All the “My Goals For This Year” blog posts recently have one thing in common: each author prefaces their goals with this caveat:

“I’m not good at keeping resolutions, but here are a few anyway.”

These words always make me twinge. Making goals like New Year’s Resolutions is, in my opinion, a misunderstood practice. Goal lists do not recognize that Life Happens. We grow and change and accept new challenges or opportunities that we never saw coming. It is rare that a person’s goals do not change from month to month, or even week to week. But straying from our goal lists, especially New Years Resolutions, makes us feel guilty.

This is destructive. Not the act of writing down our goals–that is very valuable. It’s the way we think about our success in completing them that hurts us.

Over the years, my feelings toward goal lists have evolved. I no longer see them as a rubric for evaluating my success. Instead, they are snapshots of the person I was at the time I made the list. They encapsulate my hopes and dreams during that period of time.

Each year, Ray and I make a list with two components: our accomplishments of the past year, and our goals for the next. Then we read what we wrote last year. Inevitably, we laugh and shake our heads at those documents, amazed at how we had no idea what was in store for us. The list of accomplishments reminds us that we did not fail to achieve; we simply decided that other things were more important than our original goals.

What I would like to say to all those bloggers brave enough to put their resolutions online is this: don’t worry about “letting yourself down” if you don’t do that project you meant to, or the daily meditation you decided was good for you.  Completion of goals (or lack thereof) does not determine your worth.

Don’t stop making goal lists, or feel bad about resolutions that fall by the wayside.  Cherish these lists for what they are: a snapshot of yourself at a moment in time.

And what would a post about goals be without sharing a few of my own? I have about 40 goals – I tend to make ridiculously ambitious goal lists – but here are a few:

• Make a dining room table for our new house, complete with a mosaic design and sealed surface. This inherently requires the creation of several smaller practice tables.
• Sketch every day. I have a project that is working out very well. More on this in a future post!
• Remove the wallpaper in my kitchen/dining area and paint it. I am not a DIY queen; this will be a Big Deal.
• Complete three more Wild Fables
• Teach my sister everything I know about graphic design so that she can be my minion –ahem, help Razeware out with our artistic needs.
• Continue creating a monthly desktop wallpaper, and adapting them to create a printed wallpaper at the end of the year.

Lord, that is already an ambitious list, and it doesn’t include most of my actual “make-a-living” work!

How do you see your list of goals? How often do you make them or re-evaluate them — or do you make them at all?