In 2021, I stopped making resolutions and started doing something different.
Each year, I spend some time in the last week of the year and I choose three guiding phrases, three things I plan to use to keep myself on track in my own growth and evolution. Then, whenever I'm confronted with a choice, I consider those mantras and ask myself which choice keeps me closer to that path.
My 2024 phrases were Learn for Leadership, Improve Your Space, and Cultivate Community. Throughout the year, I've found them leading me back to empathy, simplicity, connection, and authenticity, and while my growth hasn't been particularly linear, I'm pretty happy with the direction of my overall personal evolution. For 2025, I'm keeping one of the three: Learn for Leadership. It's not only helped me choose my reading and educational materials, but it's been an incentive to dive more deeply into learning *people*, becoming more curious and understanding of them, and it continues to be an incredibly useful lens for the world. For the other two, I'm taking the lessons I've learned and contemplating where I want the next stage of my personal journey to lead.
One thing I've definitely been working with and through recently is the understanding of my own impact in the world. I'm learning that I have far more capacity to effect change, and far more power, than I realized, and I'm also learning that even my most well-intentioned missteps still carry a weight that can hurt others, no matter how much I may try to avoid it. For that reason, I'm choosing Own Your Impact as the second of my guiding phrases for the year, to help me confront my own responsibility to act, and my own accountability for my actions.
The third phrase has been really hard to select, to the point that I seriously considered moving forward with only two this year rather than set myself a guiding mantra I don't really mean. Amusingly enough, *that* thought is what led me to a clearer choice. I've spent a lot of my life choosing my end goals by the paths available to me in the space where I was, but right now I find myself looking at some clear end goals I'd like to achieve, and diverse paths I could take to reach them. I can't take all the paths, though; I have to figure out the best way to move forward from where I am and reach where I want to get, and spend my time and energy judiciously. To that end, the third guiding phrase I'm selecting is Define Your Journey, both to help me remember that I need to consciously choose my own path on my own terms, and to remind me that I can't do all the things, I have to do the things that make sense for my goals.
This year is also a departure for me, in that for the first years each set of mantras evolved from the previous almost directly, so that Always Be Learning has changed a little each year to reach Learn for Leadership, and Claim Your Space has grown into Improve Your Space, and Build Connection has transformed into Cultivate Community. This likely means that Learn For Leadership may become a persistent life mantra for me, but it doesn't mean that owning and improving my space or cultivating community goes away; it more likely means that doing so has become integrated into my approach to the world well enough that I can bring in more active considerations as I move forward.
I made this change in 2021 because I have a long history of setting resolutions with the absolute best of intentions, and getting partway through the year only to find myself thrown off by unexpected challenges. I got to the end of 2020, and I looked at my aspirations from the beginning of that year: travel more, spend more time doing things with friends, accomplish new ideas and programs at work. What I actually did that year was survive, completely overhaul my job, build out my online support network, and spend a lot of time gardening. I thought "How, in the world as it is right now, can I possibly even consider resolving to improve myself? Why fucking bother?" Instead, I asked myself what would have helped me weather 2020 better, and I realized that having these kinds of guideposts was better for me, in a complex and uncertain world.
Should you do this? Maybe. I think that more people will probably be helped by sitting down to think about the principles they want guiding them than coming up with very specific habits or practices they want to adopt. Several times in the last several years, life has thrown plot twists and curveballs that forced me to reconsider my goals, and each time I've found that process made much easier and less demoralizing by being able to take those changes and approach them with my guiding principles in hand, reframing instead of discarding. Even if my goalposts change, I'm still playing by my own rules.
One thing I can say: if the thought of doing this scares you or feels daunting, if sitting down to consider your own guiding ethos feels incredibly intimidating, and if setting intentions at this level seems like something you're absolutely not capable of doing, you should almost certainly do it.
I love you all.
