For every goal you make, there’s more than one path to achieve it. Write your dreams in Sharpie and your plans in pencil.
Two years ago I spent most of January crying in a therapist’s office.
I’d always loved the excitement of a new year, arming myself with lists of ways I could be a better version of myself. But a month shy of my 35th birthday, my resolutions plagued me with anxiety. So off to therapy I went.
I presented my new therapist with a list of anxieties. The recurring theme? A milestone birthday, a new year brimming with possibilities, and the overwhelming feeling that my life should be “more.” That I should be “more.” When I pictured myself at 35, I pictured myself married and with kids. I pictured a house that had crayon drawings on the refrigerator and a rogue Lego or two in the hallway. I pictured myself happier, thinner, and more settled. Each year I planned on these things, and each year my plans felt thwarted. The list was written in Sharpie, and my perceived failures seemed to scream at me.
My therapist looked through the list and started challenging what I had written. She camped out on one item: “What if it’s too late for me to have children? What if I never get to be a mom?”
“Have you ever thought about adopting? By yourself?”
Her words were a gut punch, and I burst into tears. It was one thing to put voice to my biggest fears, but to hear a stranger offer contingency plans for my life? Devastating, if not embarrassing. I told her as much, between sobs.
“Laura, I’m not telling you that you’re not going to get married or have kids,” she said. “I’m trying to show you that for everything on this list, there’s more than one path to achieve it. You’ve used a Sharpie to map out your future. I’m trying to get you to use pencil.”
Something about the dawning of a new year leads us to feel like we need to uproot our lives and be “more.” We bust out the Sharpies, create resolutions, and in our panic can often only see one path to success. We go all in for a few weeks, but by Super Bowl Sunday most of us are back to our old patterns and habits. The idea of penciling something in is seen as a lack of commitment, instead of a path of flexibility.
According to Amie Allain, a psychologist in Houston, if we really want to achieve our goals this year we need to skip the long list of resolutions and instead ask ourselves five questions.
1) What change do I want to make and why do I want to make it?
A new year is a natural time for fresh starts, but we needn’t uproot our lives just for the sake of change. Are we trying to change because we’re ready to, or because we feel like we’re supposed to?
“When we try too hard to be something or someone else, we hurt ourselves,” says Allain. “No matter where we are in life, self-acceptance and self-compassion are key. That doesn’t mean becoming complacent. We can still be driven for growth, but we have to be ready to make a change.”
The takeaway? When you’re ready for a change, you’ll make the change happen. Even if the path you take looks far different from what you would have originally mapped out. But the first step towards change is compassion for where you are.
2) What are my top two goals for the year, and how will I reach them?
Rather than creating a laundry list of resolutions, just focus on one or two significant goals for the year. And then break those down into realistic, behavior specific goals. If your goal is to Get Healthy, your behaviors might be eating vegetables with every meal, walking for 30 minutes, five days a week and committing to eight hours of sleep. These mini behaviors are what will allow you to reach your big goals, and they’re easily tracked from day to day.
3) What’s my motivation?
Allain asks herself, “am I intrinsically or extrinsically motivated.” For some of us, the satisfaction we feel when we accomplish a task is enough to keep us motivated and moving forward. But others of us need outside forces – a buddy system, a support group, public praise and feedback – to maintain our motivation. Identify which matters most to you and plan accordingly. If intrinsic is your game, you might go old school and give yourself a gold star every time you reach a mini goal. If public praise is what keeps you on the path to success, share your success with a friend or with your social network.
4) What does success look like?
After running a handful of half marathons and one full marathon, my definition of athletic success used to involve earning a medal. After a knee injury sidelined any future races, my new definition of success is walking a mile after dinner.
If running a marathon is your goal, success might be simply completing all 26.2 miles. But when your goal is vague (get healthy, save money, etc.) you have to determine what success looks like to you. If saving money is your goal, perhaps success means setting aside enough money for a down payment on a house. Or simply bringing your lunch to work instead of going out. The clearer your vision for success, the more you’ll be able to celebrate milestones along the way.
5) Have I allowed myself room to “get lost”?
As a mother of two who has moved every few years since college, Allain knows the best way to learn a new city is to get lost and have to navigate a new path. The same is true when we’re tackling our goals.
“We schedule our lives so tight, we don’t always give ourselves a lot of room for error. We give ourselves such a narrow window to achieve a goal that failure is not an option,” Allain says.
As a result, when we experience a set-back, it can be tempting to give up. But those new paths teach us resilience and creative problem solving.
Your resolution might be to get promoted, and along that path you might discover that what you really crave is more free time to devote to a passion project. In getting lost along our Sharpie plan, we might find that our original plan wasn’t the right one. The alternate route may be more rewarding.
For some of you, 2016 was a banner year, full of an abundance of success and riches. And for others, you experienced setbacks and losses you never saw coming. Losses that have carried into this new year. For most of us, it was a combination of both.
For those of us who sometimes feel overwhelmed at the possibilities of a new year, who wonder “why should this year be any different?” I offer this hope … it will be different because we’ll make it different. We’ll enter 2017 with our hopes and goals, and we’ll take action. We’ll make changes because we’re ready, not because the world says we should. We’ll celebrate our blessings. We’ll cheer our accomplishments. Even better, we’ll celebrate and cheer on our friends and family. We’ll mourn our losses. We'll invest in each other. We’ll get creative with our problem solving, and we’ll be resilient. And we’ll write our dreams in Sharpie and our plans in pencil.