I have a funny relationship with planning. I adore making plans. Like, I do it obsessively; I even take a clipboard into bed with me on a Saturday morning to sketch out my weekend. My guiding question is always: What’s the shape of the day?
But I hate committing to plans. Nothing rankles me more than an obligation, whether that’s a meal I have to make because the spinach is wilting, or a Hollywood Bowl concert that I bought tickets for months ago but am now not in the mood for.
Man plans and God laughs
- Yiddish proverb
This Christmas I received a lovely gift: A copy of Oprah’s The Life You Want Planner. It’s a beautiful book, full of color images, bound in a fabric-wrapped hardcover. I’m excited to fill it with my goals, intentions, and reflections. But as I look at the inviting empty lines beside the questions and prompts, I find myself hesitant to mark its pages with ink. What if I write something in the wrong place and have to cross it out? Or I set a goal and change my mind? Something about a pre-printed journal with fixed elements makes me feel pressure to make all the words I place in it perfect.
As an entrepreneur who hangs out at the woo-woo end of the spirituality spectrum, I come across a lot of content about manifesting and goal-setting. Productivity hacks. Vision boards. Five-year roadmaps. These exercises are all about deciding what you want and doggedly pursuing it. And I have used them all, a lot.
But as I write this on the eve of 2024, I am disinclined to do any of this. It’s not that I don’t have dreams and desires; I do. I just feel like taking them with a grain of salt.
Do you remember the child’s game “warmer, colder”? A friend hides an object somewhere in the room and guides you to it, saying warmer as you step toward it, colder as you step away, and red hot! as you move within reach of the hidden prize.
That’s how I prefer to make plans now, guided by my inner compass of emotion, intuition, and bodily sensations. As I navigate the terrain of my life, I find that the landmarks I use as orientation points are increasingly nearer to where I stand. In the past I would have set my sights on a distant feature on the horizon, keeping it in view while making daily moves toward it. At some point over the past year, I found myself preferring to look no further than the next bend in the road. Now, even that is too distant, too arbitrary, too limiting. How can I be sure rounding that corner is what’s best for me?
The things I think I want today — houses and cars and trips and relationships and accomplishments — are just pretty sugarplums, figments of my current perspective, which is circumscribed by my past experiences.
Case in point: Buying a house has been on my list of goals since I sold my last place in 2019, yet I haven’t done it. In retrospect, I’m glad I haven’t been encumbered by a property and a mortgage these past three years. Will I buy a house in 2024? Maybe, maybe not. Will I finish writing the first draft of my memoir? Maybe, maybe not. Will I spend the summer in Greece? Sounds great; we’ll see.
This fluid approach to life planning has evolved in me as I went through Martha Beck’s Wayfinder Life Coach Training program this year. She teaches us how to tune into our inner compass, moving toward what makes us feel the most free, and turning away from anything that feels heavy or constricting. Instead of imagining my ideal future, I want to remain open to what I can’t imagine. I can see my truest, highest path most clearly with my eyes closed, undistracted by shiny objects.
So I’m not going to make any concrete plans for 2024. I don’t even feel like setting goals. 2023 has been a very stressful year — full of good things but also difficult things — and I am tired. If there’s any intention to be set here, it’s something like this: I no longer want to do things I don’t want to do. I only want to do what I love to do.
If that seems utopian, naive, or privileged to you, I get it. I used to feel the same way. People can’t just do what they want! We all have to do things we don’t like doing, and we don’t have unlimited options available to us. It’s true that we may not have total freedom of choice based on our current resources, but we can make our own decisions about what we will act on, what we will say no to, and where we will invest our time and attention.
The divining rod that guides me now is the energy of love. What sparks desire in me? And what leaves me cold?
Maybe this is a new take on the law of attraction: Instead of picking a concrete goal like buy a house and then trying to use mind control to “manifest” it or attract it to me, I am noticing what I’m already attracted to — what I genuinely love — and then orienting myself toward it and letting the details of the what and how emerge organically. Essence over form.
So the goal to buy a house becomes an orientation toward the idea of an ideal home. That may mean buying a house, but it may mean having a nomadic experience, moving from one homey space to another. Instead of having a goal to grow my Substack audience or write a book, I am orienting myself to the love I feel for writing and letting the ideal form for my writing reveal itself to me.
Here are some things I loved in 2023:
Writing: here on this Substack, for magazine submissions, and personal essays that are just for me.
Hosting the Big Leap retreat and our online workshops.
Attending other people’s workshops and retreats, from Ann Friedman’s Unstuck retreat in Taos to Liz Gilbert and Rob Bell’s creative-living workshop at the Omega Institute.
Learning new skills in Wayfinder Life Coach Training.
Attending my nephew’s wedding and connecting with my extended family in New Jersey.
Having deep conversations with people I admire on the Selfish Gift podcast.
Walking in nature.
