Resolutions vs. Intentions
Happy 2024!
Does this New Year’s Resolution Scenario sound familiar?
‘The new year is approaching and you start thinking about how overindulgent you’ve been with food and drink over the last couple of months or maybe the entire last year. You quickly purchase a gym membership and tell yourself you’ll go to the gym every weekday of the new year and you will lose 20 pounds. At first, you do great and go to the gym every weekday for about two to three weeks. You are more conscious about your eating, you’re prepping your meals and maybe you even cut out alcohol and do ‘Dry January.’ But after those initial first weeks, you’re just not seeing as many results as you thought you would see by now. Your pants aren’t fitting much differently, your energy hasn’t really improved, the scale hasn’t budged. Going to the gym just feels like more work in your day and eating such a strict diet makes you start feeling irritable and really, like you’re missing out on something greater. Maybe you are even a bit jealous or resentful of your friends and family who are still eating and drinking whatever they want. You start to slip. You don’t go to the gym everyday and you stop eating consciously, snacking on whatever comes along. At first you tell yourself that it's okay to skip and have cheat days on your eating and you’ll make up for it the following day. But then, you start toggling between two worlds: The ‘World of the New Resolution’ and the ‘World of Your Future-Self.’ One side of you says, I need to stick to that resolution. It's something I’ve been wanting to accomplish or change for a long time and now is my chance; I will dedicate myself at any cost. The other side of you says, if I try to accomplish that goal I will need to deprive myself of things that bring me joy, and YOLO. This pull and push between those two worlds is mentally and physically exhausting and one (usually the YOLO) takes over. For a bit, you feel content and maybe even upbeat with your decision to just embrace your future self and live it up, maybe even more abundantly than before your New Year's Resolution. But you quickly descend into self-deprecation about how you knew you wouldn't be able to accomplish your resolution anyway. You tell yourself you deserve to be [insert horrible inner critic thoughts]. With that, you quickly end up back in your old habits and just like that, your New Year's Resolution is over, almost as quickly as it came in.’
If that scenario describes any resolutions you’ve ever made, you’ll see why I prefer setting intentions instead of resolutions. Resolutions lend themselves toward the absolute, either complete cessation or complete achievement of something, leaving little room for learning from failure, and moreover, little room to live up to our own unrealistic expectations you’ve set for yourself around that resolution.
To be successful in tackling something large and presumably as meaningful as most resolutions are, takes planning, acceptance of the goal as a journey (not a quick fix), and the creation of what I will call achievable micro-goals. As you saw in that New Year Resolution Scenario, being extremely rigid and too quick to go big in any approach to a goal can create burnout, self-deprecation, guilt and more.
So, in short, intentions leave you with the grace and space to handle ambiguity. Intentions are just that, an intent not a have-to do something. While intent suggests that you may not achieve something, really, it means you just may not achieve it in the manner in which you set out to. Intention is about not only setting the goal or your desired future state but also setting intentions around how you will see yourself and talk to yourself if and realistically when things don’t go exactly as planned.
So how do we set an intention?
1. Like any goal, in order to stay motivated and excited about it, it has to really mean something special to you. Understanding your Big MOFA or big motivating factor is your first step. Why does changing this thing mean so much to you? How will you show up differently? How will others see you differently? What will that change fundamentally do for you that you can’t do right now? There are so many questions to ask to get at the root of why you care so much but it is worth spending some introspective time on your big MOFA.
2. Next, acknowledge that this is a journey and that you are unique and your journey will not look like anyone else's. It becomes easy to compare ourselves to others and what they have achieved, and know that you too can achieve a great deal of things, just not in the same way that someone else did because you’re YOU. You are a glorious individual and your uniqueness and individuality makes you beyond special. Most intentional change takes time and there isn’t just a watershed moment where it’s all different and great. If you really accept that it is going to be a journey filled with ups and downs, you are preparing yourself to meet ambiguity with grace and opportunity and lessen your chances for burnout and giving up completely.
3. When we feel burnout we can descend into self-deprecation and guilt which can put us back at the beginning, or leave us feeling even worse than we did when we started. You don’t have to believe everything your brain is telling you, and please don’t. We can be so mean to ourselves sometimes. The way to overcome this is to set micro-goals for yourself, smaller meaningful steps that as each is achieved provide you confidence and motivation to keep moving forward toward that larger goal. Rather than going big or going home, you allow yourself to set very achievable milestones that leave you feeling pumped!
As a health and life coach, I know how important it is to build confidence and tell our inner critics to shut up. If you feel like you need that push toward accountability in accomplishing your goals, find a coach, like me. We won’t tell you what to do, but we will ask you the right questions to allow you to make the right choices for yourself.