Introduction
I’ve often wondered why we wait until the start of the new year to improve ourselves. I mean, on the one hand, I can kinda understand the ‘fresh slate’ idea, but on the other, if you wait 60 days to start, you’re 60 days delayed from the improvements you might have seen had you begun earlier!
According to an article in the Washington Post which quotes Katy Milkman, a Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania professor and author of ‘How to Change’, the ‘fresh slate’ idea I mentioned isn’t too far from the mark. Life is hard sometimes, and it can feel like we’re trying to juggle so much at once, and the very notion of attempting to add more to that can feel like a tall order. Within this, for some of us, the ‘fresh start’ effect affords a sense of a new chapter, offering the boost in motivation needed to make the changes we wish to.
But is there magic in the new year? Well, not really, as far as I can tell. But, hang on, don’t click off the post just yet, because I DO think New years resolutions get a bad reputation. Stemming from a fundamental misunderstanding of the opportunity, how to set effective goals that can be met, and cultivating a growth mindset over perfection.
As I explain what I mean, I’ll use my goals for this academic year 2023/24-2024/25 as examples and explain steps I have put in place to bring me closer to achieving my goals.
SMART Goal Setting:
SMART goals have been around for as long as I can remember. I remember primary school goals set on the whiteboard to the SMART framework. I want to be clear, that’s what they are; a framework. You don’t need to stick to them no matter what, and you don’t need to restrict yourself to meeting each part if that’s not helpful. It’s a springboard.
I like to start macro > micro, by which I mean I start with a goal dump and just get everything out – what do I want to achieve, long term, short-term, big dreams, and small, and everything in between! You can check out my goal-dump spread below as an example to get you started!
Once I have the goal dump, I can usually spot some themes. This will come into play later when we discuss ‘relevance’. Something I have noticed for me personally is that while I might want to achieve a goal, if it doesn’t fit in and mesh with the overall plan it tends to get pushed to the wayside while I am trying to juggle the core goals. I’ll probably write a whole post about how I discovered what my ‘core values and ‘core goals’ are, how they can change and evolve etc. But, basically put, they’re kinda the ‘long-term’ things we want for our lives and the ‘values’ we hold ourselves to in life.
If you want to become a lawyer as I do, you’d need to complete the required educational courses, and maintain certain ethical and moral behaviour to enable you to pass the solicitors regulation authorities admission screening, for example. So this is a ‘core goal’ and luckily for me the screening for character and suitability broadly matches the ‘core values’ I hold myself to. When we set a goal for ourselves that is incongruent with our core goals, we might find it difficult to set aside time for it. Similarly, when we try to reach a goal in a way that goes against our core values, we might find it distressing. Something I often struggle with as a neurodivergent is the premise that people are different in different situations. To me it feels dishonest, like I am lying. I still struggle with it, even though intellectually, I understand the need to adopt ones behaviour for friends v family, or work v a club night. I think sometimes this rigidity in thinking can trip me up in reaching my goals, so I wanted to mention it so you can be aware of it too!
Specific:
With this, you want to start big and get smaller. I like to start my goal-planning session with a ‘goal-dump’. I set a 30-40 min timer, and I just write out everything I’d like to achieve in that time. This can be for the year or ever, it’s up to you! But start BIG.
For example, one of my goals this year started as ‘lose weight’. That’s a huge goal with a lot of moving parts. But from that big macro goal, we can break down how much weight and in what time frame. I looked up my ‘ideal weight’ for my height and weight and set the final weight goal as 140 lbs or 63.5kg. My starting point was 320lbs or 145kgs, so I needed to lose 175lbs or 81.5kgs. Safe weight loss recommendations are about 2lbs a week, 52 weeks in a year so about 104lbs max a year, safely. Doing the math, it would be about 18 months to lose my total goal, but knowing how life can be and trying to allow myself some grace, I made the goal 87.5lbs for 2023/24 and the same again for 2024/25, which should take me to my ideal weight in two years.
Once you know what your macro-goals and micro-goals are, you want to consider how you’ll get to them. So, continuing my example, I want to lose weight, and that’s wonderful, but how will I do so? Well, I’m going to work on increasing my daily steps, which will add a calorie deficit, but I will also adjust my diet.