Cooking delicious meals, especially those shared with friends and family.
Spending time with my mother, my daughter, and my sister.
Resting.
This list is a prism that bends the light of opportunity into individual colors. If I add or subtract facets, new shapes and hues will fill my field of vision and dance on my wall.
Here’s what’s attractive to me on the eve of 2024.
Creativity and life coaching
The friend who gave me the planner was a practice client for me while I was in Wayfinder Coach Training. We worked together over about six months to explore the hidden beliefs and emotional blocks getting in the way of her goals and dreams. Over the course of our time together she took many small steps and big strides toward a life of her own design. I loved doing this work with her. In fact, it was some of the best work I did all year.
In 2024, I want to do more of this kind of coaching, perhaps blending it with book coaching and publishing consulting. If you are drawn to the idea of working with me in this way, this is a great time to do it. I need to log 25 more practicum hours as I work toward coaching certification, so am offering these hours at half price. You can book an information call with me here to find out if it’s a mutual fit.
Writing
I’ve joined Suzanne Kingsbury’s Gateless Writing Academy and am excited to use the program to discover and hone my writing voice over the coming year. I might be poetic. I might be dark or light, philosophical, confessional, personal, or pragmatic. I might write a series of essays, a book, or endless lists. Anything goes, and I can’t wait to see what wants to come forth.
Living in integrity
My word for 2024 is Integrity, as in wholeness, meaning a thing unbroken and undivided against itself. Living in integrity requires me to stay open and curious. It means being receptive and surrendering to what is.
It also means undoing habitual ways of being, dropping what no longer fits, from clothes to people to priorities. It means letting go of the managed plan, the contrived persona. Releasing obligation to old rules and expectations. I might disappear from social media for a spell. I might eat my dinner standing over the sink, looking out my kitchen window at the palm trees above my garage. I might throw out all my cherished routines and let new ones find me. Or, I might dispense with routines altogether.
Connecting and communing
I love my alone time, but after several years of feeling isolated by too heavy a workload, I am ready to open up my home and my heart to other humans. Certainly, I want more time with my daughter, who is my favorite person on earth, and more time with my mother, who is in a tender season. I’m also inviting in new, enriching friendships and deeper ties to my community. If romance comes knocking at my door, I’m ready to let it in, too.
I wrote myself some guidelines for how I want to live in 2024.
Be unapologetically authentic. Speak your truth or, if you opt for silence, at least know your truth and act from it.
Live your values. Be honest about where you’re posturing, acting out of fear, or feeling the urge to match someone else’s energy to your detriment. Compassionately release those tendencies and return to your values.
Follow your inner compass. It’s okay to set a course and then change it.
Let people have their feelings and opinions. Let them clasp them as closely as you hold your own. It’s ok if they don’t like what you’re creating, or if they disapprove of your priorities. Get comfortable with the discomfort of being judged and rejected. Their judgment is not about you, and you’ll waste precious life force trying to cajole them out of it.
Be mindful of who and what you invest your time, attention, and money into.
Don’t try to solve tomorrow’s problems today. Trust that if you’re tuned into your compass, you’ll know when the time is right to deliberate, choose, and act.
Take courageous action when you feel moved to it, even if you’re afraid.
Let go of what no longer fits you or delights your senses.
Reach out to people you admire, respect, and feel curious about, even if you feel intimidated by them.
Be receptive to new ideas, art, people, and places. Approach all new things with beginner’s mind and simply notice your assumptions rather than treating them as facts.
Love and enjoy your changing body, daily.
Take more walks.
Take more baths.
I love that I have fallen out of love with the pursuit of grand accomplishments, with setting targets and strategies. I’ve definitely fallen out of love with striving and the notion that struggling is noble.
What I’m most in love with now is peace and ease. With gentle mornings and afternoon baths. With spending time in nature. With creative writing, with making art. With connecting with people whose minds light up mine. I am in love with romance and pleasure, with lavishing care upon my physical and emotional bodies. I’m in love with fostering these energies in my own life and supporting others to do the same.
I’m going to take this approach to using this new planner, putting my intentions down on paper and holding it all lightly. No obligation; only acknowledgment. This is what I felt, desired, and wanted to say on this particular day, letting each day be a portal into the next. A new opportunity to ask and answer the question: What do I love today?
Happy New Year to you! Let’s all find ways to be closer to our hearts’ desires in 2024.
I loved reading this, Maggie! Earlier this week, I made a bracelet for myself with my kiddo’s bead set that says “integrity” flanked by two plastic gold stars. Based on our work together and how I’ve been living my life up until now, I think that “integrity” is a fantastic word of the year. I also resonate with the sentiment of holding goals loosely; by not strangling the goals, some beautiful things will come, for sure.
‘....love planning....hate commiting..’
Man, that lands for me big time!!
Nice read Jenny!! Very helpful!!