2023 Goals
Happy New Year! Happy Yule! Praise the coming sun and rebirth of all the land!
Unlike the last 2 years, I will not be making a long list (70ish goals). Instead, I will keep the list short, but full of difficult goals. I know I’ll have other goals and ways of measuring myself this year, but I’m making the official list a more focused list this year.
In addition, I am making two major changes to how I handle goals this year.
First, I am being looser with my structuring around goals. This seems counter-intuitive, but I want to give myself the slack to go where my interests and energy takes me instead of forcing myself to work. This is an experiment in self-trust. I believe I will, by nature of who I am, get the work done. But instead of forcing myself to get it done on a specific deadline, I will create organic interest and deadlines through that process.
Second, I am focusing on the meaning behind the goals, for the long term. I’m turning my attention to the man I am becoming over the next few years, instead of the tactical elements of what accomplishments he’d have over the year. My hope is that this will build a habit of knowing my “why” and also give me the flexibility to explore other “hows” on the journey.
Toward that end here are some of the big goals for the year. I’m working on a detailed goal list and may publish that in the future.
Writing:
I have several large projects I want to complete over the year. I have a sense that other writers would find this volume of work to be a bit daunting, but I am a pisser not a bleeder. I can write and write and it feels good and in flow. The content will come, it’s just a matter of making it any good in the edit and revision process.
Chronic Pain Handbook: For years while in chronic pain and in the past year of building a coaching business, I’ve looked for a single source of truth for chronic pain management and come up short. When I had my headache, I needed the big book of “here’s all the things you can try and how.” Instead, I had to discover that book on my own through lots of trial and error.
I’m going to write the book that I needed. I’m shooting for 70 pages or so of content exploring a dozen or so techniques that you can do on your own to manage the pain directly, as well as the life that comes with being in pain. The pitch for the book is essentially, “If you are in chronic pain, here is book full of everything that seems to work for managing pain, written in a way that you can understand, with exercises and questions for each topic, and references if you want to go deeper.”
Spoken Word Album: Since my teens, I have been enthralled with slam poetry and spoken word. I like writing in a way that feels lyrical and with flow. I want to create something here that I’d be proud of, but doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. The goal is to do and create and then have some artifact worth sharing.
The Rules of Alchemy: I’m working on a book about transformation. Every chapter has three parts: a fictional story demonstrating the rule, a non-fiction section about the rule, and a set of exercises on how to apply it. I love this project and I think about it all the time.
100 blog posts: I am going to continue to challenge myself to write publically. I love the pressure of needing to create, to hit a deadline, to show my work. Writing is a form of thinking, so sharing my thoughts here is a critical part of my development.
Entrepreneurship
I have several small businesses and products that I’m working on. I want them to flourish and ultimately provide the majority of my income.
Chronic Pain Coaching: This year, I will be writing the book, producing a course, and starting a short-form interview podcast with experts in the very wide field of pain. My goal is to provide people access to more information about their pain, how to manage it, and ultimately help people overcome it.
Congruent Consulting: I’m slowly growing this business. I’m doing executive coaching, facilitating strategy workshops. As my work with LSA grows, I’m going to also publish articles to LinkedIn and the website. I’m also kicking around the idea of a weekly LinkedIn Newsletter called Dayjob Alchemy as a way to help people working to change their dayjob in light of all of our personal insights during COVID.
Journals: I have a draft of a daily prompt journal and ideas for several variations on that. I’d like to create version 2 of the existing journal and v 1 of the variations in the short term, but publish several of these as digital and physical products by end of year.
Spirituality:
It’s challenging to craft goals around this, so treat these more as orientations towards the gods and my own growing sense of connection to the divine.
Regular Sacrifice: I have been sacrificing libations at regular intervals to Apollo and Dionysus since October, and have given up my own libations since then, too. While I won’t continue not drinking once my birthday hits in February, I am going to continue the practice of ritual sacrifice and prayer this year.
Wheel of the Year: I’m going to celebrate each turn of the wheel this year. I did a moderate job last year, but want to have ritual, prayer, and action for each season.
Paganism: I am going to dig a little deeper and understand both ancient and modern paganism, how it is practiced and how I might enrich my own relationship to the natural and divine worlds through these concepts.
Buddhism and meditation: I’ve let my regular daily meditation habit slip and now mostly use it as a settling activity before big events. This is helpful, but I think treating each day as a meaningful event is worth the relatively minor effort of getting up early enough to meditate.
Regular Prayer: In the same way that regular sacrifice is just something that one does (orthopraxy versus orthodoxy), I’m going to be praying regularly this year. It’s a general disposition toward the divine that matters here, along with the openness to the real or psychomagical results of this practice.
Exploration:
This is a full grab bag of things. I am not devoting myself to become a master of any of these and these represent a list of curiosities that I have at the beginning of the year. It’s just fun to learn and do things, just to see how they work.
Balisong Tricks: I want to have a full knife flipping routine. This is probably 5 or so tricks total
Vocal Training: I want to leverage my speaking and singing voice and develop this more this year
Weird Workouts: I want to play with Bulgarian bags, tires, and sleds this year.
War Mind Fight Club: I am going to build a small grappling gym in my garage and try to get about 6 folks who want to train regularly.
Poem and Monologue memorization: I loved learning poems last year and want to continue to add beautiful words into my head, decorating my mind and tongue with language.
Keyboard and Music: I am learning keyboard right now and playing with music production and music creation. I love the creativity and feel like I could easily become obsessed with this.
Dry Needling: I have a machine, a book, and needles. I’m going to learn this slow and steady. :)
