Setting My 2015 Intention and Goals

“You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. 

Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. 

There is no other land; there is no other life but this.” 

― Henry David Thoreau

For about the last 6 months, I have been working on regaining control of my life and taking better care of myself. I have made a lot of great strides with my mental and physical health, personal relationships, and career; but of course, as 2014 comes to a close I've had a bit of downtime to reflect on my personal accomplishments, and I've been brainstorming on ways to keep the momentum going in a positive direction in 2015.

I am always so hesitant to set resolutions, though I did have some for the new year in mind, but I came across this article tonight that suggests setting goals and intentions instead, and I really like the idea. The author discusses a few reasons why people often fail at keeping their resolutions, which made a lot of sense to me.

Here is the alternative approach:

1. Set your intention.

2. Summarize your intention for the year into one word.

3. Set personal, family, financial, and career goals for the year. Make them specific, write them down, and map out some objectives to reach those goals.

I've been thinking about the concept of setting intentions for a while now - maybe a couple of months. I think the one intention that I think I can apply to many aspects of my life, use as a strategy to reach my goals for the year, and easily summarize into one word is mindfulness.

Mindfulness is simply defined as present moment awareness. 

Almost every decision I make in a day could be done mindfully, and if I set my intention to do so, I can't see anything but good coming of it. To be more specific, I can make mindful decisions with things like how I eat, use my free time, interact with others, spend my money, etc., I am sure I will be able to feel more in control of my life than I do now.

Now that I have set my intention, I need to work on my goals and objectives for the year, and I will also connect mindfulness as a strategy for reaching those goals and objectives. I think it will be easy to map those out - I am thinking of devising a chart or spreadsheet. I might even bring in some strategies from the Happiness Project, which I read a few days ago. I know, this is so dorky... but I think it will work for me - and if it doesn't, I will try something else!

Tomorrow is the last day of the year - I have a lot of work to do! More to come...