Change Your Resolutions to Intentions
This is the time of year we pledge to ourselves to start doing things differently, and often those pledges take the form of New Year’s resolutions.
Unfortunately, research shows us that resolutions do little to effect change in our lives. By one count, only 9% of people who set resolutions actually successfully keep them, and most people give up on them entirely by the second Friday of January.
With that second Friday quickly approaching, I thought I’d offer a different tactic: setting intentions for the year ahead.
Within Tide Risers and my coaching practice, I like to guide people to create intentions rather than resolutions, and then to use those intentions to design meaningful, actionable goals. Intentions, when created thoughtfully, serve as a guide for how we want to BE in this world, whereas resolutions and goals are a reflection of what we want to DO. While all three are useful, goals and resolutions without intentionality often fall to the wayside.
Intentions are created based on our values.
Within Tide Risers, we always use our values as a foundation for the practice of creating intentions. Because our values are so fundamentally linked to our motivations and our aspirations, using them to direct the creation of intentions makes those intentions much more meaningful, and ensures we are more likely to follow through on them.
Importantly, intentions open us up to the potential to find new, creative solutions to long-standing problems.
That’s because by setting intentions we are not presuming we know the outcome before we even get started, as is often the case with goals and resolutions. Intentions give us the opportunity to explore a multitude of pathways, take on board new learning, and be more creative with our problem solving.
As an example, these are my 2023 intentions (how I want to BE):
Bring new thinking to old problems
Seek adventure
Find learning in unexpected places
Serve others
A selection of the goals (or things I want to DO) to support each of these intentions include:
Launch coaching offerings using equine facilitated learning practices (check out my first opportunity to do this here!).
Expand my business in ways that provide adventure for me (more to come on this in the months ahead!).
When I come across a challenge or failure, look for the learning, record it, and move on.
Dedicate at least two hours a week to volunteer work.
Next, I’ll attach more specific metrics and milestones to each of my goals so that I can keep track of them during the year.
But how, you might ask, do we track our intentions?
Well, we’re creating opportunities to do just that this year for members of Tide Risers. I will be hosting quarterly accountability check-in sessions throughout 2023 to give Tide Risers the opportunity to review their intentions, so that they can stay on track and make adjustments along the way as needed. Importantly, because we do this within the framework of the Tide Risers network, members will also benefit from the broad resources of our community if they get stuck along the way.