Here’s how to set your intention and goals for 2023

Arivee [00:00:00] We all deserve to have fulfilling careers and lives. We deserve to experience joy and peace and freedom and all of those things that make us feel truly alive. It takes a lot of courage for us to take the reins in our lives and take action that honors the deepest parts of ourselves. In this current season of life. It takes a lot of courage to lean into growing and to lean into learning and to know when it's time to make a change. I'm Arab. I'm a first generation Latina mom of three and life and high-performance coach to women just like you. And this podcast is for all of us looking to grow and learn and explore what a joyful and fulfilling life and career can look like and how to start living into that life. Right now we're going to go deep and we're going to honor our truth in this podcast. And the best thing is we're going to do it together. So welcome to the Humble Rising podcast. Hi, everyone. Before we jump into the episode, I just wanted to let you know that the kids in true working mom fashion were banging on the door and jiggling the door handle or the door knob. For the first part of the podcast episode, they were calling out for me and I was determined to finish the episode. So I did not turn around and walk away from my desk or my computer to go attend to them because I had complete faith that my husband would come upstairs and address whatever they needed addressing. And he did. Which is why then you don't hear them for the rest of the episode. So I just wanted to give you the heads up that the audio will include them making noise in some way, but one to give it a heads up and hope that you can still hear the way that you would have heard even without that noise. Again, normal working mom stuff. You probably already get it, but I wanted to give you the heads up. Thanks for being here. We are about to say bye bye avios to 2022 and welcome 2023. If you're listening to this episode the same day it's released, you'll be listening before the New Year. If you're listening when we're already past January one, don't worry. Still take a listen to what I'm about to share and do. These exercises, even if you're listening to this in the summer, like if you're listening in June, July, you can still set your intention for the rest of the year and set some goals for yourself. So regardless of when you're catching this episode, it's going to be helpful for you. I'm going to share how to set your intention for 2023, and then I'll be sharing one of my favorite goal setting strategies. I do want to add a caveat, though, that when we talk about intentions and when we talk about goal setting, I'm really talking about you personally. I'm talking about what you need. I'm talking about what you want, what you've been wanting for so long, and what you need to action on personally in the sphere of your control. That's critical. I'm talking about what's in your control because you can't bear the burden of things outside of your control. You can't predict them. You can't be responsible for them. So we need to learn to let that go and focus our attention on the sphere of our control. Now, what we quickly realize is that there is a lot more we have agency over than we think. How much we actually exercise it is really up to us, right? And honestly, sometimes we have a lot of agency, but it doesn't feel like it because we're having a really hard time or we have a lot of agency, but we're choosing not to use it. And that's okay. As long as you're aware of that and you accept that as the reality of your situation. There is no judgment, no judging yourself. You just have to be honest with yourself about where you're at. I say all of this because we always start our work from a place of truth and of honesty. We have to be honest with ourselves about where we are at. I know I've shared this before, but it took me months and months to really accept the bigger reality that I needed more help and support than I ever had before when I was struggling with my anxiety and my depression. But there were, I would say, similar, although really significant truths and realities that I did accept along the way. And that's what I'm asking of you. I'm asking you to think about where you are in your life right now. What season are you in? What chapter are you in? Are you mid-career? Are you starting a new job? Are you trying to get promoted? Are you a new mom? Are you a new parent? Do you have two kids? Are you struggling with integrating work and life? Think about how you're really doing. Are you being who you want to be and are you doing what you really want to be doing? How are your relationships? Your relationships with colleagues? The people that you love, the people that you care about, anyone else? How is your relationship with them and how is your relationship with yourself? Are you critical of yourself? You having those inner battles? Are you pouring into your own cup? Are you taking the time for rest? Taking the space to rejuvenate, to recharge? How is your career? Is there meaning? Is there fulfillment there in some way? Are you living into who you want to be in this season of life through your actions? I talk about this all the time. To me, the key is always alignment. Are you living into who you are inside and who you want to be? All the things you think about and talk about. Are you living into that in this season of your life, through your actions, through what you're actually doing on the day to day? Is there a match there? Is there alignment? These are just some questions to get you thinking and to get you into the headspace of the exercise that we're about to do together. I would love if you did this exercise as you were listening so you could grab the template that's in the show notes of this episode. You