I hate New Years’ resolutions. Sort of. I also sort of love them.

My main gripe is I always feel like they are made on a whim, or superficially – not necessarily in the end goal being superficial, but with no real weight behind the effort or progress being made. They’re said, sometimes with good intentions, but almost always fall short.

However, at the same time, I can’t help but love the idea of them, when taken seriously, to help create real positive change in lifestyle.

For me personally, at the start of every year, I like take a moment to see where I’m at in life, see what I like about life, what I want to change, and think about what sorts of proactive changes I should be making to be at least headed in the direction of the person I want to be and the life I want to live. This year is no different and, alongside other large life changes, and coming off the back of a couple rougher years, I’m very aware that this is a time I should seriously be considering stamping out bad habits and instilling new/reigniting old good habits.

Whether or not I would say it is that I’m making NY resolutions I’m not sure. I guess it basically is when I think about it, but I’m just being too snobby about it to admit that.

Anyway, here are my thoughts on making life changes and a few of my new goals and habits I’m trying to work towards this year.

The Catalyst

In my post about leaving social media, I mentioned how quite often I have used changes in life circumstances to help be a catalyst in making changes in my every day life. I feel like often it’s larger events that allow me to take a reset moment on what I know to be my day-to-day: taking the moment to stop and evaluate if I’m living every aspect of my life how I would like to. Then using the change in schedule/environment from the larger life event, I can implement a few smaller habits to areas in my life, and see it all as one large change.

The new habits are the medicine I hide inside the piece of meat (the big life changes) that I feed the dog (aka myself) if you will – does that make sense?

It’s not necessarily that I need to rely on major life changing moments to occur (although they have presented themselves fairly often over the years), but if they’re happening, why not? The important thing to me is that, when an opportunity presents itself to help me change the parts of life I want to, and to help me out of the ruts I find myself in, I will take full advantage of that.

Anyway, over Christmas and New Year, I’ve actually been moving house. So I thought why not make the most of this moment – the compounding of both the physical life shift, as well as the mental idea of a new year, to help set myself up for some long needed breaking of bad habits, and instilling of the ways I want to live.

For me that can be little things like: not upgrading this new house’s bad Wi-Fi to anything usable for gaming or watching shows, in order to push me to read and write more; using my relocation to readjust my wakeup routine, allocating time for running/walking in the morning; taking advantage of my new proximity to work to spend more time at the studio in evenings and weekends, for personal pottery development.

I could have done these things before, but I was comfortable, and in a rut. My new circumstances are not the solution, they are just a catalyst for change.

Staying SMART about my goals

Ok teacher mode. So one of my main gripes with New Years resolutions are they are often so vague, or just stupid to achieve. People will say:

“I want to eat better”
Eat what better? Does that mean eat less? What about good food?

“I’m going to run all the time”
Like, what does that mean? When will you say you have done what you set out to do?

“This year, I’m going to become an author”
Are you Margaret? How? Do you know what that entails? Do you have any expertise or background in writing? Have you ever written a story before?

None of these goals are bad, but they’re just defined badly, and frankly stupid resolutions to make on their own if you actually want to achieve them. I know everyone at school will have had the chat about making SMART goals:

S – Specific
M – Measurable
A – Attainable
R – Relevant
T – Time-bound

It sounds really cringey, but this is honestly what I look to when I think about creating new life habits or resolutions. Rather than saying “I want to run more”, I say “I want to run 3 x a week for the next 5 months”. It’s clear cut, there’s no way to stretch what I meant or kid myself that what I’m doing is what I meant if it isn’t.

And it’s a challenge – it’s enough of a feat to cause me to make actual changes in my life.

Quite often I’ll set a goal, and then 2 or 3 targets related to that goal – one related to the challenge of the goal, and one related to the consistency of the activity to adjust my lifestyle.

