I hope you had a wonderful break over the Holidays and feel ready for 2022! The New Year is a time where people often pause to reflect: "How am I doing?", and "I'd like to do more, or be more _____ this coming year." Which often starts to look like goals for the year.
While setting goals works for some people, for most people their New Year's goals tend to dim quickly as they return to the normal bustle of life, defaulting back to their old ways before the end of January. Myself included.
Daily Intent Versus Yearly Goals
Try this as an alternative. The other day as I finished my morning meditation, I set a simple intention for the day. As I visualized the day ahead with its usual family chaos, I said to myself “today I am going to be more patient with the kids”. This focused my mind right out the gates and darn, if I wasn't more patient that day!
This is a practice that I have taken from the Stoic philosophy, where intention is the thing that I plan to do or achieve for the day ahead. The difference is this is an intention just for the day, which is then followed by an end-of-day reflection on how I did with that intention during the day. It is like the mini-version of annual goal setting and end-of-year reflection.
Here's why this might work for you:
One Day at a Time. The day is bite-sized enough that we can get our head around it. We aren't setting distant goals that we may or may not achieve in the future - we are bringing a clear intent just to what needs to get done today, or how we want to show up today. If we take this seriously, we can start immediately following setting that intention, not in the future.
End-of-Day Reflection Provides Accountability. As I have written previously, there is something powerful about taking 2-3 minutes at the end of the day to ask yourself questions like "How did I do today?"and "What could I do better tomorrow?" Again, we aren't aspiring to achieve lofty goals each day, we are simply aspiring to inch our way one day at a time towards something better and meaningful to us. Then we hold ourselves accountable to that, knowing that change is hard. After all, it was our intention in the first place!
Linking the Day's Actions to Longer-Term Goals. And for those of you who do set longer-term goals for the year (which is great), having a clear intent for the day and a moment of reflection at the end of it becomes a great way to turn those longer-term aspirations into concrete actions today.
How about you?
What would you like to create more of this year? Health? Joy? Able to change more quickly? Prosperity? Or, what qualities would you like to be more this year? Focused? Resilient? Present? Patient? Open and accepting?
Intention is about creating more of what is meaningful to you. What small, yet clear intent could you bring to each day that, if fulfilled, would have you feeling more fulfilled at the end of it?
And, if you or someone on your team would benefit from more guidance, support and accountability in creating a more intentional year, please connect with me at scott@mindfulwisdom.ca. I'd be happy to share more strategies and tools.
Image Credit: Oliver Buchmann, Unsplash