Grow With Soul: Ep. 95 - My Goals For 2021 And Setting Your Own Gentle Goals
Hello, and welcome to episode 95 of Grow With Soul - and to the first episode of 2021! Today’s episode is in two parts. The first part of this episode is a recording of my Goals, Intentions and Word Of The Year blog post, unsurprisingly sharing what my goals are for this year and where my focus is - after sharing my End Of Year Thoughts like this I found be a really lovely and intimate way to share these kinds of thoughts. Then I’ll close out with a second part with a few thoughts on thinking about and approaching your planning for this year. Let’s dive in!
Here's what I talk about in this episode:
How global and personal uncertainty is influencing goal setting this year
My word of the year for 2021 and 4 specific focuses within it
My 2021 goals and intentions
Coming up with plans and goals based on how you want to feel in your work, as opposed to how it looks
Using a towards and within approach to set ‘being' goals alongside SMART goals
Links I mention:
Read the full episode transcript:
Hello, and welcome to episode 95 of Grow With Soul – and to the first episode of 2021! Today’s episode is in two parts. The last episode that went up was a bonus episode, where I recorded my End Of Year Thoughts blog post, as a few people had mentioned that it was easier for them to listen than read – and in the recording of that episode, I found it to be really lovely and intimate way to share those kinds of thoughts. So the first part of this episode is a recording of my Goals, Intentions and Word Of The Year blog post, unsurprisingly sharing what my goals are for this year and where my focus is. Then, I’ll close out with a second part with a few thoughts on thinking about and approaching your planning for this year. Let’s dive in!
This new year is different. This new year, there is not the clean break to “start again” that other years have. Of course, this is always the case; the ticking over of a digit at the end of the year is arbitrary, and denotes nothing but our human need to control and measure time. Usually, we manage to kid ourselves that the ticking over is meaningful, can birth us anew into a whole different world – but this year, with ongoing lockdowns and vaccine rollouts and continuing deaths around the world, it is harder to feel the change in the air.
I hadn’t meant for this post to start off quite so depressing. Amongst it all, always, are reasons for optimism and hope – the very fact that there are vaccines rolling out, that people are continuing to keep their communities safe, for instance. I suppose what I’m saying is, it feels pretty darn arbitrary to be setting goals right now. 2020 showed us how laughably easy it was for your precious goals and dreams to be swept away by a torrent of circumstance and doomscrolling, and with so much still in limbo, it feels a little pointless to set goals you have no idea whether you’ll be able to work on or not.
However, there is a point. The point is, it makes me feel better.
I like to set goals and make plans; planning is essentially my hobby. I like to feel like I am carving out agency in my life, and making decisions on where it goes. I like to have a destination to point myself towards. I like to dream and have ideas and see how I could make something work. So, I’m still setting my word, deciding some goals, focusing on some intentions, although they are a little more open-ended this year.
Aside from the dystopian backdrop of the pandemic, in my personal life I am also carrying a lot of uncertainty. Right now, I don’t even know where I’m going to live after January. So I’m not making a whole lot of SMART goals this year, because how can one decide what’s specific and measurable and relevant right now? Instead, my goals are mostly practices and promises – joyful things I want to have more of every day and things I want to do for myself.
WORD OF THE YEAR 2021
Light
I think I knew this was my word back at the end of November. I played around with a few others, but it always came back to Light. Last year my word (Powerful) was a general feeling I wanted to embody, but with Light I have four specific focuses:
Seeing Light – in a year where I know I will have personal challenges and some dark times to navigate, I want to always, in the words of Morgan Harper Nichols, “look for where the light gets in”. See the light in situations and face towards the sun.
Being Light – I am a person of the earth, and have a tendency to ground myself so deeply where I am that I become immovable like a tree. I hold onto things for too long, physically and emotionally. So I want to remind myself to be light, to not shoulder too much, or plant myself too heavily. I think about being a kite: still connected to earth but free to roam whichever breeze I choose.
Feeling Light – there has been heaviness in 2020, and there will be heaviness in 2021. That unease in your chest, like the agitation of knowing you’ve forgotten something important, or the dread of a funeral in the morning. While I won’t always be able to avoid the heaviness, I want to give myself opportunities to feel light, to shift the anvil with some sunshine.
Emanating Light – I did not show up in my business and the world in the way I would like in 2020. Not beating myself up about it, I had a lot going on, but in 2021 I will need community and my work more than ever – so I want this to be a reminder to show up with lightness and work that I’m proud of.
