New Year, Same Goals (Kind Of)

As someone who is known to implement random monthly challenges, and commit to keeping new healthy habits on a whim, it’s pretty easy for me to skip the exercise of setting a new year’s resolution (or many) in January. I’m all for the power of a clean slate, and totally buy into the idea of setting a single word for the year, but I definitely don’t always set “new year’s resolutions.”

This year however, I did. Kind of.

I recently shared how I’ve been in a dark rut with with my role in motherhood and life in general, so the new year felt like a good time to pair up with my husband and do some serious digging into what type of year we hope to have: individually, as a couple, and as a family.

And boy, did we go all in.

Why I’m Focusing on Goals, Not Resolutions

We all know word choice is important, right? So instead of focusing on resolutions, which often feel too big, too vague, and perhaps just not realistic to change overnight when the calendar strikes January 1 – I set out to make goals.

Instead of I’m resolving to make a change with words that are way to vague, like “finally drink water” I wanted to make GOALS that were very specific. But not so lofty that I knew I’d be setting myself up for failure. Like no matter how hard I want to change, I’m just not going to drink 8 glasses of water every single day for 365 days straight. That’s just not realistic for me. I will fail. And then I’ll feel guilty.

So I ran with the idea of picking at least a few very specific and truly realistic goals.

At first I didn’t limit myself, and I wrote down anything that came to mind. Then, I wanted to whittle the list down to a number that was both challenging but achievable. I also wanted to make sure there were things that touched on me individually, me as a wife, and me as a mother. I want to spend this year focusing on all of us – as a family.

Identifying the things that I was most excited about was actually pretty easy, but I felt like I needed more. So I took my spiritual master Gretchen Rubin’s concept of 20 for 2020 and re-expanded my list to basically capture 20 things I want to do or achieve in 2020.

I’ll admit: as soon as I reopened the list and went for 20 things, I wound up including some vague, hard to define items. Exactly what I didn’t want to do! But that’s okay with me. Because there’s a few goals that are sitting at the top of my list, and that’s what matters most.

Throughout the year I’ll probably refine, and better define a few of the more vague items as I go.