Wellness and Personal Intentions

This month, the topic is wellness. Self-care is part of wellness, certainly. But wellness is bigger than yourself. In a workplace, everyone’s individual self care impacts the overall wellness of the organization. One person burned out behaviors can start a tidal wave of negativity through an organization. (That said, that burnout is likely a result of poor structures in the org; but that’s a topic for another month.) So, this month, the topic is thinking about wellness individually and how it impacts work.

January is the traditional month for imagining a better you. It’s the time when you focus on good intentions, and then at the first stumble, you start feeling like a failure. It’s a month of high hopes and low vibes.

So, let’s spend this month talking about good intentions but doing away with low vibes. The low vibes comes in part from the arbitrary nature of choosing January 1 as the date for your resolutions.

Time is a construct. January is the beginning of the year as part of an old Roman clerical choice. April 1 had been New Years. Some faiths have New Years in the fall.

Point is: pick a day, and feel free to make it your day to make an intention. But day two is often when the low vibes start. For example, let’s say today I’m gung ho about writing. I’m going to promise myself to write every day. Imagine tomorrow morning I have a crack of dawn flight and then a crazy day of meeting and then family responsibilities and then...Point is, every day is variable. Any one day can foil your plans. If your goal is everyday for a year, you’ve lost a whole year of dreams in two days. But, that’s because you gave yourself very little wiggle room and your intention was huge.

Now wiggle room is tricky. If you hope to do better in the world, you’ve got so much latitude anything will satisfy your goal. As long as you don’t call all your colleagues idiots and cut people off in traffic, you’ve succeeded in your goal.

Huge intentions are also tricky. For some people, they are just the ticket. These are also the people who’ve lived a life of succeeding in tiny goals. Their life is full of positive feedback loops. ‘Write a book this year’ can actually happen for them. I made that intention one year. Before that, I’d written many, many published works. I’d written essays, books, and labels. In other words, I’d trained. And success has trained me. I made a giant intention, but I’d set myself up to succeed.

Setting Goals isn’t like planning an escape room. You’re not trying to set up a system where you have a 99% chance of not doing it. You’re setting up an intention for something you have a likelihood of doing. Pick something where the odds are good but without work not great. If it is something you’ve already done okay, make a huge intention. It will motivate you, and you’ve trained yourself up. If it is new, set up smaller intentions. Like, if you dream of writing a book, set down mini goals: I’ll write 1000 words this week of free writing, say. But notice, my intention above is concrete and achievable. It’s not like the wiggly intention of doing better. It’s also got a bit of wiggle room, in that I give myself one week to write a set of words, rather than giving myself daily targets. Assign yourself this goal every week for two months, and you might have the level of success to give yourself daily word count targets. Or you might decide reading is more your speed than writing. And either answer is okay.

Which brings me to my intention for the year. I’m choosing a single big intention for the year. But I’ve been training up. I spent the last couple years consulting. I worked a lot; and I loved the work I was doing. One year, I decided I needed to get ideas out there, but I didn’t have the money for an editor. (Any reader of this blog can tell ;) ) But I also decided my ideas mattered, and I wouldn’t be hard on myself for typos. I had the best editor in the world at my old job. I just never learned the skills to catch my own mistakes. It irked me at first to have so many typos on my blog. I’m the sort of person who finds typos in The Times in seconds. Then I realized I am no more or less smarter than I was when I had an editor. If I need the ideas out there, I’ll just give myself a break about the typos. They annoyed me when I reread my writing at first. Now a couple years later, I just shrug and fix them. And, my life changed drastically from my blogging. People wanted to hire me. The positive feedback loop proved being gentle on myself was worth it.

With this one practice experience under my belt, this year my intention is to give myself a break in all aspects of my life. I’m going to be honest with myself and shrug off missteps. This is not to say I’ll ignore them, but I won’t ruminate on them. I’ll learn from them and then let go.

I’m choosing this goal because I think it will change how I lead. I hope it will have positive effects on my work and my energy. I guess time will tell.  And then I’ll tell you :)

Personal goals can have big impact on the work place. How you see yourself spills out into the world and workplace? Don’t believe me? Pick a drastic change of attitude at the work day. If you don’t generally smile, spend one day deciding you will smile at everyone you see. Come home and write down how your day went. I did this exactly experiment recently. Not with smiling, bc I’m naturally smiley. I decided to walk slow. It was hard. But when I reflected, I noticed more people approached me to talk. I also realized I noticed more things about my work place. Changing for one day, and a small thing, can have big impact. I’m excited for the impact I’ll feel, and through me, my work place when I spend this year giving myself a break.

What are your intentions for the day, month, year? Share here or on social media.