New Year's Revolution

Does a shiny list of goals excite you? Change it up, writes resolution fan Harriet Minter, who asks us to ponder how we want to feel instead

Call them naff and unrealistic but I love a New Year’s resolution. Nothing makes me happier than spending winter nights planning the areas of my life I’m going to overhaul and, come the beginning of January, I am ready to go with a long list of goals to be achieved over the following 365 days. Inevitably, I hit some and miss others by miles so, last year, I tried something a little different: instead of writing down all the things I wanted to do, I came up with a couple of keywords that described how I wanted to feel. And it changed my year.

You see the problem with goals is that when we make them on 1 January, it’s difficult to know how we’re going to feel about them one month, six months or 12 months later. Also, we simply don’t know what might come along to push the original goal down the list. When we set our year according to how we want to feel, we allow some flexibility.