You need a revolution not a resolution.
What do you need in 2024? (Part 2)
Last week in my post “Don’t make NY resolutions!” I suggested you do a short review of your year before thinking about what you want for next year. It really helps to remember just how much you actually do and have achieved (and we women are often so busy ticking To-Do list we forget to pat ourselves on the back for all that is created, brought to fruition, facilitated, devised, thought about, supported, juggled, caught, prevented, pushed, done, redone, redone again and again and again, moved forward, encouraged and enlightened in our everyday lives).
Hopefully you got a bit of context and perspective on just how much you handle. This is useful in terms of the next step: setting a mini revolution for yourself next year, instead of New Year Resolutions that tend to be just another stick to beat ourselves with and lead to an initial burst of valiant vigour, only to whimper into the wilderness once we realise they are not sustainable and our calf muscles will never be the same again.
So here are three steps (that won’t inflict pain on your calf muscles) to carry you into and through 2024 with a bit of passion, purpose and panache. (That’s panache not ganache, although I personally like a bit of chocolate ganache at any time).
Step 1 - set your intention
Step 2 - get clear on your direction
Step 3 - create some goals for the 12 months
Step 1 - set your intention
In my book, Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter I suggest that midlife is a perfect time to ask yourself an important question. I personally ask this question at the beginning of every new year (and no, it’s not asking where can I find calorie and hangover free wine as this is a question I ask all year round.)
In our early adulthood we usually ask ourselves the question “what do I want my life to look like?” We list the boxes we want to check that we assume will make us happy and Facebook successful - possibly this is related to travel, career, love, family, and maybe a personal passion or sport. But at midlife, having loved, lost, laughed and loved, it’s really important to stop checking boxes and check back in, to make sure the things on that checklist actually are making you happy or are still what you deem the markers of success. (And by midlife I mean regularly throughout the decades-long stage of life between youth and old age).
Now it’s time to ask a better question alongside this one - not just “what do I want my life to look like?”, but “what do I want my life to feel like?”
This broadens your spec and allows you to focus on your emotional input as much as your physical output.
Anyone who works with me, or follows any of my Instagram videos and workshops knows I evangelise about intention. Intention helps you drive the juggernaut of your struggle to juggle all the aspects of your life; it helps you set the tone or direction for yourself amid the mayhem - keeping the ‘I” in your life.
So asking yourself the question “what do I want my life to feel like?”, what word or words best sum up your personal intention for next year?
Over the last few years mine have included words such as courage, kindness to myself, strength, selfishness (as a positive word), focus, connection. For next year my two words are growth and revenge. Growth for me means investing some time and energy on becoming as a person, not just on the doing. The revenge one doesn’t mean I’m planning on running anyone down on a dark, wet night. It is a clear instruction to myself to stop wasting energy and anger on the past and persons who have caused me pain, but to seek revenge through making my family and life the happiest and most gorgeously fulfilling I possibly can. My best revenge is happiness.
What words of intention do you need to guide you through next year so that when you do a review this time next year, your life has moved forward in a positive way for you?
Step 2 - get clear on your direction.
It’s easy to bluster through life reacting to all the external demands and expectations, without responding to internal needs and desires. Or certainly huge swathes of it. One really simple way to regularly course correct is to do this reset by asking three simple questions:
For the next year, what do I want / need to:
Stop?
Start?
Continue?
So to give some examples, my answers for this include:
Stop? - wasting energy on things I can’t control, watching TV after 10pm
Start? - monthly budget meeting with myself, meditation once a week
Continue? - practising dropping the narrative in my head when something happens (this has made such an impact on me recently and you can read about it here.)
What do you need and want to stop, start and continue next year? Just the simple act of getting clear in this will help you on your little revolution of small changes leading to big impact.
Step 3 - create some goals for the year.
Look at your intentions and think about what that will look like in a year. So if I’ve grown and taken sweet revenge, what will my life look and feel like this time next year? I’ll have freed up some mental space for creative and love, I’ll have done some work, and stepped out of my comfort zone, I’ll have experienced joy and adventure. So what will I have done and achieved? My goals now are to make that vision happen.
So my intention in the run up to my 50th birthday was to be Fit&Fab@50. That was my intention and mission for the year. That didn’t happen overnight. It took a series of goals and small steps to get me there. Here is an edited and shortened expert from my book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter on goals:
My Fit&Fab@50 plan in itself wasn’t the goal. That was the aspiration and, helpfully, a deadline. Fit&Fab@50 was the umbrella if you like, made up of various goals that formed the spokes. I had a dress size goal. A fitness level goal. A nutrition goal. A skincare goal. A goal for how I wanted to feel. A career goal. Having a goal simply means knowing the result you want. In my case, being fit, healthy, happy in life and actively dating by fifty. Then you figure out the steps to get there because – and I know you know this – there can be a lot of procrastination between the words ‘I’m going to ...’and ‘I am ...’
……A goal is simply a plan of smaller manageable actions that acts as a guide on how to make choices. Because it can’t be done on autopilot and requires conscious action, a goal is not the same as an aspiration or dream. Winning the lottery is an aspiration. Waiting for Keanu Reeves to knock on my front door is a dream. Sadly.
…….A goal is planning a trip to Bali and working out how to save for it. A goal is deciding to enter the Hunger Games of mid-aged internet dating by joining a site and putting effort into writing a half- decent profile and making room for at least one coffee date a week. Step one of goal setting is establishing the destination, but step two is breaking it down and mapping the journey. It empowers you as much as possible to start living with intention instead of autopilot, as much as you can.