Typically, when making an action plan to support achieving the goal in question, you add barriers to a habit you wish to stop and remove barriers for one you wish to start/increase. For example, for most people gaining weight is not simple, and I am no different. A combination of mobility issues and fatigue, ADHD brain fog and executive dysfunction rooted in memory and organisation issues meant that I would struggle with meal planning and prep, fresh food would go bad before I remembered it needed to be eaten, and often I’d be left with take-out as my only option if I wanted to eat that day. This isn’t a bad thing once in a while, but it was happening 1-2 times per week at least, which was a huge contributor. To start, I removed delivery apps from my phone, making it harder to order take-out when I was tired. Next, I made a designated day to plan my meals and I typically have my shopping delivered on the same day and time slot wherever possible, too. I then prepare batch cook and portion out the food on a set day. This makes it easier when I’m tired.
If you’re like me, and you struggle with fatigue, pain and executive function, the very question of ‘What should I make for dinner’ feels like a knife of fear directly into my right ventricle. I have never been the best with food, and while I’m not officially ‘recovered’ from my long-term eating disorder, I am doing significantly better than I ever had before. I think this is in large part thanks to my instant pot, you can find the one I have here , while I don’t always use the ‘pressure’ features, and I have no singular fucking clue what a ‘sous vide’ is or does, the basic idea for me is ‘dump and go’.
So, on Saturday, I plan my meals for that week. For example, let’s say I do porridge for breakfast with a banana and chai seeds, and for dinner a veg pasta, I pop everything in my basket. When it’s delivered, I get my meal prep pots out and prep everything, I measure out the oats and milk, and I prep the banana and chai seeds into their little compartments so all I have to do is throw that bad boy in and nuke it, pow! BREAKFAST. Not only is that a meal I no longer need to think about, but it’s the same calorie portion each time. I have these for breakfast, snacks, dips and things like that. For dinners, I weigh out my ingredients, add the seasonings and tins of tomatoes or whatever sauce base, and put those in freezer bags with their name on them ‘tomato pasta’ ‘mushroom stroganoff’ etc. When I want to batch cook my dinner, I just take the bag out, dump the whole thing in my instant pot, and select the program, and it’s good to go. Once it’s cooked, I dish it up into my portion boxes (these for dinners that are like fake meat, a veg and a sauce that I want to keep separate. Never may the dry things touch the wet things! Amen! And these are for things like bakes and casseroles, where all ingredients are together): put the date on, shove it in the fridge and then it’s ready for when I want dinner – another choice less and no question on the calories or nutritional content.
These planned routines help me know what I am doing daily and reduce my food budget as one microwave meal is between £2-£6 depending on the brand and meal. While this is less pricey than take-out, it is still not within my budget. Additionally, I have far less control over the ingredients and nutritional content of a meal I have not prepared, which sounds obvious, but ADHD and autism sensory issues paired with allergy problems due to Mast Cell Activation Syndrome and being a vegetarian since I was 16, it leaves me quite restricted in options. None of this is to say I never have take-out or a ready meal, but I can reduce the frequency enough that I am much more comfortable with it!
Measurable:
When you’re thinking about your goals, you want to get specific and plan how you will measure them, how you will know when you’re done, and what metrics you will use for milestones along the way.
Continuing with my weight loss goal as the example, and knowing my difficulties with eating disordered thoughts and habits, I decided to restrict myself to weighing in a maximum of twice a week but to try only to do so once a week – I only track the lower of the two weights regardless. In addition, rather than track calories, I ensure I eat something in each ‘meal slot’. It doesn’t have to be what one would typically consider a meal, but I have to try. As a general guide, I’ll try to grab something to eat each time I make the dogs their meal, and with this in mind, meal-prepping something easy to grab that reduces choice fatigue is so helpful for me!
When I started ADHD medication, I gave up energy drinks and caffeine. I keep coffee in the house because sometimes there are mix-ups with my meds, and I do not get them on time – meds are a treatment, not a cure, and I still struggle with ADHD symptoms, but they’re milder, if that all makes sense! I also know the stimulant medications used to treat ADHD, in addition to my postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, mean ensuring I am drinking enough is of high priority, so I got myself a Spark Hidrate smart water tracking bottle.
