2012: Goals, not resolutions

I’ve never been much into New Year’s Resolutions. My favourite example of a NYR of all time is my friend Adri’s resolution some years back. She resolved to “eat a different pork-based product” every day. This, to me, is the perfect NYR. Achievable, and hilarious.

So while I feel that there are certain things in my life that I wish to focus on this year, I hesitate to call them resolutions. For one thing, the changes I want to make are likely to be somewhat incremental and while I hope to keep my “resolve”, I am also aware that having a generic description like “lose weight”and “get fit” can set me up to fail. Partly, because it’s not specific in how I will achieve this (divine intervention would be preferred), and secondly because it focuses on the negative, not on the positive. If I’m not “losing” weight, I’m failing. If I’m not “getting” fit, I’m failing. And if I feel like I’m starting to fail, I tend to throw the whole thing away and settle in front of the TV with a packet of Tim Tams for solace.

I tried to get an idea of what this difference between “resolutions” and “goals” is beyond the vague feelings within my mind. According to dictionary.com resolution is the determination to do something, whereas a goal is the result to which effort is directed. I guess I’m more results-based and don’t feel I have a “will of iron” to just plow through stuff – if I did, I think I’d be one of those skinny people who can run a million kms on the weekend for fun – so I’m going to go with goals. From the few articles I found, I will replace the generic resolution “lose weight, get fit” with the specific goal “focus on my physical health through eating well and exercising regularly” and then have defined actions. This approach also fits in with some training in Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT) I did last year which asks you to focus on your values. That led to me realising I was spending too much time in the “work” portion of my work/life balance. I think I’ve changed that significantly in the last few months, which is somewhat explains why my internet presence has declined steadily on twitter, my blogs, and even facebook. I’ve been spending less time “plugged in” because I have so much trouble switching off the work part of my brain, so I’ve annexed it. I hope to get more balance with that this year – but as my rudimentary research on the internets tells me to only have a couple of goals, I will not prioritise social media balance this year. This may be the first of many posts chronicling my goals for the year, or my last. Time will tell.

Back to the point of this post, which is to set out my positive goals , their specifics and ideas as to how I will measure and celebrate them.

1. Focus on my physical health – eating well
2. Focus on my physical health – exercising regularly
3. Focus on my physical health – limit headaches and chronic pain

Wow, that’s already three. And probably more than enough for a year, if I’m really honest. Within all of these goals there is a broader commonality than just the focus on my physical health – in order to achieve these goals, I will need to do a little bit every day. This is something that I am not great at. I have traditionally been a flood or famine, all or nothing kind of person. I am definitely the hare in the famous story featuring a tortoise. My father used to call me “Burns-candle-at-both-ends”, but he didn’t give me a faux-native-American name for the inevitable result of the former, which would have been something like “Falls-in-a-heap-and-sleeps-for-a-week”.

And on that note, I think I will leave the specifics for another post.

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