2021 GOALS
Turnover £56k in 2021
In order to pay all my bills, have a little aside for unforeseen issues and be able to have lunch with a friend every couple of weeks, I need to make £27k – that is where I break even as a human. My business expenses are generally around £6k a year, and so I’d like to take home £50k to have a financial buffer.
Maybe this sounds like a big goal, maybe it sounds quite pedestrian in a world of six figure incomes. Previously, I’ve set myself big money goals, but I don’t actually find them particularly inspiring – in fact, they feel like pressure rather than momentum. So I’m shooting for what I need to feel safe.
Create a new book proposal and submit to agents by the autumn
I mentioned my first book proposal in my end of year thoughts, and how what I created was probably a better course than a book. So this year, I want to start over with the book and approach it differently. I want to take time to just explore, to jot down random paragraphs and play with ideas and let the book emerge, rather than force it through a piping nozzle that’s the wrong shape. But also, I want it to happen, so I am putting a deadline on the play and a deadline on turning it into something.
Read 24 books
I know some people read 24 books in a month, but a numerical goal has to be achievable. In 2020 I finished 11 books (and have three that I’m halfway through); two years ago I read ONE book. Two books a month feels a do-able stretch, but also that I could beat it, which is apparently important to my competitive streak.
Go on a solo trip
This may be a little ambitious given, you know, everything. But perhaps around my 30th, or maybe in the summer, I want to take a trip on my own. I’ve done this a lot in the past, enamoured with the romanticism, but have never been very good at it. When it’s “just me”, I don’t make the effort to have nice dinners and visit nice places like I do with a companion – I’d like to take a solo trip where I treat myself.
INTENTIONS
Move my body every day
There was a point, about six months ago, where, overwhelmed and in crisis, I was living off garlic pizza breads and spending most of my time in bed. Since ending my relationship, I have walked, more or less, every single day. I started, in the ten minutes it takes for the bath to run, doing a short circuit of exercises remembered from my gym bunny days on the bathroom floor. It’s been tiny, tiny increments, but I feel stronger in my body, and I realised how much better I feel on the days I do it than the days I don’t. So, continuing into 2021, I will move my body every day. Even just for ten minutes.
Write every day
I always hated the idea of doing something every day. I love variety, and would always rather spend a couple of hours once a week bashing out thousands of words than doing a little every day. I probably will still approach blogging and podcasts in this way. But in December I took a Beth Kempton writing class, where each day you listened to a poem and then free-wrote for five minutes on anything the poem sparked.
I learned a few things doing this. One, I wrote some really good stuff in those sparks. Two, my imagination got better, and my sentences more lyrical in my day to day. Three, after the doing the five minute spark I would often go into another Google doc and add some extra paragraphs to a different project. Fourth, I loved the rhythm of ending my day with five minutes of writing, a series of punctuation marks in my week. So, as part of my book project but mostly for myself, I will write every day. Even just for five minutes.
Gift myself something every month
I have a tendency towards asceticism; someone once told me I was a “natural minimalist”. I talk myself out of purchases with ease, and I’m happy to go without things that aren’t in the bottom two tiers of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. But this is also how you get to the point where you’re eating nothing but garlic pizza bread and sleeping 12 hours a day. So in 2021, I promise to treat myself.
I’ve set myself a gifting budget that is just to be spent on me. It might be something big, like that solo trip or a new tarot deck; it might be a bunch of flowers from the supermarket. But I want, in big and small ways, to make sure I’m making myself feel special. This is also going to include booking time off. When I set my email auto-responder up in December, I noticed that I hadn’t put my out of office on since last Christmas, so I will give myself some intentional time off too.
More intuitive yes’s
As I also touched on in my end of year post, last year I ended up, unconsciously, sticking to my comfort zone, and saying no to almost everything. I thought I was protecting myself from burnout and affirming boundaries, but really I was closing myself off from the world. In 2021, I want to reconnect. When I see an online event I like the sound of, I’m just going to book it instead of thinking of all the reasons why it would be more comfortable not to bother. When I’m invited to speak or write somewhere, it won’t be an automatic no but instead I’m going to think (crazy right?) about whether it’s actually a yes. This isn’t saying yes to everything, it’s just not saying no to everything – taking the time to check in with what I truly want to do.
