Less Goals, More Being

A gift to help you step into the New Year with intention

The New Year is fast approaching.

You know what that means.

It’s goal-setting season!

Annual plans, New Year resolutions, OKRs, financial goals, life goals… are you ready?

Whew. It can be overwhelming. Take a deep breath.

Before you dive into your annual reflection and planning process, I’d like to invite you to ask yourself a question:

Why are you setting goals?

This might seem like a silly question. Goals are useful! They give us specificity to work toward. They help keep us accountable. They help us know whether or not we’ve been successful.

I won’t argue with any of that.

But (you knew there was a but coming, didn’t you?), I wonder what’s underneath the surface of these goals.

What would happen if you don’t hit these goals?

What would that say about you?

What would that mean about your value in this world?

What I found myself doing, year after year, was setting goals that I believed would make me feel like I was enough.

If I can grow the business…

If I can hit these content goals…

If I can lift this much weight…

THEN I will be enough.

Which meant that in the very act of setting a goal, I was confirming that I was not enough.

Whether or not I hit the goal didn’t matter. I already confirmed the story that I was lacking in some way.

As a result, I found myself serving the goals, rather than them serving me. I became bound to my goals. I let them determine my mood, my success, and my self-worth.

What would it look like for your goals to serve you?

When I’ve been able to approach goals from the belief that I’m already enough, my relationship with goals shifted.

For the most part, I found I didn’t need goals.

Most of my goals, I discovered, could be intentions.

My annual planning process naturally evolved to be a lot less about what I wanted to do or achieve, and much more about how I wanted to be.

I wanted to be present, balanced, and energized with the work I chose to do. I wanted to prioritize other aspects of my life outside of work. I wanted to have a sense of spaciousness in my life.

It’s from this place of being that I stepped into the New Year. Rather than a set of goals, I just focused on how I was showing up to whatever life asked of me in that moment.

I felt a deep trust that “results” would emerge as they were meant to. I didn’t need goals to make them happen.

It was a beautiful, and refreshing way to step into the New Year.

Take a moment to reflect on these questions:

• What would it be like to approach this new year from a belief that you are already enough?

• What would be different if you focused more on being and less on doing?

• How would it feel to have less goals, and more intentions?

What shifts in your body do you notice as you sit with these possibilities?

A guided journey of reflection and contemplation

If any of this is landing for you, I’d like to offer you a gift to help you navigate this unique approach to stepping into the New Year.

Our team at Downshift just released the Annual Review, an 8-stage journey of deep reflection, contemplation, and intention setting. It’s filled with exercises, guided meditations and visualizations, and a curated playlist to help you tune into how you want to be and set conscious intentions for 2025. It’s free to download here.

If you’d like to embark on this reflective journey with others, my colleague Matt Yao is organizing a small cohort you can sign up for here.

I hope you enjoy the journey!

Warmly,
David