New Year's Intentions

Setting intentions, not goals.

I’ve learned a lot about my values over the past year. In 2026, I want to work on living those values with greater consistency and intentionality. These aren’t written as S.M.A.R.T. goals, and that’s okay with me. Instead, I think of them more as guiding principles in my approach to life in this coming season.

Openness

Being open to new experiences, ideas, people. Embracing personal growth. Changing my mind about things. Tolerating—and, ideally, welcoming—when others have different ideas than mine. Bringing curiosity rather than judgment to new experiences, ideas, and people.

Honesty

Practicing honesty, transparency, and openness in my relationships, especially when it’s hard or uncomfortable.

Being authentic. Letting my words and actions align with my values. Not pretending to like or want something I don’t, just because it would make someone else more comfortable.

Speaking my truth with love. I can be a bit overly direct sometimes, and I want to be honest without being blunt. I want to be considerate in the delivery of my messages. This means I need to take more time before speaking, to think about how I want to share. This also means I need to interrogate my truth for myself, and figure out whether my truth is a momentary thought or desire or something that feels more deeply true and values-aligned.

Acceptance

This one’s about releasing the desire to control my circumstances.

Accepting how people want to love me and show up in my life. Accepting that different people show love in different ways. That people may show up imperfectly or not how I wanted or expected. Appreciating all the different ways I can give and receive love in my life and the value of each connection.

Accepting that we can’t control how other people view us or what their impressions of us are. All we can do is to show up honestly.

Accepting that everything changes. Staying committed to holding all things lightly (non-grasping). Being content with how things are rather than how we wish things were or used to be or could be. Satisficing over maximizing.

Humility

This hasn’t been an important value of mine in the past, but I’m ready to embrace it as something I really want to work on this year. Humility to me means acknowledging that my way of seeing things or moving through the world is not necessarily the best way. It relates to both openness and acceptance.

Fundamentally, this is about being okay if others don’t have the same priorities as I do or if they communicate differently. For example, it’s really important to me to have open communication with my loved ones, and I feel close to others by sharing my thoughts and feelings, but my partner has a different preference for how he wants to communicate; as an internal processor, doesn’t always have such ready access to his opinions as I do. He will share things with me, but on his own timeline, and there will be some things he doesn’t share. My way of being is not “right” or “better.” I can have general preferences for how others treat me, without assuming that everything about the way I communicate is the best way.

A blend of humility and honesty is necessary in how I take accountability for my actions and their impact. Rather than justifying or rationalizing my actions, I want to own my mistakes (with grace and self-compassion) and learn from them.

I want to more readily make amends with others. I want to be the first one to apologize after an argument. I want being connected to be more important than being right.

Equanimity

This is another big area of growth for me. Equanimity means mental calmness, composure, and even-temperedness. It means emotional steadiness over volatility, both the highs and the lows. It means not chasing our desires or running from our fears.

In the past, I’ve thought of myself as less volatile, more tuned toward positive over negative stimuli, and someone who readily sees the bright side of situations and forgets the hardships. But I’ve realized this isn’t equanimity. Equanimity is about balance, calm, and discernment. It’s about patience. It’s responding over reacting. I still have a lot to learn here.

This coming year, I will be working on skills related to emotion regulation: identifying my emotions and where they live in my body, accepting them and the message they have to share, and self-regulating with kindness and care. I want to practice more self-soothing and more acceptance of negative emotions rather than having to immediately fix or distract myself from hard feelings, or looking to someone else to make me feel better.

I can also be impulsive sometimes. I want to practice sitting with a desire (to speak, to act, to decide) without acting on it. I want to practice naming and fully considering and feeling the potential consequences of my decisions. I want to respond thoughtfully in conversations instead of blurting out the first thing that comes to my mind. I want to own my tendency to externally process and do it in appropriate contexts and circumstances. For example, if I’m having a conflict with my partner and a quick comeback comes to mind, I want to wait before saying it, or take a break from the conversation and journal about these thoughts to process them to myself.

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I’m sharing these with you because I want to be known authentically. I truly love knowing and being known by people, and I’m deeply curious about others. In that spirit, I’d love to learn what you’re working on or committing to in your own life. Please share in the comments or in the subscriber chat.