How we set intentions & goals for the new year

As 2022 came to a close, I thought it would be great to take a moment to share how we reflect on the past year, celebrate our achievements, set our intentions for the new year along with a few aspirational goals and how we make sure we are working towards the year ahead of us. 

Step 1 – Review

The first part of this process is to review what we’ve done in 2022. Since I practice journaling every day using my ReMarkable II this is quite an easy process for me. If you do not journal, no worries, I’m sure you can remember the highlights of the past year and write them down.

I use the following template to help me organize what I achieved in the past year.

This template is comprised of the following categories: 

1. (Love) Relationship: this is about your love relationship 
2. Family: this is about everyone you consider being part of your ‘family’.
3. Friends / Community: this is about your friends and your community as a whole
4. Health / Fitness: this is about keeping both your body and your mind in great shape
5. Passion / Work projects: this is about your career (or passion project if you are retired)
6. Finance / Investment: this is all about your money 
7. Personal Development: this is about what you learn that helps you grow and become a better version of yourself
8. Fun / Travel: this is about play in general 

For each of these categories, I have a ‘highlight’ (+) and a ‘lowlight’ (-) section that I fill out.

Depending on how organized you are and how detailed you want to get into, this can take anytime from 30 minutes to a couple of hours to complete.

This is an important exercise to do as looking at the past can inform you of areas you would like to focus more on in the future as well as things that you would like to stop doing.

Step 2 – Celebrate

Now take a moment to celebrate your accomplishments in 2022. This can be as simple as taking a moment to feel grateful for everything you’ve accomplished or as fancy as planning a proper celebration for yourself (and your partner if you are in a relationship).

We recently learned that people spend a lot of effort to set goals, complete them but never take time to celebrate them. So this year, we are intentionally going to have a special day to celebrate everything we accomplished in 2022 and we wish you to do the same! 

Step 3 – Set up Intentions (& Goals)

The next part is to come up with your intentions for the year to come.
Intentions are things we would like to focus on.

• I would like to be more present
• I would like to make more conscious choices
• I would like to spend more quality time with my partner
• I would like to only spend money on things that add value to my life and bring me joy
• …

Once you have your intentions for the year, you probably want a way to make sure you work towards them and this is where goals can be useful.

Important: make sure that your goals are actionable, specific, measurable and have an expiration date (instead of being fluffy). Also make sure the goal does not focus on the outcome but on the intention. So for instance, if you would like to lose weight, your intention should be about becoming a healthy person that only eats food when you feel hungry, eat food that nourishes your body and exercise to keep your body moving. So this could translate into goals like:

• I will attend a yoga class 3 times a week
• I will eat at least one meal per day that I cook at home with whole foods that I will get myself from the farmers market

Once you have your goals, write them down and use the same categories as before to organize them and put them under each of your intentions for the year.

Important: Less is more, so do not come up with 50 goals as you will not likely be able to do most of them. Just focus on a few intentions and 1-2 goals for each of them. This should give you more than enough things to focus on.

Step 4 – Measure progress

While intentions / goals are great to have for the year to come, it is probably more important to make progress on them than just creating them.

One easy way to do this is to list your goals/intentions on a sheet of paper that you can look at every day. And then once a week (or once a month) you can review them and assess how you are doing. An easy way of doing this is to write each goal on a piece of paper and give yourself a score (like from 1 to 5) and explain why you give yourself that score.

Important: If you realize that the goals are way too easy or way too hard, feel free to adjust them.

So this is in a nutshell how we go about looking back at the past year and setting our intentions/goals for the new year. We wish you a happy and healthy 2023 and hope that you accomplish your goals!

Do you like reflecting on the past year to inform what you would like to do in the next year? Or do you prefer instead not setting any new year intentions and going with the flow? Let us know by leaving us a comment in the comment section below.

Happy New Year!