A reminder for setting New Year's GOALS

It’s that time of year again. Everyone’s sharing their lofty goals for the New Year, their 12 step plans to becoming the Best You You Can Be™, and we all start to feel a little bit overwhelmed. Sure our motivations might be high at the moment, and we have this “anything is possible” mentality, but we can quickly fall into the trap of comparing our goals with everyone else’s. All of a sudden, your vacation to New Orleans doesn’t look as glamorous as the trip to Paris your cousin is planning. Your goal to workout 3 times a week sounds a bit sad next to your best friend’s goal of weight-lifting 7 days a week. Or your plan to take up a new hobby in bread-baking doesn’t sound as adventurous as your brother starting his rock-climbing journey.

I get it. With everyone sharing their goals for 2024, it can be pretty discouraging when yours don’t look like someone else’s. I wanted to share today’s Meraki Monday sketch with y’all to try to put this in perspective.

Bobbles could easily look at the weights on Bits’ barbell and feel ashamed struggling to lift his 1 pound dumb-bells. But Bobbles knows that comparison is the enemy of progress. He knows he’s at a different point in his strength-building journey than Bits is and THAT’S OKAY. The strength of others doesn’t diminish your strength. The goals of others don’t diminish your goals. The lives of others don’t diminish YOUR life.

We’re all on different journeys. We’re all different people. If your goal for the new year is to rest and recover from a year of burnout, that’s AMAZING. That goal isn’t diminished by someone else’s goal to get their dream promotion at work. Someone else’s goal of running two miles every day doesn’t diminish your goal of learning to listen to your body through once-a-week yoga practices.

So, today I want to encourage you to be confident in the goals you’ve set for the New Year. To remember that your life is beautifully unique and so are your goals. That bigger is not always better. (If you’ve set big goals for 2024, that’s totally amazing too! Just make sure they align with YOUR journey, not someone else’s.)

As the year comes to a close, I also want to mention the end-of-year sale in my shop! A lot of you have been reaching out about wanting prints of the paintings from my 20 Illustrations Challenge this year, and I’m so excited to share that I’ll be releasing those on Thursday, December 28^th. I only have two prints available of each, so make sure to mark your calendars and snatch one up before they’re sold out!