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From pipedreams to reality
8 January 2025
Being more intentional in 2025.
Where do you stand on New Year’s resolutions? Do they provide an invaluable roadmap for the year? Have they evaporated by February? Or do you avoid setting them on principle, like my husband? I used to be a fan, but in recent times I’ve approached New Year resolutions a little differently.
I still love taking advantage of the end of year lull to consider what I’m going to be committing time and effort to over the coming months, but I’ve shifted towards trying to make more intentional choices throughout the year, not just in January. Here are 4 reflective prompts that work for me, I hope you find them useful if you’re also keen to keep your intentions alive and kicking from month to month.
1. What matters most to you this year?
Taking the birdseye level here, is it finding a new challenge? Is it preserving stability in one aspect of your life, perhaps because you’re dealing with change in another? Is it persevering with an existing initiative or direction you’ve been investing in for a while so that you can realise more of the rewards? Is it freedom – releasing yourself from the status quo or stepping outside of your comfort zone in order to start a new chapter, master a new skill or explore a new facet of your identity?
2. What will it take to achieve this?
This is about the nitty gritty of execution, the steps you will take and when, that turn your priority (this conscious choice you are making) into a reality. I’m a recent convert to the 12 Week Year approach, which encourages you to set quarterly goals and weekly action plans to help you avoid procrastination and make steady progress. Planning across a whole year can feel pretty daunting plus it’s highly likely your context will change more than once. I trialled the 12 Week Year approach last autumn, including a ‘weekly accountability meeting’ (a 15 minute call every Monday) with another professional where we share our tasks for the week, what’s going well and if we’re not on track, what we might do in response. These WAMs have been working so well, we’re continuing with them in 2025.
3. How are you going to stick at your priority?
New Year’s resolutions notoriously fall by the wayside before long and this is often because the hardest aspect of achieving something important to you is making new habits stick. There’s some great advice on this in 2 books: Atomic Habits by James Clear and How To Change by Katy Milkman. It’s also something I coach people on – whole teams or on a 1:1 basis – so if you’d like a commitment-free exploratory conversation to discuss some coaching options further, book a time to chat here.
Think about who you might share your goals with, whether a close friend or colleague, your team, or by going big about it on Linked In or with other social media followers. This gives others permission to ask you ‘how is it going’ which can be a powerful nudge to help you recommit if you’re wobbling.
4. How are you going to bring more intentionality into the weeks and months ahead?
My top 3 pieces of advice on making more considered choices, week in and week out, that are aligned with your priority would be to:
I still love taking advantage of the end of year lull to consider what I’m going to be committing time and effort to over the coming months, but I’ve shifted towards trying to make more intentional choices throughout the year, not just in January. Here are 4 reflective prompts that work for me, I hope you find them useful if you’re also keen to keep your intentions alive and kicking from month to month.
1. What matters most to you this year?
Taking the birdseye level here, is it finding a new challenge? Is it preserving stability in one aspect of your life, perhaps because you’re dealing with change in another? Is it persevering with an existing initiative or direction you’ve been investing in for a while so that you can realise more of the rewards? Is it freedom – releasing yourself from the status quo or stepping outside of your comfort zone in order to start a new chapter, master a new skill or explore a new facet of your identity?
2. What will it take to achieve this?
This is about the nitty gritty of execution, the steps you will take and when, that turn your priority (this conscious choice you are making) into a reality. I’m a recent convert to the 12 Week Year approach, which encourages you to set quarterly goals and weekly action plans to help you avoid procrastination and make steady progress. Planning across a whole year can feel pretty daunting plus it’s highly likely your context will change more than once. I trialled the 12 Week Year approach last autumn, including a ‘weekly accountability meeting’ (a 15 minute call every Monday) with another professional where we share our tasks for the week, what’s going well and if we’re not on track, what we might do in response. These WAMs have been working so well, we’re continuing with them in 2025.
3. How are you going to stick at your priority?
New Year’s resolutions notoriously fall by the wayside before long and this is often because the hardest aspect of achieving something important to you is making new habits stick. There’s some great advice on this in 2 books: Atomic Habits by James Clear and How To Change by Katy Milkman. It’s also something I coach people on – whole teams or on a 1:1 basis – so if you’d like a commitment-free exploratory conversation to discuss some coaching options further, book a time to chat here.
Think about who you might share your goals with, whether a close friend or colleague, your team, or by going big about it on Linked In or with other social media followers. This gives others permission to ask you ‘how is it going’ which can be a powerful nudge to help you recommit if you’re wobbling.
4. How are you going to bring more intentionality into the weeks and months ahead?
My top 3 pieces of advice on making more considered choices, week in and week out, that are aligned with your priority would be to:
1 – Find a few minutes every week to look back at your priority/goal and remind yourself of why this matters so much to you. If you’ve got an image or a quote that conveys this, take a look at it. I’ve printed off my new book’s cover to remind me how much I care about sharing my ideas and knowledge in this way and how mindblowingly proud I’ll feel when I finally finish the manuscript.
2 – Decide how you’re going to carve out the time and effort to invest in your priority so that it can take shape. Otherwise it’ll fall off your radar and into the vast scrapheap of unrealised pipedreams. If freeing up time during an already packed week feels like mission impossible, try using my Time ROI tool here
to help you figure out what you could realistically stop doing, outsource, automate or continue doing.
3 - Accept that during the year you’ll likely get knocked off course, have setbacks and encounter curve balls. This is real life we’re dealing with – gloriously messy and frustratingly unpredictable - so your plan needs to be flexible not set in stone. Don’t beat yourself up if you fall behind or need to tweak it; as my wise WAM partner advised me: depersonalise it, treat it as interesting data, decide what you want to do in response. Ditch the guilt.
If you want to drop me a line
to tell me what your priority is this year, I’ll email you every quarter to ask you how it’s going. Good luck, I hope you make great progress and encounter fun and fulfilment along the way, whether you end up exactly where your roadmap intended you to be or somewhere slightly different that may just be even better.
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