Goals, aspirations, plans for 2022 – the different and more nurturing approach I'm taking this year
I’m pretty sure there’s not a person on this earth who wouldn’t agree that 2021 was a harder year than most. I started 2021, like many, with the hope that the whole pandemic fiasco would fizzle out with the speedy development and administration of effective vaccines. This hope quickly dwindled with the news that Germany would remain in lockdown for an undefined period of time.
Lockdowns eventually ended, things resumed to a sort-of normal (again), and we managed to take our first holiday in two years. But then, enter Omicron, and once again the uncertainty beast reared its ugly head. It really does feel like a marathon that has an ever-extending finish line (not that I’ve ever run a marathon, so I don’t really know from experience. Let’s say it’s like a never-ending PhD – I know all about that!).
Normally I love the end of the year and the clean slate of a new year. I usually relish in musing about hopes and dreams and plans and goals in December, and jumping right into them in January. But, 2021 felt different. During December, I was more tired, more cranky, more fearful. These feelings just didn’t mesh well with making abundant, hopeful plans.
I also started getting really stressed out, realising that 2021 was quickly coming to an end and I felt swamped with stuff that I still wanted to do with such little time. There were articles I wanted to write, book manuscripts I wanted to get further along, plans for my writing ‘business’ seedling I wanted to enact, and there were also more mundane organisational tasks I wanted to do that I normally feel are necessary at the end of the year but even more so this past year with all my various writing files and ‘stuff’ that sometimes just feels all over the place.
In short, I had a lot I wanted to do but I didn’t feel like I had enough time. I also didn’t feel like I had the energy to approach it in the way that I normally do – which is to use the energy of the year transition to make big changes.
After mulling over these thoughts for a couple of weeks in December, I came up with my solution:
My problem was all in the timing. I wanted to fit everything into the December-January transition, and it was making me stressed out that I couldn’t possibly fit all of this into such a short period of time. But, I realised, I didn’t actually need to fit it in that time frame.
I could give myself some GRACE and some more time. I could start from where I was, and tackle everything at a slower pace. And readjust if necessary.
The more I thought about it, the more I realised that this approach is even more important for me this year. You see, I've got a huge upcoming transition. Just after Christmas, we finally booked our tickets home to Australia. This is not a visit – we booked one-way tickets. After living in Germany for six years, we are now moving back to our hometown, Melbourne. It is utterly exciting and utterly terrifying at the same time. It will be a huge transition – perhaps even bigger than the transition from Melbourne to Munich (we now have the addition of two kids, and we don’t yet have a home, jobs, or childcare lined up). Literally, everything is going to change.
Maybe you are not predicting as huge a change as what I have coming up, but things WILL change for you in one way or another; things are changing all the time. Plus, with the pandemic still raging and constantly changing, it’s still true that the only certainty is uncertainty.
So, how can we achieve all the things we want to in 2022, while also acknowledging the weight of uncertainty, as well as giving ourselves a constant big dose of grace at the same time?
Well, I’m not sure of anything, but here are some things I’m doing…
The practicalities: how to plan the year being mindful of transitions and uncertainty
Give yourself grace
But what does this look like in reality?
More time
I’m gifting myself more time whenever possible. I love making big goals, striving for them, and achieving them, but really, a lot of the pressure comes from myself (not external forces – eg I’ve decided I want to write some books and I’m planning on self-publishing them, therefore the timeline is completely up to me).
So, where possible, when things can wait, I’m letting them wait – or at least, chipping away at them slowly without any pressure on myself to actually achieve anything. Therefore, to continue with the book writing example, I’m not saying I must have the first draft of a manuscript done by a particular date, instead I’m giving myself a window of 25 minutes in the morning to focus on that manuscript. I don’t know how long it will take to get to the first draft, but it doesn’t matter. It will take as long as it takes. If I find that life gets too busy and I no longer have that 25 minutes, I might shorten the time, or even take a pause on writing that book for a period of time.
Shifting the energy of December to the first quarter of 2022
In keeping with the theme giving myself time, I’ve allowed myself the whole first quarter of 2022 to complete all the mundane organising tasks I would normally do in December of the year before. These things, like clearing out my email, are great to have done but they are really not necessary. Especially when there are more important things on my plate at the moment – which brings me to prioritising.
Prioritising
I remember learning about Maslov’s hierarchy of needs in first year psychology. Essentially, he breaks up human needs into a pyramid – with basic needs at the bottom, and higher level needs at the top (moving from: physiological - safety - love and belonging - esteem, all the way to self actualisation). A person can only move up the pyramid if they’ve fulfilled their lower-order needs first.
In fitting with this, I guess I would say that clearing out my email is sort of a higher order need (or not need at all but a goal, let’s say). But there are a whole lot of things that have a much greater impact on my life right now: such as finding a way to sell/give away all of our furniture so that we can board a plane on the 1st of March.
