Forward Momentum | My Word for 2024 and Some Goals
I love a new year. Nothing excites me more than the prospect of starting fresh, clearing away all the stagnancy of the past, and getting a clean slate. I’ve always believed in goal setting, vision boarding, and choosing a word or words to guide you through the year. Until recently, I started each January with a new paper planner where I planned out my goals and the steps I needed to accomplish them. While I will always adore the fun paper planners and might return to them someday, I decided to streamline and go digital for 2024.
In the old blogging days of the 2000s and 2010s, I shared monthly goal-tracking posts to hold myself accountable. Life has changed a lot since then, and now I prefer to keep most of my goals to myself but rest assured, my process of setting and tracking them remains the same.
When I chose my word for this year, I had to reflect on what has worked and what hasn’t in my past goals. For the last few years, under the wet blanket of COVID, I have been struggling with deep depression and anxiety. This led to many days where I kept myself busy but didn’t accomplish anything important … or I stayed buried under the covers all day and hid from the world. Either way, I wasn’t getting any closer to reaching my goals or doing the work I wanted to do.
Choosing my word was easy, but to make it work for me, I had to reframe how I was looking at goals in the first place. I am the most ambitious person when it comes to making plans for what I’m going to do. Come on, I’m an Enneagram one, after all. I have very high expectations and set even higher bars for myself, often ones that I’ll never be able to reach without obtaining some superpower. I needed to stop looking at goals as an all-or-nothing situation and start taking Lara Casey’s advice of “progress over perfection.”
It’s about the little bites, taking small, incremental steps to get where I want to go. The things I do this year won’t be the endgame for me. They will be just one puzzle piece in the larger picture of my long-term goals or dreams. So, the word I’ve chosen to navigate my year is …
Progress
[noun: prog-res verb: pruh-gres]
noun
a movement toward a goal or to a further or higher state.
verb
to go forward or onward in space or time.
to grow or develop, as in complexity, scope, or severity; advance.
Both the noun and verb forms of this word fit with how I intend to use it. My goals for the year are still ambitious, but I’m looking at them from the perspective of taking baby steps to make progress towards where I want to be. I set goals in twelve different areas of life: physical health, mental health, spiritual health, personal growth, marriage/partner, family/friends, career, home, pure joy/fun, adventure/travel, community, and finances. The overarching themes point to where I want to be ten years down the road, but each of my goals will help me make progress to that point.
Now, goals only work when you put them into action. So, after I chose the word and made the list of goals, I had to make the action items. Many of the habits I want to form focus on getting away from screen time. So, I’ve planned out weekly date nights, unplugged time while I’m working and in the evenings, monthly adventures, and bookshop visits. I want to be more intentional about how I spend my day so I can accomplish what’s important to me, and my calendar is full of reminders, so I won’t forget a step.
Am I still the ambitious, type-one overachiever? Hell yes, I am, but now I have the mindset of building momentum rather than trying to get it all done in a day. :)
