Instead of Making New Year’s Resolutions, Try Clarifying Your Intentions

As we start a new year, many of us make New Year’s resolutions that we won’t be able to keep. Meditating every day, exercising 3 times per week, saving more money each month. A Forbes poll recently asked 1000 adults how long their New Year’s resolutions last. The average was less than four months. Should we just give up trying? My Zen practice offers a way to get off that seesaw of trying and failing. It starts with knowing the difference between particular goals, like losing 10 pounds, and a deeper intention, like honoring the preciousness of physical health.

I was reminded of the value of knowing my intentions when I recently gave a work presentation that left me feeling bad. I was speaking to respected colleagues, and I was presenting some new information from my research. I gave it my best shot, but my audience found all kinds of things wrong with what I was presenting and much to criticize. Their feedback was constructive, but I went away with my tail between my legs. I told one of my friends that I was feeling bad about my presentation, and he made a comment that turned my head around.

“It’s always useful to clarify your intentions. Why did you give that talk?" I had no immediate answer. For days afterward, I wondered, what were my intentions? I knew I wanted my colleagues to like me. I wanted them to think I was smart. But those reasons seemed small and insignificant. Was that all I was after? Amid the swirl of motives that we have for whatever we do, how do we clarify what's most important to us? With so many different desires operating all the time, how do I figure out what I most want in any situation?

The Zen teacher Norman Fischer writes about the distinction between our goals and our intentions. Goals are the specific things we set out to achieve. For example, the goal to do a good job on my presentation at work. I can try to achieve my goals, but I can’t always control the outcome – whether or not I succeed. Fischer contrasts these goals with intentions – what he refers to as the heart's intentions. They’re the aspirations for how we want to live our lives that are still there even when things don’t turn out as we’d planned. He asks us to think about which of our intentions we’d like to see proliferate in the world – the kinds of intentions that we would like others to live by as well.

If, as the saying goes, “What goes around comes around,” which of my intentions would I want reflected back to me by others? If my intention is to make people like me, would I want this reflected back to me in a universe of people just hungry for everyone else’s approval?

Looking at it through this lens, I again asked myself, why did I give that presentation? One of my strongest feelings was urgency: I had some new information about what promotes health and happiness that I wanted others to know about. By contrast, my wish to have everyone approve of me looked like a pretty superficial goal. But helping people be happier and healthier? Yes, that felt like an intention worth holding, and one I’d like to see more of in the world.

As a Zen teacher, I hear many people talk about feeling bad if they don't meditate every day. And I offer a way to reframe it to the underlying intention. Meditation is, after all, a way to be more present to life as it unfolds. So how about the intention to be as fully alive as possible, to be as fully present as I can be for this precious, fleeting existence? That reframe might offer a guidepost not just for how often I put my butt on a meditation cushion, but for how I behave when I’m with my family, and whether I give my full attention to a friend who wants my help.

Clarifying these deeper intentions can be a lifelong practice that we use to shape how we are when we’re putting a child to bed, or when we’re out for a walk in the woods, or when we’re at a meeting of a work team. It’s a bit like exercising our muscles, something we get better at with time. And when those deeper intentions are front and center, they become the “north stars” that we aim toward, and day-to-day goals become easier to sort out. My more trivial goals, such as being liked or seeming smart, take a back seat to what’s truly meaningful.

What does all this have to do with failing to keep your new year’s resolution to save more money or drink less alcohol? Try shifting your focus to what’s bigger than the particular resolution you may have trouble keeping – maybe it’s the intention to take good care of your family financially, or to be more present when socializing with friends. Holding those intentions clearly in mind as you go through the day lets you get beyond judgments about success and failure and opens up whole new possibilities for living a life you want to live.

Click here to buy “The Good Life” from Amazon.

Thanks for reading The Good Life with Robert Waldinger!

Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.