You can find a link to the bottle I have here, and it syncs with my Apple iPhone 11 Pro Max; their app keeps track, and the sensor in the bottom is customisable. You can adjust the colours and how frequently it lights up, reminding you to keep up with your drinking! I also invested in the Xiaomi Mi Body Composition Scale 2, which comes with an app that syncs with my iPhone and tracks my weight in the health app.
So, a successful day for me looks like a minimum of one ‘meal’ and something – a fruit or veg snack, a snack bar, etc – when I make the dog’s breakfast and lunch, with a minimum of 1.8k steps and 2k of non-caffeinated fluids. I broke down the 2023/24 goal into 05lbs milestones, where I can give myself small rewards like a new item of clothing etc, to encourage me to keep going and maintain momentum when things get difficult.
With weight loss particularly, as you lose the weight and get closer to your goal, typically, it slows down because your basal metabolic rate is lowering since your body requires fewer calories to maintain basic functions. I am quite a visual person, and seeing how far I have come helps keep me going, so I have a weight loss tracker and a clothing size tracker with my measurements in my bullet journal in separate spreads, which you can take a peek at below!
Achievable:
As I outlined in the Specific part of the process, the goals must be possible. I could easily have set my goal to lose the total in just one year, but that would have set me up to fail, and why would we want to do that? Not only this, one of my key emphasis points in this goal in particular, is to lose weight healthily. Sure, I know how to drop 50lbs in 6 weeks, but it is not healthy, sustainable or a mental state I ever wish to slide back into.
But this isn’t just applicable to weight loss, if you want to learn French, for example, another of my goals. If you’re starting from scratch, you’re probably not going to be able to have a flawless, fluent conversation with a native Parisian in 4 weeks. I have a basic understanding of French and can communicate in a broken sort of way, that I can be understood between knowing the singular words I want in combination with hand gestures and props for the words I can’t recall or do not know. I want to go from this non-officially assessed ‘A2’ level to ‘C2’, considered proficient and fluent.
Considering I study part time with a disability, have two dogs to care for and Daphne to train as my assistance dog, looking into how long it takes the typical learner to go from A1>C2, 850-900 hours. Nine hundred hours would be 18 hours a week, meaning I am studying ‘full-time’ in terms of hours, which is a little too much for me to manage right now. Instead, I decided not to set a level goal but took the 900-hour total and divided it by the number of total levels, which gave me 150 hours. I then worked out how many hours a week I would need to study to move up one level roughly, and that worked out at 2.8, so let’s say 3, which is far more manageable. So I want to put in 180 minutes of French study each week, which can be slotted in while I eat, shower, and other ‘dead air’ time where I don’t use my hands to type or do other activities but can listen and speak easily.
Relevant:
Relevance matters, and this is where the goal-dump shines because if you’ve done one when you reach the relevance part of the SMART framework, you’ve practically already formulated it! Why a goal is relevant is something only you can know. But sometimes, things look unrelated at first glance, and when I consider them a little more deeply, I realise they are all interconnected.
If you look at my 2023-24>2024-25 goal-dump spread below, you’ll notice I have seemingly unconnected goals in all categories. But they all move me towards my larger career aspirations. Let me explain:
I want to qualify as a lawyer, so I need to finish my current module W203, which completes my second year of study. Change degree pathways, so I am taking the newer modality of study with the SQE prep built in, and completing my third year of study with the Open University.
While doing that, I want to lose the weight I mentioned in my examples to improve my fitness and increase my daily steps, resilience, and stamina. The idea is that I will be able to have more ‘good’ days and sustain hybrid working.
Part of being able to sustain that is not relying on public transport to get everywhere, so I needed to renew my provisional driver’s license and get my new PIP Benefit award to get an adapted car with Motability scheme and finish learning to drive. This will also help improve my mental health, offering me freedom and independence I haven’t had in a long time. I’ll be able to take my dogs to more places, walk more without my wheelchair etc.
Spotting the patterns and recognising the goals that weren’t working towards that larger, overarching goal helps spot the goals we are unlikely to follow through on. That isn’t to say that any goal out of the pattern is out of reach, and sometimes ‘travel to Egypt’ as an outlier works as a vision-board-like goal. It helps us think about our career and fitness goals with a reward in mind. But, for me, these goals typically get planned out and then pushed back because I’m trying to juggle too much at once.
