Like many of you, I’m thrilled that 2020 is over and we can begin to regroup on multiple levels for 2021. For me, the New Year always brings hope and possibility, but this year especially. I enjoy the thrill of change and the springboard that the New Year offers me. In my consulting and counseling business I help people set goals and change behaviors. I had a client ask me how I set goals for the New Year and I had to tell them… that I don’t. Why I don’t have a New Year’s resolution and instead I have a sentence goes back about a decade.

I started realizing and being mindful of how judgmental and angry I was in so many situations. I didn’t like that and wanted to change it. So I started a New Year with my value of “compassion through nonjudgment.” This sentence is still something I think about because it was my sentence for 6 years. Each year. Compassion through nonjudgment. I spent time in meditation learning how to live that value and not just say it. How could I turn that value into action and moments? So, I practiced. I still do.

I continue to work on myself, living the values of the person that I wanted to be. Creating a life that I want to live. Controlling what I can, and there’s a lot I can’t control.

I used to set resolutions and I didn’t end up sticking with them. Shifting my mindset from goal setting – to value setting was instrumental in my personal (and ultimately professional) development.

Goal setting or value setting?

Here I like to take an ‘and’ approach. I set a value sentence for my year and goals tend to come out of that. This way the goals align with how I want to live my life, which makes them more compatible with my day to day. I think goals are much stronger when paired with values. In practice, I think it makes them easier to achieve. Not to get too scientific but research has shown that in order to make good decisions that further your life in a positive way we need both logic and emotion. Many people think all we need is logic, but it’s not true. Humans need to be emotionally connected to the outcome as well. That’s why I think value setting combined with goal setting helps us to not only stay intrinsically motivated but to further our lives positively as well.

What happens when you add goals to a value sentence:

As an example, my sentence for 2020 was “My year of wellness” (ironic, yes, it’s fine you can laugh, I have.) I was working a lot, too much (like over 60 hours a week), and I was neglecting my mental/emotional health because of it. Overworking is something I’ve always been “comfortable” with. I like to create new things and if I’m honest with myself I think I used work as a way to feel complete or to generate self-worth. The more I produced, created, did… the more hours I worked the more valuable I was, right? Obviously, that’s wrong and it led to me realizing something had to change.

It started to hit home when my husband told me he worried about my stress level and that I’d die young of a heart attack. He’s 2 days older than I am and we turned 40 in 2020. I hadn’t thought that before. The way I viewed myself was I was pretty successful, mostly happy, and in love with the life I had created. Sure I was always busy and had a sense of urgency but I really was mostly happy.

Except when I wasn’t and stress, anxiety, and anger ruled me, which was more often that I realized. What I didn’t allow myself to see clearly was that in order to be “pretty successful, mostly happy, and in love with my life” I had a constant undercurrent of stress. I realized that the truth I’d listened to within myself was, “you can’t relax, you have to do more.” I felt if I wasn’t doing more then what value did I have? Unhealthy, you bet. And I know I am not alone in this.

My year of wellness started off without a hitch. I already ate well, exercised daily, and meditated, so what else could I do to focus on wellness? That’s what having a sentence over having a goal did for me. What else can I do to focus on wellness to live this value… to be who I want to be? I scheduled a doctor’s appointment to do all the physical things that a person turning 40 should do. I was healthy overall which was a relief. My doctor didn’t do a cortisol level test though, I think a part of me didn’t want to know.

I went to a work conference at the end of February and traveled on a client visit the week after I got back. COVID was already beginning but I didn’t stop working and doing what I needed to do. Then, basically everything fell apart and my small business was in turbulent waters. I started working even more to pick up the pieces to keep it afloat.

My husband and I had already lost our home and livelihood in 2008 and that trauma was playing heavily in my mind, heart, and body. What if something like that happened again? We worked so hard to rebuild our lives. The thought was so heavy. The stress mounted and then I got sick. I probably got COVID from traveling. I wasn’t hospitalized, thankfully, but around day 11 my husband and I thought I might have to be, I think the reason it hit me and not my husband and teenage child was that my underlying condition was stress. Those two weeks put a lot in perspective for me.

If I wanted to really live my year of wellness, I clearly needed to make some changes.

When values are aligned with goals:

I started by examining and being mindful of what caused me stress? Was there anything I could control to mitigate it? My meditation practice usually included insight meditation and I intentionally added compassion meditations into my routine. During lockdown my husband and I started taking long walks in the morning before I started my workday, luckily, we have a deserted road by us that was perfect. I’m fortunate to have a partner than I can share myself with and started doing it more often on our walks. He and I became closer because I became more open with both he and in myself. That connection healed a lot in me.

There was more I could do though. I’ve come to accept that I will probably always have a “What more can I do” mindset, but I can use it to my advantage instead of being ruled by it. I scaled back my work to make it more manageable for me, I used the extra time to bond more with my family, to read fiction, to learn instead of produce. With more time being spent intentionally I took an accelerated certification for wellness counseling and got accepted into a certification program by the Institute for Meditation and Psychotherapy. I don’t think I would have traveled down this road without my sentence of 2020 being this is my year of wellness. Happy 2021 everyone!