could also grab a journal or a paper and a pen, whatever you use to record your thoughts. If you're listening in your car or you're listening while you're organizing around your place, cleaning up whatever you're doing, maybe you're taking a walk. No worries. Just make sure that you hit pause. And right now you go to your calendar on your phone and you end an appointment with yourself to carve out time to write down your thoughts. So let's get started with setting our intentions for 2023. Intention is about focusing your mind and attention on acting in a certain way. When you think about how you want to show up in your life in 2023, what comes to mind for you? Think about it for a minute when you think about how you want to show up in your life in 2023. What comes up for you? Now, remember, we aren't thinking about this from the perspective of the false stories we tell ourselves, right? That we don't do enough, that we aren't doing the things we said we would do, that we aren't being who we said we'd be, or that we're tolerating what we said we wouldn't tolerate. No. We're thinking about how you want to show up in your life this year from a place of possibility and openness, from a place of enough ness, from a place of worthiness. So let me give you an example. In 2022, my intentions or my word for 2022? I said it in January of 2022. My intention was easy. That was my word for the year was ease. Capital E. Capital A s e. That word was important to me because I found myself over complicated things, overthinking things, overanalyzing things that didn't warrant it. And I found myself taking on a lot that I wasn't fully prepared for. So I would ask myself when those things would happen, when I would feel that in my body, when I would feel that tension in my body, when I was recognizing that, okay, this is getting overwhelming, I would ask myself, how can I make this easier? So I got a poster board. Yeah, we're going back to like the fourth grade. I got a poster board that had a gold glitter border on it. Yes, you heard me right. I bought that thing at CVS. I got four of them. Three for my kids and one for me. I got a poster board with a gold glitter border on it, and I got a Sharpie, a big Sharpie marker, and I wrote the word e's, a s e. And underneath I wrote like underneath the word E's and huge letters. Right? I wrote the question, How can I make this easier? I also grabbed a sticky note and I had the word ease and all capital letters stuck to the bottom corner of my monitor at my desk all year. And it helped me because when I was feeling like I was overanalyzing it or overdoing it, or I was spinning my wheels on something, I'd see a massive poster board next to me, the one with the gold glitter border on the wall that said ease and mass of letters. And then underneath said, How can I make this easier? So what's your word for 2023? What is your word? Which is your intention for 2023? What are you going to focus your mind and attention on? Pick one word. I know there could be 50 because there's a lot of things I want to work on. And I know that. And I say that from a place of love and respect, and I relate to that. That resonates with me. But there is such a power on focusing on one intention that impacts all areas of your life. Because even if you think it's only about work, it isn't. It's about your personal life, too, and vice versa. So let's move on to goal setting, and I'm going to show you a way to set goals here that I think is simplified and straightforward. There are multiple steps, but my hope is that because the steps are clear and I'm giving you prompts, you can follow the steps and just do the prompts in order and you'll get to your goals that you're going to hit in 2023. This isn't the smart goal strategy that I actually do love, right? The capital smart strategy that you probably do at work. What I'm showing you is going to get what's in your brain, out of your brain, out on paper to clear space for you to think even more clearly about what you need to do, really double down on in 2023. Okay, so first let's do the brain up. So we're going to do a brain dump of all the goals you want to tackle that you could realistically achievement 2023. So we're getting all of your ideas. We're getting all of your thoughts out of your head and onto the page. This isn't a time to judge what you're writing down. You know how like we go to write something and then we're judging ourselves and we're like, Oh my God, that's crazy. Or, Oh, that's stupid. Oh, who do you think you are? Nope. This is not the time to let that voice be amplified. That negative voice say, Hey, I hear you, but you need to step aside for a second because I'm doing something for me, right? This is not a time to judge what you're writing down. This is a time to let things get on that page. And we'll now. Narrow things down in a minute. But for now, I want you to get on a page. All the goals you think you want to tackle that you could realistically achievement 2023. If you are struggling with what could I really realistically achieve it, write it down anyway. Don't question. Just write it out. Okay, so do that and then come back to this episode. Just hit pause and then come back. Once you've gone down all your goals. I want you to ask yourself these two questions. These are very important. So listen really carefully, okay? Number one, what are the three most important things in my life in 2023? Meaning this is where I need to be focusing and putting my energy towards. Okay. What are the three most important things in my life in 2023? And I want you to rank these. I'm told you list three things, right? I want you to rank them. Number one. Most important. Number two. Number three, many of you this will be reflective of your values. Write your non-negotiables, in other words. The second