In other words, dreams are what you wish for. Goals are what you are prepared to work for ……..
No goals can contain the word ‘should’ in them. ‘I should loose weight’ is not a goal. It’s a bloodied stick that will beat you into stuffing your face even more with Doritos. Instead, ‘I want to be fit and healthy so I can feel my best for my fiftieth birthday’ is a goal you can get your wobbly behind behind. Instead, goals should be:
Manifestable
The goal can’t be so broad that you can’t put an action plan to it. Rather than wishing for something and then sitting back and hoping it happens, within each goal there are clearly visible actions to be taken, actions that will become habits that become your designed way of living. You are creating new habits that will ensure the success of your goal. You’ve got to be able to see it so well you can almost reach out and touch it. I want to drop a dress size by the summer, rather than I want to lose weight; I want to be able to run 10km by the end of the month, rather than I want to get fit; I want to have upskilled in three areas through online courses by the end of six months, rather than I want to keep learning. You have to be able to see it, feel it, taste it, breathe it, be it.
Appropriately ambitious
You have to be real. The goals have to be relevant to your life, and ambitiously achievable. They have to push you out of your comfort zone, but not into an alternative universe. Working six months of the year as a holiday rep in Greece is not an appropriate goal if you single parent three school-age children and have a local business. Building a business you can run off your laptop that allows you flexibility and freedom to travel once you have no dependants is an appropriately ambitious goal (mine as it happens). It is unlikely a fifty-year-old woman with an arts degree and no experience will become an astronaut, given the training required. It is entirely possible and appropriately ambitious for a fifty-year-old woman with an arts degree and no experience to go back to college to study business.
Grounded
It has to become embedded in your everyday life, not sitting on a shelf like a book that won’t get read. It has to be aspirational yet actionable, day by day. Wanting to drop a dress size in a month doesn’t mean anything if habits aren’t formed and maintained every day of that month. The actions and habits that underlie the goal are what will define its success. Eating sensibly and exercising regularly becomes a daily habit towards the goal of dropping a dress size. And the good thing about habits? Once they are embedded in your daily life like cleaning your teeth, they tend to become a way of life, not just a separate short-term activity.The weight loss happens as a result of the actions and habits, driven by the goal. Every step you take brings you closer. Even if it’s half a step one day, you are further along than you were yesterday.
Inspiring
If the goal feels like torture, your chances of success are about as likely as keeping this woman from her gin bottle on a Friday night. Goals should make you want to reach for, but not fall off, a cliff. It has to make you get out of bed, not hide under the duvet. It has to make it worth you pushing out your comfort zone into a new space where you leave behind an old habit, and welcome the newness (and strangeness of change), but not be so challenging you never get out of bed again. The magic doesn’t happen in the comfort zone; it happens in the growth zone. There may be growing pains but you are taller as a result. If the goal is a ‘should’ goal, it’s going to be a path of pain, ending in a ditch. If the goal is an ‘inner gut shouts YES! even while the heart is pounding’ goal, then the path may have bumps and potholes, but it’s going somewhere worth going. Hopefully with a Welcome Cocktail.
Constant congratulations
They say there is no gain without pain. So make sure the gain is worth the pain. This means that as you build your habits and actions to achieve your goal, the reward of the goal (at some distant point perhaps) may not always be enough to motivate you when the going gets tough along the way. So reward yourself along the way. If I go for a run this morning, not only will I feel great for doing it, but I’m going to make a really good breakfast. If I study for an hour even though I’m tired, I’m going to treat myself with two episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. If I don’t drink any alcohol during the week, I’ll treat myself to that nicer bottle of wine at the weekend. Everyone succeeds with support and congratulations so build it into your goal.
So your goal should be something you can see in your mind, touch, taste, and feel so much it’s a reality in waiting. It has to be appropriately ambitious for your reality without being limited by it. It has to get grounded in your day-to-day life, not be some added extra you can easily forget to action. It has to inspire you enough to catch your breath with anticipation and excitement at the thought of achieving it, not make you hold your breath in abject horror. It has to be a rewarding experience as well as a rewarding result, with a habit, or series of, self-congratulations along the way.
So, perhaps after Christmas, when you have taken the evidence to the bottle bank and eaten turkey leftovers 15 ways, grab a green juice, a pen and paper and think about you and the quiet revolution you want for yourself in the coming year.
I’d love to know what what you come up with.
To help you live with intention in the new year, I’m running my free 5 day Happier Happier Challenge Adventure again, starting on the 1st January. Each day I’ll send you a short video and prompt to help you build a happier mindset for the year ahead. All the details are here
If you’d like to take a moment to check in on your life to see how you can manage things differently, you can book a one hour 1:1 Discovery Coaching Session with me where you get to think about you, how to manage this life you are living, and invest some time and thought on you. Radical idea that, is it? To invest some time and thought on you? Details are here.
Paid subscribers get a 10% discount - just email me at alana@alanakirk.com
www.themidlifecoach.org
If you’d like to read the full version of my latest book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder Brighter it’s the perfect guide to a new year revolution. A self-guided book with lots of fun exercises you’ll end up with your own bespoke midlife (wo)manual… the perfect way to start the new year! All the details are here and on my website https://www.themidlifecoach.org/midliferedefined
For my paid subscribers, there is a 20% discount code if you email me.