Plan your bliss: effective goals and intentions for change

The dark of our long New England winter is the perfect time to clear what no longer serves us well, and to listen to our heart as we set our goals and aspirations.

Here are a few of our recommendations for journals, workbooks, or paper agendas for you to put pen to paper with your projects, plans, intentions, and dreams.

effective goals and intentions for change setting new years resolutions and goals
Photo by Joanna Kosinska

Our planning recommendations

The last couple of years, I’ve found it really helpful to work with Danielle LaPorte’s Desire Map process, which guides you to forget the concrete project management-style goal setting process that so many of us dread. Instead, LaPorte invites you to decide how you want to feel, and use that as a daily focus. Then you reverse engineer your activities and priorities to get closer to your “Core Desired Feelings.”

If that’s too left-field for you, take a look at our review of Susan David’s book Emotional Agility, which provides really helpful guidance to identify and live according to your values.

Ink + Volt’s planners are well-designed, and clarify that weekly and monthly process of setting concrete goals, with the important follow-up piece of documenting your accomplishments.

My dear friend Megan J. Alexander of Embodied Home has a new tarot workbook, Bija Tarot, designed to help you develop your intuition using your tarot deck and her guided journaling prompts. Megan is a yoga instructor and tarot practitioner with a grounded yet lyrical approach, and I’ve found her daily and monthly tarot forecasts to be inspiring and prescient.

You will get off track. That’s OK.

It’s easy to start the year with best intentions and get off track. Just remember, you can start and restart at any time of year. We explored this in-depth in this article, on using the month of September, to recalibrate.

I’d love to hear how you work with goals, dreams, and intentions for new year planning– or any time of year. Are you a paper or pixel person?

What are your favorite planning and dreaming resources? Please leave a comment below to share with other women in our circle.

Note: This post was originally published in January 2018 and has been revised for 2019. There are no affiliate links or sponsorships.

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