S3 E22: A Gentler Approach to Goals for 2021
If you feel like you're not quite ready to start making plans for 2021, because things still seem so uncertain, I see you. We can still make goals, but we might just need a different, more flexible approach that accounts for the inevitability of change. I share how I’ve shifted my approach to goal setting over the years, and affirm that it’s okay to scale back in comparison to what you do in times of “normal productivity”. Listen in to find out what I think is the most important habit you can cultivate in the new year (or anytime!) that will support your creative work and progress toward accomplishing what’s most meaningful to you.
How are you feeling about goal setting now? Has it changed a lot this year? Tag me on Instagram @rebecca_hass and we can share ideas!
UPCOMING:
RESOURCES DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE:
Weekly and Monthly Check-In Worksheets - sign up to get these worksheets, and access to all of the goodies in my free resource library!
MORE FROM REBECCA
Rise Above the Overwhelm - laser-focused 1-time coaching sessions
Fuel Your Creative Work With Compassionate Productivity workbook
TRANSCRIPT
Hello, everyone, happy new year. I know I told you Happy New Year last week. But I recorded that before the new year. So Happy New Year, from the New Year.
How's everyone feeling so far? I know, this week has been pretty crazy with the government coup and all. But in terms of your personal life, I hope it's feeling good so far, I hope you got some kind of holiday or winter end of your break. I hope it was replenishing.
If you feel like you're a little bit not ready to get into the normal level of work, whatever that is (I don't know what normal is anymore), or if you feel like you're not really ready to start making plans. I see you.
Today's topic is making gentle goals for a new year that still holds a lot of uncertainty. If you're hearing this further in the future, hello from the past, I hope things are good. And this approach can work for any time that you decide to start something, not just a calendar New Year.
I'm doing a workshop on gentle goal setting and opening up to the new possibilities of this year, this Tuesday, on January 12. And I'll give you more details at the end of the episode. But I'm really excited about that.
Today I'm going to share a little bit about how I've shifted my approach to goal setting over the years, and how I've made it more gentle. I used to treat my new year planning like basically like an all you can eat buffet, I was just ready to eat all the things, do all the things, download all the free resources, all the PDFs, all the workbooks, read all the blog posts. I have a tendency toward over-researching by nature, and it's really easy and normal for me to just want to collect everything.
But, of course, that got overwhelming, that I would feel like I had to sort through and finish all of it, even when my brain was already too full of information, and looking back, I probably didn't really need all those resources. I maybe needed to sort through them to figure out which ones would be best for me, and make a plan from there, but really, I was looking to other people for wisdom more than looking to myself. I was looking for the answers to be already prescribed for me, because, let's face it, that's easier than doing the hard work and soul searching of figuring things out. So, it's a very normal thing if you're also an over-researcher, and if overdoing it also extends to you making goals.
At the beginning of 2019, I did my year end review, which I always do, and part of that is compiling a list of everything that I did that year to see what I had accomplished and celebrate that. That list from 2018 was jaw droppingly long. For the first time, I actually felt like I had done too much. I released an album that year and did a Kickstarter to support it, so that, in itself, was a huge amount of work.
But, on top of that, I felt like I really had done too many things, and that's probably always been true - doing too much is a common tendency. And if you're listening to this, that might be something that happens to you, too. But it really sunk in for me at that moment seeing that list. I was like, “Oh, this is too much. I've always beaten myself up for not doing enough. But look at this, this is actually too much.”
So, for 2019, I didn't want to make this long list of goals and to do's and “shoulds” that was just going to make me feel really stressed and burned out again. Even though I was really happy with a lot of those things that I accomplished in 2018, I just wasn't really ready to jump in and make this huge list. That would just keep me in this place of overwork. So I knew I needed to take a much more minimal approach. Part of that was that I had an inkling that I might be moving halfway through the year, I hadn't decided yet at that point. But that made it feel like I couldn't really make plans because my life might be totally shaken up. And it turned out it was, so that was a good decision.
Then in 2020, I was in the process of still getting settled in the Bay Area and feeling like, “Okay, I'm ready to think a little bit bigger, and dream up some new things and, you know, push my boundaries a little bit.” But I will never return to that all you can eat buffet approach because I just really don't want to commit myself to unattainable standards or unreasonable expectations that are going to basically decrease my quality of life and make it so I don't have the mental clarity or wherewithal to make those decisions about what is really important in my life, and to make space for those.
I know that might sound like I'm committing to under-committing, and sometimes that could be viewed negatively, in the sense of holding back or staying small. And, you know, we all have those tendencies, too. But here committing to committing to less (that’s a weird mouthful), and not piling on those big goals might mean that you achieve less, but if you're trying to achieve so many things, and those achievements come with a cost of exhaustion, burnout, not having time or energy to spend with your loved ones, not having the time and space for your creative projects, the ones that really light you up and make you excited? That's not what I want. That's probably not what you want, either. We need a little more spaciousness to figure that out, and figure out what is best and what we truly want.