question I want you to ask yourself is Which goals do I need to accomplish this year, 2023, that are aligned to those priorities? If your number one priority is family and spending more quality time with them, I'm going to bet that your number one goal at work may not be to go for that massive promotion that may require much more energy, effort, or travel. Maybe that's not true for you, but you know what I mean. There are trade offs to everything. This is the time you decide which ones you'll be willing to make. If one of the most important things in 2023 is my self-care and for my mental and emotional health, and for me to have time for recharging when I have many obligations and responsibilities like you do and I have three small children I can't have as one of my goals serving on more boards. Even though it's important to me, I probably can have as my goal, like I want to cook more than once a week. Do I want to? Yes, I want to do all those things. But I have to set my own boundaries and I have to set my own limits so I can achieve what's even more important than that. I know there are a lot of things that are important to you. I hear that. But there are tradeoffs and everything cannot carry equal weight. We have to be honest with ourselves about the true weight each thing our person carries in our life. We have to be honest with ourselves about that. Okay. So once you've answered those two questions for yourself, I want you to go back through your brain dump. Remember? Do you remember that list you made all those possible goals for 2023? Go back to that list and I want you to start removing the goals that don't match or aren't consistent with the answers to those two questions you just answered. So you look at your list, you're just going to put a line through the ones that aren't consistent, that don't match the answers to the questions you just answered. Right? Put a line through them. Cross them out. Look at your list. What do you have left? Read the ones that are left. How can you refine these so they align with your answers to the two questions you asked yourself? And you know what? If you have to tweak those goals a lot, so what? Do it. No one is watching you do this. No one is doing your life for you. You are. Don't worry about that. Focus on what you're doing right now. Focus on what's in front of you right now. Now, I'm going to ask you to do something you may not like at first, because you've done some work on these goals and you've done a lot of work so far. Right. But I'm going to ask you to narrow these down to three goals. I know. I know. Just three. Just three. And if you want to do one goal for 2023, go for it. One, two. To do it. I just want to keep you at three and under. And the reason why is because I want to keep it simple and the fewest number as possible to reduce the chance for overwhelm. Because when our brains get overwhelmed or they get confused or they're thinking, Oh God, this is too much, our brain is literally telling us to stop and then poof, there goes your goal. Your brain's going to say, This is too hard, this is too hard, this is too much. And then poof, you go, you're going to just say, This is too hard. You're going to make up excuses. Your brain will do that to you and you may give in to those excuses. So I'm trying to reduce the chance of that happening for you by getting you to three or less goals. Okay, so let's say it's three. Take your three goals. You can circle them. You have your list, right? You've looked at what's left. You can circle the ones that you're going to pick. And then I want you to grab a fresh piece of paper and write down the first goal. Okay, so fresh piece of paper. What's your first goal? Write it down. That's the first step. The second step is to write down why it's so important to you. Research shows us that when we write stuff down, and especially when we write the same thing down repeatedly, over and over, our brains get the message that what we're writing. Down is important and our brain is like, Oh, I have to remember that. Oh, she's writing it down and drawing down again. Okay, this is really important. Literally, there's research that shows that that's true. This is why this is powerful. This is why we write stuff down. So remember one write down your goal. The second step is to write down Why is the skull so important to me? Why does this matter so much to me? The third step is to write down what obstacle could get in the way of you achieving your goal. Look, we know that unexpected things happen. Things can happen that you don't anticipate, your plans can get derailed. So thinking about how that might happen in advance and coming up with some strategies to prevent a complete derailment will be helpful. So you can stay on track as best you can. Can't predict the future, but we can try to anticipate a little bit and prepare in advance as much as we can. Don't spend too much time here because then you might start spinning your wheels. Then, Max, Max, 3 minutes on that. 3 to 5 minutes. The fourth and final step is to write down the support or resources you'll need to help you reach your goal. Is it a friend or a sibling that could be your accountability partner? Is it a coach? Is it your partner at home? Is it something or is it someone else in your life that will help you increase your chances of completing your goal? If I'm focused on getting stronger, I may take strength classes and I may hire a personal trainer. Or maybe I'll do semi-private lessons. So I'm in a small group without the higher cost of training one on one with someone. I am working on a social project, so I hired a coach to help me get through 95% of it because my ultimate goal is to launch the project in two years. But I have to gain a lot of momentum in 2023 to get there, right? To get to that two year mark, I