And look, life circumstances could change in the next year – I had planned out a serious reuptake of running again last year, and then I became chronically unwell. Equally, as the year goes on, perhaps a goal post adjustment is needed – you were over ambitious because you weren’t informed enough in your targets, or you’re realising that that crazy goal is just around the corner already.

All you can have is integrity and be honest with yourself – are the targets you are setting when you are setting them uncomfortable enough to have to push yourself, but not impossibly out of reach to demotivate you from trying. And the plan isn’t to always have a SMART goal for every aspect of your life (although not necessarily a bad thing when looking at what is next). But for me whatever target I set is enough to at least set a new habit in motion in my life.

Not Angry, Just Disappointed

Another great(/vital) motivator in reaching goals and building habits for me is accountability. Fun fact: I am a people pleaser. This may not always seem obvious from my dry humour or often dismissiveness/blasé attitude to some pop culture/social topics/views/ideas. But if I’m honest, I’ve always cared a lot about other peoples’ perception of me. If you’re into your enneagrams, people have said I’m a big 2 – I don’t subscribe to the enneagram or the diagnosis (see what I mean about dismissiveness of social ideas), but I get the sentiment.

Some of that people pleasing is unhealthy and I have spent a long time working through it (I’m getting better with it), but I do also believe there is a healthy nature to a burden of social expectation.

When I first signed up to run a marathon in 2021, I told NOBODY except for my friend Sheona (who I signed up with), my parents (who I was living with) and my friend/desk mate Ellie (who was an ultra runner/coaching me through my training).

I didn’t tell anyone else because, what if I didn’t train and progress on schedule? Then I’d have to pull out. That would be absolutely mortifying and I would just be a huge disappointment! And besides, I could only run 5k at that point, what an insane challenge to tell people I was doing at that point.

Well eventually, I had to tell people – I was running for charity and Sheona rightfully mentioned I should probably be asking people to donate. So 2 months into training, I shared it. I made an Insta story sharing what I was doing, why I was doing it and how much of a challenge it was.

The result was two-fold:
1. I managed to raise some money
2. It completely changed my mentality around the challenge. I went from “what a challenge, I hope I can keep on track”, to “well I have to do it now, I’ve told people I’m doing it”

I truly think that the public declaration of what I was doing solidified my resolve to have to get it done. It’s out of fear, but it’s not crippling fear, of fear of something actually bad. It’s a need to fulfil your commitment.

When I worked at Tearfund, I took over one of our team’s weekly social calls at the start of January to chat all about New Years’ resolutions and setting goals. Partly as an opportunity to offer inspiration to each other on some great ideas for New Year’s resolutions, but also so that those that had made resolutions could share with one another their goals for the year. It was great – people were keen to share their goals and others were inspired to take up their own.

But then beyond that, whenever we met up in person at the office, or went for a coffee, or lunch, or to the pub, the question of New Years’ resolutions would often come up – we were still invested in the goals we had each set for ourselves. And people mentioned, how part of the reason they were still on track was the knowledge that it could be brought up again at the next team social.

Community accountability is great, because it’s this weird promise with your world that you’ve made. Nobody really minds if you fail, you are not going to be scolded and ostracized if you fail your publicly announced goals (my rational brain tells my irrational social anxiety), but there is healthy weight behind the pact you’ve made to yourself.

So with that in mind, here are…

My Current Goals for the Year

1. Start Running Again
   • Target: Run 3 x a week, for a minimum of 45 weeks this year
   • Target: Run a half marathon
     
2. Read More
   • Target: Read 40 books this year
     
3. Get better at pottery
   • Target: Make 150 mugs
   • Target: Make 5 identical pieces
   • Target: Make something of more technically difficult (this is not decided yet, but open to ideas!)

I’m sure there will be other goals and targets that come through the year, and the goal posts of my current targets will change (hopefully because I’m nailing them!), but these are the first

Let me know if you have any New Years’ resolutions/goals for the year, or ones you’ve done in the past that you’ve never regretted – I’m always keen to hear other people’s and keen to flesh out mine whilst I’m in this period of big change and routine building.