New Year, New Challenges, New Growth
As another new year unfolds before us, we take stock of our lives and look at what we can improve. For a lot of us, reflecting on last year’s goals feels daunting because of the reminder of just how much has changed. It’s likely that the landscape of your industry is still reverberating in ripple effects from a tsunami worth of necessary protocol changes, layoffs, restructuring, etc and it feels like your foundation is suddenly built on sand.
If there is one thing that this past year has taught us, it’s that the figurative ground under our feet isn’t fixed, things are ever-changing and no amount of planning, technology, or advancements can come in the way of nature. COVID-19 is an ongoing crisis that’s damage will be felt for years to come, but perhaps our task now is to do all that we can in making the lessons this year has taught us to outshine its damage. Considering how fear-driven media coverage is, this is not an easy task at hand.
The antidote to the fear trap that the media lays out is an intentional mindset. To brainstorm, plan, and follow through on any goals, mindset is key. Allowing ourselves to grieve the loss of our normal lives is important, but it’s also important to allow ourselves to see this year through different lenses. What if 2020 wasn’t a setback, and instead is a setup for a better, kinder, and more connected world? Through this lens, creative solutions surface and we can wedge ourselves out of the cookie-cutter mold we had laid out for our future, previous to a pandemic upending our plans.
With that in mind, my proposal is in reanimating resolutions and rebranding them as intentions for the New Year. Instead of asking what are my goals, perhaps a better question is how do I plan on achieving them. The New York Times echoed this sentiment in a recent article titled “This Year, Try Downsizing Your Resolutions” that explores strategies around drafting resolutions that are achievable and motivating. Notably, a Swedish study published this month found that affirming resolutions are more effective than those that are avoidance oriented. For example, instead of saying “stop eating late at night,” an action-oriented alternative would be “finish eating for the day by 7:30 pm.”
BJ Fogg, founder, and director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University finds that the key to achieving goals is in the habits that create the rungs of the ladder towards the goal. Think of a goal as the top rung of a ladder and think of habits as all the steps below it. Without the lower rungs, there would be no hope of reaching the top. Still, taking that first step and starting a habit is challenging. Fogg recommends finding an anchor for your tiny behaviors that will build into your desired outcome. Fogg defines an anchor as a pre-existing automatic behavior, like making coffee first thing in the morning, that will act as a reminder to trigger a new behavior. For example, “after I make coffee, I will do a pushup.” Being intentional with starting small will catapult the chances of succeeding because of the consistency we build in the implementation.
2020 left us all with life lessons that we can choose to learn from or ignore. The fragile nature of life around every one of us might have been taken for granted while executing resolutions last year, but not so much in 2021. Those of us who notoriously hate resolutions might find that the excitement for 2020 being officially over has sparked a new mindset around new beginnings. Ultimately, we are all reckoning with a new awareness of impermanence that we might have previously kept in the dusty cobwebs of our unconscious mind. With this awareness comes resiliency, if we are intentional.