got to do a lot in 2023. So I hired a coach to help me get there because I felt like I needed that. And for me, I want 20, 23 to be a year of more creative expression and creative accountability. So my two close friends from college and I are going to do these retreats throughout the year. We we did a few last year, but now we're focusing on creativity and creative expression and it's nothing fancy, just us three getting together. We're going to do one at my house and then one at an Airbnb. We're doing the fun girl stuff, sharing, laughing, creating, bouncing ideas off of each other and being honest with each other while we do it. Because they keep me honest. They'll call me on my B.S. and I need that, you know? But if I'm away for the weekend with my girls, that means I need to have my husband on board because he'll be holding it down with the kids or he'll be asking my mom to take care maybe of the youngest while he has the other two during those three days. Right. So I need his support. I need my mom's support. I'm also needing my friends support. Right. These are just some examples of support and resources that you may need when you're thinking about what's going to increase the chances of me achieving my goal. And I would say that support and resources are some of the biggest determining factors to goal achievement because you can have the focus and the willpower and the persistence. But if the environment and the support and the resources that you need aren't there, it's going to be very difficult. It's possible, of course. Absolutely. But it's more difficult than it otherwise would be. So let's review. Let's review your intention for 2023 is a word for how you're going to approach your life and situations in 2023. Download the template in the show notes so you have a place to write down your word and why it's important to you. Just go to the episode, click on it, just scroll down, you'll see the template, click on the link. Once you do that, start your goal setting exercise. Let's review. We start with the brain dump. We write down all the ideas for the goals for 2023. Don't judge yourself, just write. This could take you 10 minutes or more. It really depends on how much stuff you need to get out of that beautiful, beautiful brain of yours after you have your brain dump on paper or in your computer wherever you do it, ask yourself these two questions. Number one, what are the three most important things in my life in 2023? Which means where do I need to be focusing and putting my energy towards? And you're going to rank them number 1 to 3. Number two, the second question you'll ask yourself is Which goals do I need to accomplish this year, this year in 2023 that are aligned to those priorities, that are aligned to the priorities that you listed in question number one, write down these answers. You're going to want to think about these and write them down. Then go back through your list that you created in your brain dump and start removing the goal that don't match. Remove those goals that don't match. Remove the goals that aren't consistent with the answers to those two questions you just answered. Now you're going to look at what you have left. You're going to refine the goals you have left. So they align even more with your answers to the two questions. Right. So then you're going to choose only three goals. I know you're going to narrow it down to three or less. Three or less. Okay. Once you do that, you've picked your three or less goals. You're going to write down on a fresh piece of paper the first goal. Write it down. Number two, why is it important to you? Number three, write down what obstacles could get in the way of achieving it and how can you prepare for that or prevent that? And then the last question you're going to answer for yourself underneath that is what support or resources do I need to help me achieve my goal? You see why I said you need a pen and paper for this episode? But if you do this work and you take the time to really do it and be intentional about it, you're going to enter the months ahead with such clarity, with focus, and you're less likely going to be distracted by things that arise that seem and probably are incredible opportunities or things. You're going to have less distraction. You're going to be able to ignore the distraction more when you are clear in your focus and you have a direction. So I want you to do that, what I just described. You're going to do those steps. The goal, why it's important to you, the obstacles, support, resources. You're going to do that with each of the three goals. Remember, three goals or less. Okay. Now, if you're already in my women empowering women email community. Amazing. Reply to my latest email and let me know how this exercise went for you. I really want to know how you experienced it. I want to know if you had any big highs or any anything that you thought surprised you as you were going through it. And if you aren't part of the email community yet. It's about time you join us. You can join my email list where I send you doses of motivation. I send you dozens of inspiration. I also share more personal stories in my emails, and I'll be sharing when any events are happening and when my limited client slots open up for my one on one coaching this year if they aren't already full, the link to join the email list is on the shownotes, so check it out. And as always, you can find me and connect with me on LinkedIn or on my website, Adobe Vargas dot com. And so next time I want you to know that you're powerful. Really sit in that truth for a minute. Know that you're powerful. You're powerful now. Right now, in this moment, to create the life and the career that you want and deserve in this season of your life. Let's amplify that power in 2023 and I'll see you in the New Year.