Many of us are starting this year from that exhausted place, even if we had a holiday break of some kind, being in a pandemic for nearly a year is really exhausting, I know, in some circumstances more than others, we're all in different situations. But I think we can say that collectively, it is exhausting, because we don't know when it's going to end - we don't know when things will change, and that's hard for human brains.
Usually, that holiday break is a big part of why I feel refreshed and inspired to start new things at the beginning of the year, more of a factor than just the arbitrariness of flipping over a calendar. But you know, I kind of like that container as well, the neatness of: this is new, and I'm done with the old.
Really, my philosophy is always, if you feel excited by that fresh new energy and inspiration, the excitement of turning over the calendar, awesome, run with it, use it, but you don't have to use that to pressure yourself. I personally love making plans and goals, implementing new habits, all this stuff, which is why I'm a coach. I love doing that myself, and I love helping other people do it, but I don't think that it's necessary to push yourself to make all the lists and plans if you're not really ready to do that right now.
I think we can have a personal New Year whenever we want to. You know, the Gregorian calendar that starts in January is not even the calendar that all cultures use, either. If you feel like your new year starts in the spring, because that's the beginning of new life and you know, more light and all this stuff, do it in the spring, that's cool. If you like it to be the start of a school year, if you're in an academic situation, we can have these fresh starts at many different points throughout the year, and we don't have to do them only once a year either.
Right now, if you're not feeling fresh start energy because it's still winter for you, still feel kind of hibernate-y, and, you know, shelter-in-place pandemic hibernation, it's still winter, that's totally normal, and it makes total sense.
I feel somewhere in between this year: I'm excited about the new year, but I also feel a little tentative, a little protective of both my energy and my time, and that's based on how much capacity it feels like I have right now, and that feels a little uncertain, too. There's all kinds of middle ground that you can take between the “seize the fresh energy and do all the things” and wanting to do absolutely nothing. There are so many shades of grey in between there. And that's going to be unique to you personally. It's going to be unique to the time that you're in. Like this week, if you have been glued to the news and upset about the state of things, you're going to have less capacity than perhaps you did last week, and that is completely normal, and we can adjust to that.
Whatever choices you want to make about goals right now are totally valid. If you're just not wanting to make any goals, cool. If you want to make one goal, awesome. If you want to make fewer than you normally do, you just want to wait and see, because February is the new January, those are all valid and great choices, if they feel right for you. Even in a normal year, I kind of hate the pressure of “new year, new you”, because I really don't believe in fully rejecting your old self in favor of changing everything.
First, it's not compassionate. It is unkind to ourselves to say, “I'm going to change everything because the old me wasn't good enough.” And it also just doesn't work. We can't change everything at once. If you've ever tried to do a major life overhaul, and you made this whole list of, here's all the things: I'm going to get up early, I'm going to exercise, I'm going to do this, this and this, and there are like 10 things you're trying to implement at once, you might do it for a couple days, and then probably not again after that, because it was overwhelming.
We're not built to make that many changes at once and have them stick. If you just want to make one change, one habit, you're going to be much more successful than the total overhaul. But it's really easy to get swept up into that pressure when you see everyone's year recap and their goals, posts and “make this year great” and “what are you going to do this year?” And, you know, it's cool to share that stuff. I think that's great, and it's great to get inspiration from people.
But if that pressure is feeling detrimental to you, then you might want to filter that out of your consciousness. I also used to feel like if I didn't do the year end recap, and all the goals, and make all the plans right away on January 1, I was like “Time is ticking! This year is ending soon!” It wasn't ending soon, I was, you know, losing a day or two or six. I just had this overwhelming feeling that I'm late, I'm missing something, and that wasn't helpful at all, because I just got stuck in that pressure, overwhelmed, and just really felt bad about myself. So we don't need to do that, either.
And this year, we're all kind of swimming in this soup of overwhelm at various levels. So you might have your feet in the water, you might be fully submerged, you might feel like you're near drowning, but it's all around us to a degree. I don't say that so that we dwell in that, but just to acknowledge that we're in it, it's still, it's happening, and that is a factor on how you feel and what you're able to accomplish, and how you experience your entire life.
Part of the reason for that is there's so much uncertainty around change this year. In 2021, we're expecting and hoping for change, because vaccines are starting to roll out. But we really have no idea when change in a meaningful way, in a logistical way will really happen. When you're expecting a big change, it doesn't always feel safe to make plans, or convenient, kind of like what I was describing when I had a potential cross country move coming up. I held back a little bit, and that felt right to me, but the truth is that there's always change that we can anticipate. Sometimes it's huge and collective like we experienced in 2020. Sometimes it's big and personal. Sometimes it's smaller. But regardless, we can count on there being change.
