on removing the clutter and that which tripped me up, essentially being more organized and cleaner in everything I do. That ended up causing me to purge a lot of things in my home and work world, but it allowed me to see things I didn’t see so clearly before, because the noise and clutter were gone. Another year was Resolution; that year was about “fix what’s broken” instead of just complaining about it. That year dove-tailed with a similar goal I set for my team at work, and whenever a member on the team brought me a problem, I focused them at discovering the root cause and making the time to actually fix the problem instead of complaining about it. It was so refreshing to apply that theme throughout the year, tackling all sorts of things from unpatched holes in the wall to missing buttons on a sweater, to fixing a leaky faucet, to replacing batteries in an alarm or clock. Sometimes just making a list of all that’s broken and targeting a few things to do each weekend got me there.
The beauty of having a theme for the year is that it’s easy to remember, and it keeps you aligned with a tangible goal that makes you feel good. It also brings about some good habits if you’re intentional with your execution. Once you go clean for example, and you do this for the year, you find yourself staying on that path long past the year.
The Resolution “List” for the year.
So many people make a resolution or resolutions each year, and they tend to be the same things each time…often goals they didn’t really pursue beyond a week or two the year prior before dropping completely. These are things like “I want to lose 10 (or 20) lbs. this year”, “I want to exercise more”, “I want to save more money.” While these are all noble goals to resolve, mine were very different over the years. Like goal setting at work, setting a goal with realistic expectation, or a SMART goal, helped way better than just high-level goals. If I set an objective to save money, I laid out the how much, by what date, and the how I would do that. Example, one year I wanted to save for college for my kids, something I didn’t start doing until 2 years before they started their first year. I had to come up with a realistic plan of how much of what I thought they needed for year 1 (the first of them at least) and how much per month I’d need to save, and what activities/purchases would need to be delayed or altered to get us there. Once it’s on paper, and the plan is known, it’s time for execution, and tracking it monthly gets you excited towards achieving the goal, especially if it’s important.
I’ll share that when I started to do this, I had 10 goals I set every year. Realistically I didn’t expect I would get all 10 goals done, but anything upwards of 4 or 5 was a home run. Sadly, I used to put myself and self-care as #10 almost every year, until I learned to alter my approach and bump myself up much higher, to be able to care for others too. The hardest of the goals I’ve ever set was surprisingly not saving money but planning for retirement and setting a will. Creating a will was always #10 of 10, because the idea was so daunting. Eventually in 2022 I finally had the courage to write the legal will for myself and my husband, an exercise that was so much less painful than I expected! Lesson learned here is we often fear what we don’t know, but once we start to learn and pursue doing, it’s usually significantly less scary and painful than we thought.
Over the years, I learned that 10 goals were a lot, and to apply the “law of subtraction” and pack the most powerful punch, capping it at 5 goals per year would serve me best. For the past few years, my goals are no more than 5, with them in priority order. Luckily, I’ve wizened up with age and have made sure that the 1st goal is always something that serves me on a mental, physical, or spiritual level, and for the first time I’m putting “me” before “we” when making resolutions. The good news is ever since I’ve made the list simpler, I’ve been able to remember it, and storing it on my iPhone notepad, so I can have it handy to glance at it occasionally keeps me on the right track in planning to achieve those goals or keep the resolution.
So, take my advice…invest in yourself. Take this exercise seriously. It’s far more powerful than you think. Like having a vision board (a topic I’ll talk about sometime in the future,) it goes a long way to catapulting you into executing that which matters most. Without vision, you can’t tackle a mission!
Good luck, and may 2024 be a year of happiness, health, wealth and peace for all!
