Are your resolutions already forgotten?
By now, everyone has either told you their resolutions for 2025 or they have broken them. They may have already moved on to try to forget that they were ever trying to change anything as just another holiday fever dream.
People tend to go (or get) too high when putting together these lists. It’s similar to when you are convinced at the make-up counter by a pushy salesgirl that you look good in that shade of red when you know you’ll never use it.
We write those goals with the same amount of gusto. We write for the person we dreamed we’d be on our very best days, which is noble, but we forget to sync that vision with the known stumbling blocks ever so present in our lives.
How about we remember that we have children who need to get out the door in the morning before we plan for workouts that start just when they need breakfast?
Or that we don’t know how to speak to Spanish before we resolve to speak fluently by the summer? Including the steps and making realistic goals is more than half the battle, but also getting even partway towards our goals is as important as getting there; it’s hard to accomplish anything if you can’t stomach starting or the very murky middle ground of the grind.
So what happens is that most of us don’t even bother with resolutions anymore, mainly because we’ve seen so many people flame out gloriously before the Christmas tree is even down.
Kickstarting the new year once the year begins
As a mom to young children, I love setting my goals each year. But this rarely happens during the holiday season.
Let’s admit why. The holidays for everyone else may be relaxing and full of watching movies in your pjs or late starts and good parties.
For us moms, this is our Super Bowl. We are expected to pull out all the stops like a fully operational magic genie that turns this week into a time that can be locked into the core memories of our family. That kind of magic takes a lot of work. It is not a self-serve fro-yo machine. It requires an enormous amount of outbound energy.
So I’ve taken on a new pattern to set my goals.
I wait.
I wait until the last person in my family has returned to school or work. I wait until all of my friends are safely busy with their resolutions. I wait for the Christmas movies to leave the platforms and for stores to end their sales.
That’s when the quiet of winter begins, and I can gather my thoughts about how I’d like to use the next 12 months to my benefit. I started this pattern a few years ago, and it has served me well. In the quiet, I can finally separate what I think from what others need of me and, within that space, see what I want from what may be wanted.
How do I plan for the next year? (where has the dust landed)
It’s not about reaching some astronomical goal or re-engineering my whole life. It’s about examining where I am with specific projects, with the insight of being a year older, having a more mature relationship with myself, or having more experience to push something from just ok to good or good to great.
Lately, it’s been about trying something new because I am so much more comfortable with the idea of failure and knowing my ability to change.
Mostly, I feel like it’s about knowing myself and looking at patterns that may tend to hinder me.
I have to take off the glasses of reflection that constantly consider what everyone else would like me to be or do.
I have to stop wondering how my goals will play in the court of public opinion (i.e. online) and think about what gives me a true sense of happiness/joy/satisfaction. Listening to that inner voice has been getting easier as the years go by.
I’ve never been faced with the problem of “Should I plan?” only “How much can I plan?”
But I think mostly, it’s about assessing where you are. Every year brings with it a new play altogether.
Sometimes, the players have changed; sometimes, the opportunities have changed; market conditions have tightened; locations need to move, or the desire is higher/lower for whatever you were attempting to accomplish.
It’s essential to spend enough time assessing to really figure out, is this the year when I am going to go hard in the paint, or am I going to use this year to put my head down to do the work so that I can go hard later on?
Is it a prep year or a show-out year? Sometimes it’s clear. All signs are pointing to making a splash. Most times, we are all just making calculated guesses, hoping that your bets pan out and that we’re flexible enough to pivot when/if things don’t go according to plan.
The benefit of thinking this through truly comes in editing out the junk. Figuring out where you are going to spend your time and what you are going to let go. Despite what Beyonce shows us, we only have so much time. If we want to do anything well, time investment must be made. And you have but so much time to devote. Where you place those bets matters more than how many bets you place.
Pre-mortem
I was reading an article in the newspaper the other day (I know, how retro of me), and this article about setting up a pre-mortem for your yearly goals caught my attention. I’ve done plenty of post-mortems on projects to try to figure out what went wrong and what worked, but the idea of doing a pre-mortem seemed either like just regular planning or a bit morbid to plan from your death bed.
The article is titled “It’s Called a Premortem—and It’s the Most Productive Thing You’ll Do All Year,” an article about how John Shaich, a billionaire entrepreneur, does one personally and with his businesses each year. Good enough for a billionaire entrepreneur, it seems like it’s worth an attempt.
I believe he called it “future-back” planning. You’re looking at yourself 5 years from now and saying, “What is it that I would have loved to have done in that time between 2025-2030?” This gives one the benefit of attempting what you wish happened from that vantage point instead of today.
But the interesting thing about this is that it took out a lot of the emotions of what’s happening in this moment and gave me the gift of hindsight without the passing of time.
But the other part that I love about it, is that it bakes in the ability to identify all of the hurdles and ways in which you will fail to do these things so that you can put in place things to mitigate those falls. It leaves a sense of hopefulness in the attempt but has the value of “hindsight” to be honest about how you may fail without the right amount of time, resources, effort, etc.
We usually reserve this until it’s too late to do anything to affect change, so I love how this turns planning on its head.
Second starts to the year
With the ability to finally start planning with a “future-back” mindset, I was about to think differently about my approach for the coming years and begin to see the steps I needed to take to get myself there and the many ways I could fail. I’ve set up my next steps but also plan to help mitigate those failures and give myself the grace to restart and try again.
I’ve found that the road to my goals has been lots of work that can be tedious at times and being able to try again when plans fail, which isn’t very sexy or exciting. But if you plan on the failure, you can also plan the comeback.
In the end, when you add it all up, it’s the ones who persist and can look back with less regret and more adventures under their belt.
Here’s to second starts. Happy planning!
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