The no goals year

Why I can’t be doing with striving and achievement right now

Happy new year, lovely readers! I’ve had a bit of an extended break from Substack but am back. 

I wasn’t sure about posting this new piece. I thought it sounded too negative for the start of the year. But then I remembered something I read in Big Magic (my book of the year in 2023) and in a talk by Farrah Storr (these wise women must be onto something, right?!). They both say to write what you’d like to read about, what you feel drawn to, and the rest will follow. So I am throwing caution to the wind and posting it anyway. Maybe some of you will resonate with it.

I hope everyone has had a peaceful start to the year and thank you again for being here and reading my words.

Louise x

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Photo by Cristian Escobar on Unsplash

As Christmas came to a close, my Substack inbox started to fill with lots of ‘review of the year’ posts and goal setting posts for next year. Ordinarily, I love this kind of content. But this year, I’m not feeling it and I turned away. 

And let me tell you, I have been a BIG goal setter in the past, so this is unusual for me!

I’ve always set goals, intentions, resolutions, the whole lot. The last few years I made my husband do a goal-setting workshop for two (run by me!) on New Year's Eve. I was also previously in an actual club called the ‘New Year’s Resolution Club’. Really. It was run by two brilliant women and I loved it, but the premise was setting goals and being accountable to others for them for a whole year.

I love achieving, have typically always been working towards something, and live by life according to a Trello board at work. It’s how I roll.

And this has always worked well for me. I have a good job in publishing, I retrained in my spare time, I have completed a half marathon and 10ks, I have learnt three foreign languages. I set myself a goal, I apply myself, and then I get the rewards. 

Except, that is, when it comes to fertility. 

There I set a goal, apply myself, I do all the things they say you’re meant to, but I haven’t yet got the end result.

And so this new year, I didn’t feel like setting any goals whatsoever. The whole thing made me feel a bit ick. And it’s not just been the fertility experiences that have shifted my perspective on this. 

I don’t want to be striving and achieving anything right now. Am I not enough as I am? It feels a bit exhausting to fathom up some new targets for myself this year and then start plodding away at them. 

When I think about it, it feels a bit much to force energy during January. It’s so dark and cold, hardly motivating. 

In 2023 I also reached a nicely comfortable place of filling my life with nourishing things and trying to shift away from efforting and striving. Going through IVF creates this sense of needing to be perfect to get the result or you might ‘jinx’ the outcome. It can lead to a life of restriction and deprivation of the things you enjoy and the person you were before. And it’s worth it, if you get the outcome you want. But when this goes on for years, it’s not sustainable as a life. 

I made the decision in 2023 that I would nourish myself instead. In fact, ‘nourish’ was my word of the year (a gentle practice that I do like to do - I recommend a workshop with

Jessica Rose Williams

to learn more). To me this meant, nourishing my soul, my mind, and my body. I joined a choir, I saw multiple musical shows and some nostalgic gigs (Blur, S Club), I read more fiction and joined a book group, I started writing more, I bought new underwear(!), I got my hair cut more often, and I ate meals that were yummy to me. It meant that when I was asked what didn’t go well in 2023, I couldn’t think of too much. And that’s despite a failed IVF transfer in 2023. Because I widened my life and did things that filled me up rather than relying on achieving my goals as a measure of the year’s success.

This year I really want more of the same. I don’t want to have to improve myself. I just want to like my life and live it according to what fills me up.

We can never predict what life will throw at us. The cause of most of my anxiety in life has been not dealing well with uncertainty. So I may well need to reorientate myself at some point or there may come a point where I do want to set a goal or two. I’m still open to that, I just don’t want to set any right now. 

This doesn’t mean that I will sit on the sofa and do nothing with my life this year. I want to see my nephews lots, I want to keep up my reading routine, I want to improve my knowledge of the nonfiction creative writing genre. But they’re not goals as such. More like intentions for a general direction to move in with no set time frame. The antithesis of the SMART goals method we’re taught to use at work! 

I don’t have my word of the year for 2024 pinned down yet, but I feel like it might be ‘align’ or ‘discover’. For me, this is about aligning myself with how I want to feel and like living, and doing those things (i.e. more of the same!). It’s also about discovering what happens rather than planning it all out. Discovering what happens if I drop striving and achieving, and have a no goals year.

How about you? Have you set goals for 2024 or are you just easing in with no plans? Let me know in the comments.