A Fresh Start or New Year's Blues?
From concentrating on feeling achievement to building on what you have already, here are seven answers to the question, “Can you share your best tips for how to write a fresh story/goal without getting the New Year’s Blues?”
Focus on the Feeling of Achievement
Stories help us connect, and connecting with our goals is crucial for success. So, think about your goals for the new year and tell a story about how you’ll achieve them. Maybe you want to run a marathon, so tell the story of how you’ll train, how you’ll get through the tough times, and how you’ll feel when you cross the finish line.?
Focus on how you want to feel when you achieve your goal, and use that to motivate yourself to take the steps you need to get there. By telling a story about your goals, you’re giving them a narrative and a purpose. You’re making them more than just a New Year’s resolution and making your success more likely.
Create a Vision Board
Instead of New Year’s resolutions, which often lead to the New Year’s blues, create a vision board! Find inspiring pictures or words from magazines and put them onto a poster board or some place where you see them each day. Visualizing what you want to accomplish is a powerful approach and less daunting than a goal you might not have hit.
Keep a Future Focus
Beat your New Year’s blues by focusing on your future goals. Looking back on your past year can give you insight into what you could do better in the coming year, but it can also be detrimental to your concepts of attainable goals in the coming year.?
Instead, focus your story by leveraging the lessons of the past into actionable goals for your future. This will give the previous year’s events value while putting your attention squarely on your future endeavors. Understanding the value of your experiences and putting them to work for you is a wonderful way to keep your writing impactful without giving yourself a case of the New Year’s blues.
Conduct Research into Popular Trends
Writing a fresh goal or story without getting the New Year’s blues can be a challenge. One creative way to come up with something new is to conduct online research into the latest trends in your specific subject. Rather than diving right into creating something, break down each trend and explore how best to tackle it in your own piece of work.?
For instance, research may reveal a popular genre like K-Pop that has gotten little attention from writers yet; taking on this musical genre for a project could be a unique idea for readers and help you avoid being overwhelmed by ideas that have already been used plenty of times before.
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Break-up Your Goals into Realistic Steps
The reason many people don’t realize their New Year’s goals is because of how they map them in relation to the progress required to get to the endpoint. Goals are not going from A to B; it’s often an A to Z process with many smaller milestones in between.?
Actually mapping out those milestones ensures you keep the broader goal in mind, but also means that you tackle New Year blues by accepting that it’s not just a simple ‘one and done’; many goals are ongoing processes that can take a long time to complete.
Reframe by Setting Intentions
You need fresh material to write a fresh story. Instead of goals for the new year, set intentions. “I intend..” gives you some leeway and is more positive. It doesn’t box you into success or failure only; they encourage and invite revisions throughout the year instead of a black-and-white goal. Reframe how you think about your story in the new year by setting intentions for success instead of setting yourself up for failure with goals.
Build on Your Achievements
Start with what you already have and build on top of that. Take a piece of paper or open a new document. Divide it into two columns. In the first one, write your 10 biggest successes from the previous year. Make it more if you feel like it. Remind yourself of the things you did and that you are proud of. That way you make a switch in your brain—away from the blues and towards solid facts.?
You’ll have proof that you can do a great job and reach your goals. Next, there’s a clean slate in the second column. And you’re already in a positive mood for the new beginnings. Here you can write the plans and goals for the new year. Whenever you come back to them, you also come back to the successes that have already happened. Give yourself some of that new-year positive reinforcement.
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