Setting intentions for the new year
I’m sure you’ve seen the memes and comments circulating on the internet, about how a planner for 2020 turned out to be pointless, etc. “Why bother planning for 2021?” then sounds logical, right? Well, yes and no.
In my experience, setting intentions is always worth it. Planning is optional.
Intentions include things like how you want the coming year to feel, and what sorts of things you might want to do or accomplish in 2021. It could mean choosing a word for the year for yourself, as I explained in my previous post, or it could mean creating some thematic intentions: perhaps you want it to be more about personal growth, improving family bonds, trying new things, building financial security.
Maybe you have multiple intentions, which is 100% allowed and actually more realistic. Single focus is rarely a thing for most of us, even when we want it to be.
What do you want to manifest? This could for yourself, your relationships, and/or in your career or business. Remember that “manifest” means “to make evident”, which is a way of saying that you bring it about in your actual life. The easiest way to manifest a new bicycle is probably to buy it. The easiest way to manifest a sense of ease in your life may be to engage in regular gratitude practice.
The idea behind setting these intentions is that you don’t have to 100% know how what you intend for yourself will come about, but you do know how you’d like to show up in the world, and how you’d like the world (or Universe) to show up in return.
Here are some steps to help you figure out your intentions for the coming year. You start by dumping a lot of information into a funnel, then distill it down, then keep the good stuff:
Do a brain dump. Write down all the things you can think of that you want to BE, want to DO, and would like to HAVE in 2021.
Once you have your list, look to see if there are common themes, dreams, or goals in there. Perhaps pour a cuppa (tea, coffee, wine, water, whatever) and sit quietly for 10 to 30 minutes. You can meditate if you’d like, or just ponder the ideas in your list. Listen for inner guidance—perhaps one of your ideas causes you to feel butterflies of excitement, but another causes you to clench or grit your teeth. Follow that guidance: excitement is okay, but if something repels you, you don’t have to keep it.
Once you have sorted through, see if you can find some common threads that can help you form clearer intentions for yourself. Maybe it’s that you need to say “no” more often, remembering that a “no” to someone else is a YES to yourself. Maybe you need to work on your physical or mental health. Find those bigger themes and ideas and then take a new piece of paper and write them down.
Once you have your intentions for 2021 written down, you can hang the list where you will see it often, if you’d like. Or you can tape it to the back of a mirror that you look into often, which is a way of releasing those intentions, but also being quietly reminded of them as you look into the mirror each day.
I hope you can see that intention setting, as done above, is quite separate from planning. Planning involves dates and times and specific actions and (often) deadlines. Intentions do not.
Please please remember that there is no deadline for this. I like to look at a card that I purchased from Curly Girl Design. It says: “It is important to remember that the beginning can be anywhere along the way.”
If you are feeling frazzled and are ready for 2020 be over, but not ready to plan anything yet, please know that I’m with you. It’s okay to ease into the new year. It’s okay to just be.
I am planning on an easy start to 2021.
I will be hosting a DREAMS TO GOALS event the first weekend in February. This program is designed to help you cast a vision for yourself for the remainder of 2021, then to select one or more of those dreams you have and pull it into the real world through journaling and other exercises. Finally, I will guide you through the process of converting one of your dreams into a goal, and to determining what the first few steps toward it might be, and what “mile markers” you might set along the way.
The cost for this course hasn’t been established yet, but will be under $100 to make it accessible. I hope to have my shit together enough to get this up and posted before the close of 2020. (That’s my intention, anyhow—now I need to have a plan in place to make it real.)