Another way of thinking about it is to question: Is this a January problem? Or a March problem? Or a November problem? Or maybe not even something I have to do at all? Some things just won’t be as important to me until I’m settled down in Australia, so I’ve started dividing up my ‘goals’ into periods of time when they will become relevant. I need to keep on reminding myself that the year is composed of 12 months and not 1! There’s much more to 2022 than January!
Reframing ‘goals’
On the topic of ‘goals’: I’m reframing ‘goals’ into something else. For 2022, in attempting to give myself grace, I’m not going to talk about ‘goals’, but instead, about ‘focus areas’. These are areas of my life I want to pay attention to in 2022 and some little thoughts about what that will look like in 2022. Just to keep me, you guessed it, focussed. Don’t you just feel more relaxed already? No achievement necessary, just a little attention.
What are these focus areas, you may ask?
Self: which actually includes lots of things that are already ingrained habits – reading, exercising, self-nurture activities.
Home: all about saying goodbye to Germany and saying hello to Australia, and all the possibilities and opportunities that will bring.
Writing: this will include articles (which again, is a pretty ingrained routine), as well as manuscript writing for the 3 books I am working on (I know that sounds like a lot, but I have released all pressure to complete these books in any given time).
Career (general): all about thinking about the direction I want my career to take and finding a day job that I enjoy.
I’ve also picked two words and a phrase for 2022 to help me keep focussed:
The two words are: Bold (for days when I have more energy) and Grace (for days I need more energy).
The phrase is: Pay attention to the little things and see your life grow with intention (it’s just a reminder to myself that the little things are in fact the big things).
Incorporating a lot of wiggle room
For me, this first involved realising that I can’t just go along like nothing’s going to change – things are going to drastically change and I have to lean into that change – as I slowly bind and interweave my old life with my new life. A lot of my focus is actually centred around the transition itself, and I have no strict timeframes on anything that I’m choosing to do (sure, there will be the timeframe of leaving Germany for Australia, but I’m not adding anything else on top of that).
I’m also planning ahead – for instance, I’m planning to prepare all the blog articles I will need up until the end of March. This means that over February and March I have some breathing space, and don’t have to write if I don’t have the time or energy.
I’m also not making too many ‘plans’ that I don’t have to. I listened to The Gathering Room podcast a few days ago and Martha Beck talks all about ‘planless plans’. She suggests that part of a planless plan is to treat life like a comedy skit show – constantly checking in with what is going on around you. Something unexpected comes into the mix, you accept it, and then act accordingly, and bring that new idea/concept into your plan. It’s all about being aware of what’s going on, rather than sticking to your original plans in a rigid way.
Reassessing, refreshing + resetting throughout the year
This really helps me get away from the idea that I need to stay chained to my goals set in January throughout the whole year. Things change: sometimes only in micro ways, and sometimes in massive ways that we could never have predicted. I think it’s great (and a bit relieving) to revisit my goals over the course of the year – I often find that the changing seasons induces changes in what I focus on, and that they are the perfect times for some refreshing and resetting (you can read my spring refresh articles here, and here, and my autumn and final quarter reset here for examples of what I mean).
My final piece of advice is to have an understanding of what you find grounding during times of transition or uncertainty:
As I said earlier, we are all still trekking through a long period of uncertainty, and we will all make transitions (whether big or small, foreseeable or not) in 2022. It is therefore important for all of us to have enough self-awareness to have an idea of what we need when we need it.
For me, I love routines – I especially find it comforting to consider what are basic things that can always be maintained no matter what the transition or uncertainty (for example: I can always exercise in some way, even if that doesn’t always look the same. For instance, exercising after having my second baby was a slow walk around the block until I regained my strength. In times of high energy, strength, and time, exercise would look like HIIT training).
Ask yourself: What grounds me? This is a question I’m pondering with the forthcoming move. It is very likely that for at least two months of this year, life will look very different from life as I’ve known it. But, I know that I can carry certain grounding activities with me: I can read, I can write, I can probably do some simple exercise, I can choose the best food available to me, I can choose calm over fear. I think I’m going to make a list of these simple, specific grounding activities that I can use to bridge my German life to my new Australian life.
PS – If you would like some simple self-nurture ideas to try out, sign up to my email list at the bottom of this page and you will receive access to 89 simple and wonderful self-nurture activities (+ a whole bunch of resources that I’ve specifically created for my email subscribers).
So there you go: my nurturing plan for 2022. What about you? Do you have a different approach to 2022 compared to previous years? Let me know in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this article, you might also like:
How to survive (and even thrive in) the Northern Hemisphere winter lockdowns
Make the most of small pockets of time: the power of a "quick task" list
How to exercise at home: a round-up of my favourite resources and equipment
Reflections on expat life: answering the question - “Should I stay or should I go?”
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