The funny thing about goals and resolutions
The funny thing about goals and resolutions is that they require something that humans are hard-wired against: change.
Because goals are not achieved in a single bound, but by building, brick by brick, choice by choice, the road to get there.
It takes more than one lesson to learn to play the piano.
It takes more than getting off the couch for a week to become an athlete.
It takes more than foregoing a single purchase to build wealth
Goals are achieved through building habits around them, by becoming someone who simply does the things, day in and day out. Even when they don’t want to, even when it’s not convenient. It takes a certain kind of person to endure the process of becoming someone else.
Because that’s what it takes to achieve goals, to develop habits that are new: becoming someone who does.
Going from not working out to someone who does pilates regularly.
Switching from a career in accounting in a corporate firm to working for an organization more aligned with your beliefs.
Having the hard conversations with, as Brené Brown puts it, a strong back and an open heart.
These all require becoming someone different, someone new.
The person who says, “I have class at that time, how about another?”
The person who says, “This doesn’t work for me anymore” and consistently shows up for what does.
Evolution doesn’t happen overnight. It took humans millennia to evolve into Homo sapiens.
No single generation woke up dramatically different from their parents—the changes were so incremental as to be invisible in any given lifetime.
This is what habit formation feels like too. You won’t wake up on day three as someone who ‘does pilates regularly.’ You’ll feel exactly the same (if maybe a bit sore). But show up enough times, and one day you’ll realize the identity shift has already happened—you’ve already become that person without noticing the exact moment it occurred.
Achieving goals, becoming someone who does the things necessary to do so, is a process— one that requires a balance of intention and surrender.
Intention to make the choices necessary to establish the habit.
Surrender to the process of what it takes to do something new. There is ease in acceptance, of making the choices necessary, of not forcing the outcome. It’s allowing things to unfold on their own timeline, and to know that things unfold not as we want them to, but as we need them to.
Enjoy the ride.