January 4, 2023
Thinking about goals used to come so naturally to me.
I could hammer out a list of my top ten measurable goals if you asked, and accompany each with a rough sketch of initial strategy, next steps, measures of success, and its bigger Why.
I think the past three pandemic years have eroded that skill out of my system, and to be without it feels like someone amputated all my limbs.
Today, January 4, I found myself writing down a more/less list: what I want more and less of in my life this 2023. I’ve never done New Year planning this way, ever, but granted, I’ve never felt this different about my life, ever.
My list was long and very specific, but ultimately, the main patterns boiled down to this:
The things I desire more of:
self-trust, expression, conversations, play, art, instinct, presence, childlike wonder, breathless excitement, goosebumps.
The things I desire less of:
self-pressure, self-measurement, self-judgment, status, labels, perfection, polish, excellence.
This is BIG.
But even with that acknowledgement, I don’t think I am yet capable of truly realizing how big this is. Only time and lived experience can reveal the bigness, the weight of this character change. Excellence is one of my main, main core values in life. I even wrote about it in the book I authored and published, permanently inked and out there for thousands of readers to know.
But—
becoming a mother has thrown a grenade at everything I thought was permanently part of my identity. It forced me to examine not just what was important to me, but HOW IT CAME TO BE important to me (which stems from childhood, just like a lot of core values tend to do)—and more importantly, if I want my child’s experience to reflect that.
Excellence served me well as a core value for decades of my life, but I’ve come to identify with it differently now. I want to decenter it from this next chapter of my life, to make room for something even more important to me.
Hello, 2023. Back to the drawing board I go.