This is not a year of growth, but of discovery. That’s the last thing I wrote to myself in my end of year tarot spread. When I say growth, I’m talking about business. I don’t need to worry over Instagram followers and newsletter subscribers this year, I don’t need to shoot for all the figures or be the world’s most visible woman. I am tired just thinking about “pushing for growth”. I have some repairing to do; some recovering. But most of all, I have some discovering to do. Discovering who I am as a newly single, nearly 30-year-old. Discovering what I actually like to do when I’m not placating a partner. Discovering how my purpose, and it’s application in my work, shifts in this new phase. Which feels altogether more exciting… I hope you’ll join me.
COMING UP WITH PLANS AND GOALS
As I said right at the beginning of this episode, there is a strangeness to making goals this year. Most Januarys, the internet has this hyper achievement-orientated atmosphere, a real “you can do it, dream big – no dream bigger than that” dialogue that can feel like a lot. I know it can drag you to a place where you’re not sure why you’re shooting for the goals you set, because I’ve done that too. This year there is less of that, but it also feels like a good time to get into a new January habit, of setting goals more gently.
For me this is all about balance, and practising a Towards and Within approach, where you have goals that are taking you towards fulfilment, but also intentions and being goals that mean you are existing within fulfilment and enjoying your life at the same time. Not placing all your hopes for happiness in some future place, but enjoying life in the here and now too.
The place to start in all of this is to have a vision for how you want to feel in your work. This isn’t about what you want it to look like, because we can get thrown off course by expectations and comparison and what we think we want when we do that. By focusing on how you want to feel, on an average day in your working life six months from now, you can capture what you really want.
I have spoken about my emotive vision on the podcast before, how it was me pottering in my garden and having nowhere to be and nothing to get back for. With the shifts of my life in the last few months, I realised that vision was no longer true – not only was the garden literally not going to be mine anymore, but that wasn’t how I wanted to feel in my work anymore. As I sat down to try to plan the specifics of how I was going to reach the goals here, what I was actually going to do, I had no ideas other than burning it all down and never talking about marketing again. Which was really just frustration at being out of alignment with what I really wanted; I didn’t need to rip it all up, I needed a new vision. I needed something to work towards that would excite me and help the ideas to flow.
In my new vision, I am taking a moment to stand at the back door and watch a rainstorm, breathing in the smell and listening to the sound of it on the roof. I am holding my tea and feeling unhurried, peaceful, with no great worries troubling me. I am working on a couple of projects that bring me great joy in different ways – a few clients, the book, a workshop – and I’m excited to go back to work on them, but not to the detriment of a few quiet minutes with the rain.
There is no right way to get to your vision. For this one I simply closed my eyes for a few moments and focused on what the feeling was that I wanted; the image of the rainstorm was one that had resonated deeply with me when I wrote it in my last newsletter, and so that served as a jumping off point for the rest. You’re really just imagining yourself on a day 6 months from now – be clear about what time of year that is to ground you in it – and how you want to be on that day. Who’s there, if anyone, what you’re doing, if anything, how you feel in your chest and gut. Once you have a scenario that feels inspiring yet also grounded and achievable (not you flying to Bora Bora on your private jet) it feels calming, and then the ideas start to come. You start to be able to see how everything slots into place to get to that feeling – not just in 6 months time, but tomorrow too.
Because that’s the other thing with the vision – it is the basis for your Towards and Within actions. You can set goals and plan projects that take you towards that point in 6 months time, and they maintain momentum and forwardness in your business. This is where one or two SMART goals (goals that are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Time-bound) can be useful. My book proposal goal is one of these – I have a deadline on it, I know what needs to happen and what ‘done’ looks like. That goal is one of the big threads going through my year.
But your vision also leaves you space for the Being goals, where you can experience that vision with your every day. So my intention for more intuitive yes’s speaks to my wanting to feel excited about my work, and have projects I’m passionate about – I can start that tomorrow. Writing every day, reading more books, learning – these are all things that are the application of how I want to feel, but I don’t have to wait until I can feel it.
You may be thinking “well this is all very lovely but I do need to make some money this year”, and I hear you. My annual financial goal is one of the SMART goals I’m working towards, and you can approach it simply. What I often find in my own thinking about money is that I think it’s worse than it really is – lack of financial clarity breeds catastrophising. When I get granular about what I need (exactly how much my bills are, what my weekly coffee dates cost, how much I want to spend on clothes in a year, my business costs) I realise that I don’t have as much of a financial mountain to climb that my brain was telling me I did. Then, when you look at the projects and income streams available to you, you can see exactly what you need to do to hit, or exceed that number – for example, perhaps booking 6 clients will pay your rent for 6 months, maybe three sales of your course a month covers all your bills. Once you’re clear on what you need and how your income streams can provide it, you know where to start focusing your sales activity.