Time:
Ok, this is the hard part because there’s a balance between a deadline and a ‘growth-over-perfection’ mindset I mentioned at the top of the post—deadlines and I are not pals. I can admit my weaknesses, and BOY is this a weakness. I have to set internal soft deadlines for myself, but they don’t work, because my brain’s like FUCK YOU LEXY you lying liar who lies. I know that’s not a real deadline!
So how do you strike the balance? Well, I say look for improvements. For me personally, I have quarterly check-ins scheduled in my planner and calendar, I use these to check in with my goals and planner system and make sure things are going okay. If they aren’t going well, I review my data (habit trackers, health data, etc) and see what I can tweak and adjust, what spreads work and why, which don’t and why etc.
That’s why I suggest setting milestones to measure yourself against because sometimes things get in the way and life happens, but if we get to November and I’m only at 260lbs rather than 142.5lbs, I can look at the milestones I have achieved and see that while I didn’t quite get to my goal, I did make progress. Ultimately, the milestones serve several purposes, and all data is useful even when it isn’t what we were hoping for. By keeping a track record, you not only see what’s going well but what isn’t, and though that might sound negative, it can help when you get to reflection and want to find out why you weren’t quite meeting the goal you hoped to.
Mindset | Growth > Perfection
It isn’t easy, and I often get caught up in it. Back when the pandemic hit, I was studying at a different University. When our first university asked us to leave, I had already tried to pass the second-year modules from our rented house. But their courses were not designed to be online, and one PowerPoint slide was simply a car, a house and a bar of gold with little explanation otherwise. I deferred and moved closer to campus, then started attending in person, which proved difficult too. My reasonable adjustments were not properly placed when exams came, and the technology did not work. So by the time the pandemic hit, I hadn’t submitted a written piece of work in almost 18 months, and my confidence was shot. I was exhausted and grieving and now living back at home with my parents and my Grandfather – all of whom I love dearly, but I had been used to my own space and solitude. I repeatedly wrote and deleted my coursework, requested extensions, and then deleted it all again, starting over. I think subconsciously, I felt if I didn’t submit anything, I couldn’t fail, and that was better than trying my best and it not being sufficient.
Those of us with ADHD are estimated to receive 20,000 corrective or negative messages by the time we are 10, according to an article from ADDitube mag, and it’s heartbreaking all the more when you understand that many of us already have difficulty with rejection-sensitive dysphoria, the emotional distress we feel genuinely feels as though the world might end. The shame and guilt, even the diagnostic questionnaire asks if we make careless or thoughtless mistakes. When the ‘professionals’ who know and understand our condition more than others use terms like that, what hope are we meant to hold that lay persons will be more compassionate? Often we even equate asking or accepting help with ‘giving up’ or ‘admitting’ we are incapable, incompetent, or just ‘lazy’ – as many already consider us.
The best advice I can offer, as an imperfect person still learning and coming to grips with her sense of self and neurodiversity, is that we can only do our best. That changes day to day, hour to hour sometimes, and that’s okay. We are imperfect people in an imperfect world, making decisions with incomplete, imperfect information. Sometimes, that’s frustrating, so often I find myself saying, ‘If I had known….’ but of course, it’s easy in hindsight with all the information and consequences laid out bare. You have to go to sleep at night, everyone else goes away, everything else falls away, and the only person you have left is you. If you can’t sleep because you feel guilty, or anxious, or wonder if you made the right choice, you have to reconcile that with yourself. Sometimes it’s really hard to do that, to look at yourself and your choices, and think, okay, what could I do differently? But I think it’s crucial, and the language we use to speak about ourselves and reflect is also important. Notice I didn’t say ‘reflect on what I could have done ‘better’.’ When you’re reflecting, I don’t know that it is a ‘better’ or ‘worse’ thing. I mean, you’re answering to yourself. You’re ‘besting’ you, right? So let’s ask what we can do differently, how we can make this smoother, and calmer, and how I can reduce my anxiety in the future. Let’s all try to be intentionally compassionate with the words we use, to ourselves and others, in 2024 – and maybe we can start with how we phrase our goals!
Until next time,
All our love,
Lexy, Jaxx and Daphne