Goal Setting Makes my Skin Crawl

If you don't have a word of the year either, I see you.

This time of year, if there is anything I want to push back against harder than toxic hustle culture, it’s every single meme about New Year, New You and Make [Insert Year] Your Best Year Yet. I struggle with goal setting and all the pressure to do it in January has a way of crawling under my skin one well-meaning post about someone’s word of the year at a time.

I’m pretty sure I can trace the origin of this struggle back to my sophomore year of college when being faced with choosing a major sent me into a depressive tailspin. This is, of course, an oversimplification of a multifaceted thing, but feeling the pressure of deciding what to do with the REST OF MY LIFE at age 19 was certainly a big part of the problem.

A huge part of the way through this particular bought of depression for me was internalizing a new belief that I was simply choosing something I wanted to study and could allow the rest of the journey to unfold from there. This concept of not looking too far into the future became pivotal to my mental health in my 20s, and leaves 40’s me still feeling a little itchy and uncomfortable with long-term plans and goals.

Unlike toxic messages around “the hustle” I don’t actually want to completely push back against goal-setting. I do truly believe that there is value in having some longer term direction in my business and creative life as well as my personal life. However, don’t believe that there’s one right way to do it or that it has to be done on January 1.

For those who also struggle with all the pressure to future plan this time of year, I wanted to share are some things that have helped me take goal setting baby steps. These are shifts in thinking and tools that have felt really positive and not so skin-crawly to me:

Two Philosophical Shifts:

• Starting with big overarching areas that are important and then building from there. For example, for goals that my husband and I are setting together we’ve identified these areas of importance: health, connection, meaningful work, finances, and joy. Then we look at an area and decide what we would like to do related to that. For example, for health we’d like to run a half-marathon in the spring— so the specific task becomes research spring half marathons. Thinking first about what we value and then parsing out the specifics has really resonated with me.

• Learning the concept of setting process goals, not outcome goals. The flip from setting the goal: I’m going to publish a book this year to I will query 75 agents this year is HUGE for me. Publishing a book through a traditional publishing house is something that is largely out of my control- it requires an agent taking on the manuscript, then an editor liking it, and so on and so on. But querying those manuscripts- that’s all me. That I can do.

Two Tools:

• Elise Blaha Cripe’s book Big Dreams Daily Joys. I picked this book up in 2019 after following Elise on Instagram for some time before that. I had always really loved the honesty in her posts. I was deep into seeing the value of goal setting but still struggling with overwhelm around something so vast and nebulous as the future (and this was before 2020- imagine!). In the book, Elise ties goal setting back to making time for what matters and making room for joy. This resonated with me as a good why for doing the very difficult work or future planning. She also includes sections about the value of white space and the fact that nobody knows what they are doing which make me feel heard and understood. The book is broken up into short little digestible nuggets of wisdom (also helpful for taking it a little bit at a time) and it’s written in the same friendly, honest tone I loved from Instagram. It’s also just a well-designed book with bright colors and graphics that made me smile. If you’ve struggled with more traditional books about goal-setting (I’m looking at you— everything ever written about SMART goals, ever)- this just may be the antidote.

• Notion. If you’d told me last year this time that I’d be pretty in love with a digital tool for project management I would have laughed and laughed and said something like - I am taking baby steps toward even being comfortable about long-term planning and you think I’m going to put this stuff in an app? One that’s sort of free form and full of infinite possibilities? That sounds super stressful, no thanks. But after hearing my friend Julia talk about it for a couple years and listening to Jason and Caroline Zook from Wandering Aimfully wax poetic about it on their podcast, I decided to poke around a little. I’m just scratching the surface of how to use it (so don’t ask me technical questions!)— but I love being able to put in tasks and tie them back to those big bucket areas I mentioned in the first bullet above. There is a habit tracker template that’s great for recording miles run, days I meditated, etc. Then all in that same space I can plan out content for these posts. Everything syncs seamlessly from the desktop version to the app and it just feels really relaxing to have things in one place. Even though I don’t totally understand why it’s clicked for me, it’s making tracking progress towards goals <gasp> fun right now and I’m not about the question the magic.

As mentioned, I’m still very much in the baby-stepping phase of all this, and in absolutely no way an expert. I would truly love to know what works for you around setting and tracking goals, especially if it also doesn’t come naturally to you. Most importantly though, I want all of us to remember as all those memes about 2022 Goals Of the Year come flooding in— there is no one right way to do this and you can make damn good goals in June, too.

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Things of Beauty

Just a few things that felt particularly soul-nourishing recently (or maybe just made me smile).

Ruth Reichl’s post, Cooking With Ghosts, about how food connects us to friends and relatives who are no longer with us over the holidays.

This beautiful post from Elle Burke about the yes/and we talked about in my last post!

Whispering Springs Farms Orange Grapefruit Sugar Scrub, a Christmas gift from my sister-in-law, that is doing wonders for my dry winter skin and smells SO good!

And speaking of gifts, I have barely taken these off since I got them:

Whether or not you’re choosing words of the year and setting goals as 2022 kicks off— may you be warm and cozy, may you feel at peace, and may you be well.

Mary Chris