Happy New Year! I am hopeful that the year 2024 will bring all of us a year of health and happiness. This is always a time of year that I think about goals—our goals for students at school, goals to keep our adult learning moving forward, and my own personal goals as well. Last year, my sister told me about the “23 in 23 challenge” when the subject of goalsetting for the new year came up. Gretchen Rubin, a writer and creator of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast, suggests challenging yourself to set annual goals for yourself as a practical and manageable way to boost your happiness and build new habits. It turns out that both goal setting AND reaching your goals boosts your happiness. Rubin says that striving towards a goal, even if the goal is never fully achieved, gives a tremendous feeling of growth. Since Gretchen Rubin literally wrote the book on happiness (The Happiness Project), last year I decided to give it a try.
Two of my sisters and I each created a list of 23 things we wanted to accomplish in 2023. Some of the things were commitments we wanted to keep to ourselves, some were places we wanted to visit, and some were new activities we wanted to try. Rubin suggests that you check in on your list of 23 on the 23rd of each month to see how you are progressing. My sisters and I also checked in with each other on our progress and celebrated each time we could check something off our list. Knowing that we would not necessarily be able to achieve every single thing on our lists kept us more focused on the celebration aspect of achieving a goal versus the accountability side of things.
Without my list, I’m sure I would not have finished reading Anna Karenina, but it felt so good to finish that book and check it off my list. I also took pickle ball lessons, floated the Yakima River, and went to the Triple Door for the first time ever. These are all things I’d been meaning to try, but in the business of life and without having a clear goal for them before I had just never got around to doing them. I didn’t do everything on my list. I still haven’t tried curling or finished organizing my photos or driven the Timber Gulch Road in Oregon. But overall, this list did help me accomplish some things that I would not have had I not made the list.
This year, I actually started to add things to my list for 2024 sometime in November. I think keeping this list has made me a bit more mindful of things I’ve been meaning to do but never seem to remember when I have a little time. For example, our Fourth graders go to visit the Klondike Gold Rush Museum each year (a National Park in downtown Seattle!). The students always have a great time, and each year I think that I should visit the museum. This year, it’s making the list! It’s a small thing, but I find that keeping this list opens me up to new experiences, new places, new books, and new ideas. Better than that, it has given me the opportunity to share some of my interests or goals with others. Last year, my son floated the Yakima River with me, my mom and I read Anna Karenina and held our own personal book club meeting afterwards, and my daughter helped me achieve my goal of going to at least three art museums.
My children are adults, but I can imagine creating a list for 2024 could be a fun thing for a family to engage in together. Maybe there’s a new type of cuisine your family would like to try at a restaurant or cooking at home. Or perhaps it would be fun for you to have the goal of a screen-free family game night once a month. Maybe your family would like to set a goal of reading 10 books each this year or going camping. What would you like more of this year? What would your children add to the list? It might surprise you to find out. Maybe keeping a list like this is something that will bring you and your family a little happiness, too! If you are curious to learn more about the science of living a happier life, check out the website gretchenrubin.com.
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