Does Your New Year’s Resolution Support Your Legacy Goals?

Now that a new year is here, most people are thinking about New Year’s resolutions. Sadly, 80% of resolutions fail by the end of January. When we consider goals, we often think of monthly, quarterly, or yearly goals. Sometimes we think ahead to a three-year or five-year goal. But have you ever considered thinking longer term? For instance, what would your one-hundred-year goal be? It’s an important—and perhaps scary—goal to consider because it’s an objective beyond your life. When setting goals, personally or for your interiorscape business, here is a process that can help.

What are your legacy goals for your New Year’s resolution?

Starting with a goal for your legacy really puts into perspective what will happen each day. But, I believe most New Year’s resolutions fail because they simply aren’t important enough to our legacies to compel us to achieve them. Whether the goal is increasing your interiorscape business sales, losing weight, or spending more time with friends or family, if it doesn’t contribute to our legacy, then it likely won’t happen because it’s not compelling enough to stick it out.

The first time we think about our legacy, it’s difficult to even articulate what we want to do. One great place to start is to consider your daily or weekly activities and ask, “Would this be consistent with my hundred-year goal, even though I’m not sure what that is yet?” There are many moments in daily life where I can say, “I’m not sure exactly what I want my legacy to be, but I know for sure that this activity won’t contribute to it.”

Once we’ve established some legacy context, it becomes much easier to set compelling one-year, three-year, and five-year goals. I prefer to create New Year’s goals in each of Gallup’s five elements of well-being. 

Here are the five areas of life to consider:

• Career Well-Being: What do I do each day for work? Do I enjoy it and does it play to my strengths?
• Social Well-Being: Do I have strong relationships and love in my life?
• Financial Well-Being: Do I have the economic resources to do what I want to do in life?
• Physical Well-Being: Do I have good health and energy to live life each day?
• Community Well-Being: Am I engaged with the area in which I live or causes I care about?

Considering goals across all five areas is key because they are interdependent and inseparable from each other. Pursuing goals in one area while ignoring the others will lead to declining overall well-being and is another reason why many fail. This is because to achieve anything, we must prepare to give up something else. Therefore, good goal setting will involve not only creating clear outcomes for what success looks like (specific, measurable, and time-bound goals) but also intentionally considering what will be sacrificed for the achievement of the goal. This step allows us to consider the actual work that needs to be done on a monthly, weekly, and daily basis, as well as our capacity to put in that effort.

When obstacles arrive, keep going

We should also consider what obstacles may arise and how we’ll deal with them when they do. We may choose to identify key strengths we can leverage, accountability partners or coaches to help, or simply prepare to reset our mindset to get back on track.

For all New Year’s goals, replace negative self-talk with positive self-talk

Finally, we need to consider our affirmations and daily beliefs. What are some positive, short mantras we can repeat to ourselves about what we’re working to accomplish? Science has repeatedly proven that self-image is key to what one accomplishes.

It can feel scary to take on a truly challenging and impactful goal. When I first started running marathons for charity (weighing 348 pounds and having never run a single mile in my life), my coach taught me, “You have what it takes, but it will take everything you’ve got.” Embracing the challenge, considering my legacy, and having a plan is what has allowed me to complete two Boston marathons and one Chicago marathon while raising over $50,000 for vulnerable children around the world.

For 2024, I hope that you’ll set ambitious goals to help change the world, even if only for a single person. And I believe if you do more than just make a resolution and truly embark on a goal-setting journey, you’ll accomplish anything you dream.