New Year, No Goals
It’s the inaugural blog post of 2020! So exciting! And really what would a fitness-food-fun blog like Quinn Runs be without a post about new year’s resolutions? Don’t worry, I’ve got you covered. I myself am feeling a little ambivalent about changing my life via goal setting this year, but let’s discuss.
First, I want to tell you guys a little bit about my own family’s New Year’s Eve resolution tradition—it’s pretty adorable. Every year, my parents get a big poster board and everyone in my family writes down three or four goals on it that they want to accomplish in the coming year. It’s a fun way to see what everyone is prioritizing for themselves going forward and to support each other in our goals.
This year at Christmas dinner, this tradition took an interesting turn as my dad invited us all to think about our upcoming resolutions for 2020. We pulled out the posters from the past five years and took a trip down memory lane looking back at all of our goals since the end of 2015. For reference here, that was my senior year of high school! So, one of my goals from that first year was “go to a good college.” Happy to report that goal was achieved, and now is almost completed [knock on wood—almost completed *provided we make it through this last semester]. If you don’t know this, some of my siblings are still pretty young, so there were also some truly fantastic throwback goals from their elementary school days such as “get huge muscles.” This year, my youngest sister Scarlett, who is currently six, resolved both to eat the crusts off her toast and to publish a book. As you can see, there’s a pretty wide range of ambition going on here.
I know my little sister’s new year’s resolutions are not exactly a paramount example of well-thought out goals, but they do showcase some of the ways in which we set ourselves up to fail through the resolutions tradition. I definitely have some gripes about it. First, while I’m so here for goal-setting if that’s a method that works for you, the changing of the calendar seems like a pretty arbitrary catalyst to do it. I think we should be making conscious changes in our lives all year round, not just when a new year prompts us to do so.
Also, I think making your goals into ~New Year’s Resolutions~ puts some extra unnecessary pressure on them—at least it does for me! If I don’t manage to complete said goals, it feels like I’ve failed on another level, like I’ve somehow failed the whole year. But I don’t feel that way about other goals that I set at other times! It makes me not want to make my new year’s resolutions about things I actually care about because I don’t want to set the stakes quite that high.
Okay, one last qualm! This is more of a problem with goal-setting practices in general than specifically with new year’s resolutions, but I am constantly setting goals that are way too ambitious, not ambitious enough, or wildly vague. I don’t know if anyone else has had this experience, but it’s actually pretty difficult to formulate a really realistic, smart goal. My sister’s resolutions really embody this: on the one hand we have “eat the crusts of my toast,” and on the other “publish a book.” She’s six, so I guess the toast resolution is appropriate, if not life-altering.
I know I’ve been complaining about resolutions for the past few paragraphs, but I will admit that I did come up with some to put on the family resolution poster. It’s an important tradition to my parents, so it’s important to me to take part in it. I’ll tell you guys what I wrote down, and then we can evaluate these goals!
Become more financially and personally independent
Train to run a marathon
Devote more time to Quinn Runs
Go to a Creative Writing MFA program
Obviously I’m painting in pretty broad strokes here. While these might be some good focus areas for my year, I definitely feel hesitant to commit myself to these [and potentially be shamed at Christmas in five years if any of them don’t happen]. I want to talk about why these goals are not ideal, and how I’m actually conceptualizing them instead. For the first goal regarding my personal and financial independence, it’s a nice thought but there’s nothing said there about execution. Also, what does that “more” even mean? This goal is just super hard to measure and define as successful or not. I’m cool with the second goal, actually. Training to run a marathon is largely within my own control, save for injury or other extenuating circumstances, and it’s something I feel passionate about and excited to take on in 2020. Plus, even though it’s not included in the wording of my resolution itself, I do have a plan for how I’m going to do it. Still though, I need to work on distancing myself from the idea that if I fail in this marathon endeavor, I’ve failed in the year as a whole.
My third goal [about this very blog! so meta!] is also super vague. How much more time am I going to devote, and in what ways? Writing more posts? Getting more subscribers? What’s the plan here? Fourth and finally, I actually think my last goal is pretty awful. Yes, going to such a program is something that I want, but it’s also something that I have done all the work for that I can do within my own sphere of individual influence. I’ve worked hard on my writing samples and applications and have submitted those materials to the schools I’m interested in, meaning that the next step in whether or not this goal gets accomplished actually isn’t up to me. There’s nothing else I can do at this point, so why would I set a goal about it [side note: if you’re interested in this idea of goal-setting as exclusive to those goals you yourself can influence, I wrote a different post on that a while ago that you can read here].
What I’m trying to say is basically this: it’s really challenging to set the kind of goal that is actually achievable, that you personally have control over, and that you have a specific plan of execution for. In my four goals, really only one of them came close to fitting this bill. Making your new year’s resolutions fit these standards is definitely one way to get closer to success, I think—that is, if you decide to make resolutions at all. For me, I’m going to shift my language to come up with some “focus areas” for 2020 that I want to devote time and energy to. I prefer this term because a focus area isn’t something that you can accomplish or fail at, like a goal. I don’t want to define my year [or my life, for that matter!] in such black and white terms as successes and failures. That said, it’s definitely still helpful for me to take the time to think about what I do want to prioritize in the new year, or at any point. So with that in mind, here are my rephrased goals as focus areas for 2020.
Financial and personal independence
Physical and mental fitness, including marathon training
Quinn Runs
Writing for the love of writing, regardless of grad program status
I feel better about their vagueness of these focus areas now because it’s no longer a +/- binary of whether or not I have achieved them—they don’t need to be measurable, per se. These are just parts of my life that I want to devote time, attention, and passion to this year. I know it’s not a huge shift from goals to focus areas, but for me the semantics of it are really beneficial in amplifying my enjoyment of these pursuits and in mitigating my stress about meeting poorly-planned goals.
If you’re a goal-setter and you thrive on new year’s resolutions, more power to you! But if you’re like me and find them unnecessarily stressful and often problematic, shifting to the focus area method might prove useful, or at least fun to try. Definitely let me know if you give it a go, and I would love to hear all of your thoughts about resolutions or lack thereof! Hope everyone had an amazing new year, and wishing you all of the best in 2020!