So this might be a year when you have to do things differently with your goal setting because of this change that will be happening, and I think it's generally just a great strategy to plan on change, because it's going to happen.
Really, it doesn't matter if we make goals, if we are not in the process of reflecting on them and checking in with them regularly, in any year. If you don't have that plan that goes step by step for how the goal is going to happen, it probably isn't going to happen, because it'll seem big and overwhelming. You might not know how to start. And you might continue with something that doesn't fit you anymore, but you feel like you have to finish it. There are all kinds of reasons why goals don't work out.
But if we are flexible, that is how you make sure that you're not only doing things that matter to you, and that are actually meaningful, but that they actually happen, that they actually get completed, on whatever timeline. I'm not saying this in a pressure kind of way. I've made lists at the beginning of the year, and then not revisited them at all until the following year. When I looked back at the list it was like, “Oh, wow, I actually forgot about half the stuff I wanted to do this year because I didn't check in on it.” And you know, maybe a lot of it wasn't important, there were a bunch of shoulds on there, that's maybe a different conversation.
Having that habit of reflection, checking in on a monthly basis, or maybe even a weekly basis is so essential to making your goals and plans move forward. So, if you're in the habit of this reflection already, and you don't feel like making goals right now, you're going to be committed to your growth all year long. That's so great. You can start new stuff whenever you like, you can quit stuff whenever you like, if it's not fitting anymore. You can do things when you're ready for it.
If goals, right now, are feeling like this big thing that you're not quite ready to do, you could just start with habits - concentrate on just one thing that you want to add to your life. That could be a health thing, it could be a creative thing, it could be an intellectual thing, something you want to learn. I just added in five minutes of stretching as one of my new year habits, and five minutes doesn't sound like a lot, but it is meaningful. I chose five minutes purposely because, if I say I'm going to do a half hour or a longer period of time, I know I won't do it. I want to have that be part of my life that I can show up for every day, and the fact that I show up to do something is more important to me than showing up to do a whole bunch, because that's what will make it actually stick and actually be a habit.
I think the best habit at the New Year is probably building that habit of checking in with yourself. If you need some tools for that, I have a couple worksheets for weekly and monthly check ins that are what I do - the questions and prompts that I ask myself, they're pretty simple and straightforward. The weekly one just has three questions, and, of course, the monthly one has more, but take what works for you and leave the rest. Those are free downloads in my resource library, and I'll put the signup link in the show notes if you want those.
Then let me tell you about this workshop: if you saw yourself in some of those qualities that I described, like, feels kind of weird to make goals this year, or you typically make a lot of goals and you're just not sure what to do with it this year, you're kind of exhausted, you don't want to jump back into hustle mode, you don't have to. We can harness this fresh start energy in a really flexible way, in a really gentle way, at your own pace with compassionate productivity, staying within your own capacity.
So, we're going to get together and first, honor the lessons and the growth that 2020 brought us, and then send it on its way, since it's in the past. There'll be some journaling prompts, we'll use that reflection to look forward to 2021 and create a plan for things that you want to do, or just the next month, if that's all you can muster right now, that's totally cool, too.
If you were at my workshop about seasonal self care, we made a menu that you could choose from to fit what works for you at that time, and we're gonna use that same menu concept for making goals this year, because, you might have a lot of ideas, but you're just not really sure what's realistic to move forward with implementing, you want to collect those ideas and have them in a place where you can find them. So you'll have your goals menu for this year, and you can use that to nurture your creative practice, adding in healthy nourishing practices that will help replenish your energy and let you really do what matters to you this year. Because we don't have time to do a bunch of stuff that doesn't matter, right?
So it's a 90 minute live workshop on Tuesday, January 12 at 10am Pacific, and you'll get some PDFs, worksheets, resources, journal prompts, and you'll get unlimited access to the replay video afterwards, if you can't make it live, or you want to rewatch it, and I'm doing that on a sliding scale from 15 to $35. So I hope you can join me for that! I'm really excited to be offering something that is motivating yet nurturing. We gotta keep it gentle this year. I think that's what we need.
And if you need more support than that, to get your new year off to a good and compassionately productive start, you can also book a Rise Above the Overwhelm session with me. Those are just a 1-time laser focused session where we review what's going on, figure out what's making you overwhelmed, try to get to the root of that so that you can get unstuck, and start moving forward at whatever pace feels good to you right now. So there's details for all that stuff in the show notes. I'm excited to be here with you in the new year, and I’m wishing you the best. Take good care of yourselves and I will see you next week.
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