Successful New Year Planning

Welcome to the New Year! 

We are often so hopeful about the new year. We dream of how it will be even better than the old one and set goals to help that be so. And then, about this time in January, we begin to fade a bit or a lot, regarding our precision with those goals. Why is that? And what is to be done about that?

I once worked with a client who deeply regretted not accomplishing his goal of skiing with his adult son 30 times a year.  He was genuinely distressed and hoped we could help him be better at keeping his word to himself regarding his goals.  When asked how many times he DID ski with his son, he replied 27.  We were surprised, and curious.  When we delved deeper, he realized he was measuring the success of the goal by accomplishing it fully, not by registering what experience he was after that had him set the goal in the first place.  It turns out he had EXACTLY the experience he wanted to have with his son!

So, why do we set goals at all?  It might be to correct a habit, or to accomplish a project.  One question I have is, why set that goal in the first place?  How would completing that goal impact your life?

I’ve found through the years that what we are almost always after is an EXPERIENCE shift, wanting to feel more abundant, accomplished, peaceful, free…..you name it.  The power of aiming at the Experience we are after is much more impactful than accomplishing the goal.  Why?  Because the accomplishment of the goal does not promise you will have the experience you assume would happen upon achievement of that goal, darn it.

However, if you drill down and ask yourself to list the way you will experience life as you imagine the goal to have already been accomplished, you have a much more powerful stabilizing force for the next 6 – 12 months.

For example, I have several clients who have set goals to be in a new relationship this year.  When we drill down to what accomplishing that goal would feel like, it is usually something like Belonging, Peace of Mind, Connection, etc.  These are all things we feel in our body; it is not an intellectual thing at all.

When we then take the top three experiences on our list, we can aim every decision in our lives at having MORE of those experiences, not less.  For instance, you might choose a movie by asking yourself, will this movie allow me to feel more like I belong, or less?  More at peace or less?  More connected or less?  How about choosing a restaurant?  The same questions might have you choose differently and have a much better experience. (I used to LOVE PF Chang’s food.  However, wanting the experience of wonderful taste sensations, and relaxation, had me decide to go elsewhere as they were always swamped, and very noisy!)

This approach also takes the pressure off the goals you might still set.  If they begin to seem less interesting, it might be that you have not yet figured out how to aim towards them while also having the experience you want to have.  That is a great learning point.  What if you COULD work differently on the goal?  Or what if it was not the right goal at all?

Let me know how it goes.  My clients find this approach to be at first confusing, like learning a new language, then they often notice they are experiencing more and more of what they are aimed at, and life is overall more satisfying.