Goal Setting for 2021
LAUREN IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNA RICHARDS
AR: Hi Lauren. How can we begin to reflect on the past year?
LT: Reflection can look like mindful journaling, looking back on events in your calendar, or a scroll through your camera roll to unfold the year (including some events you may have forgotten about). The turn of a new year holds this inevitable and often unshakeable pressure to both ‘reflect’ and ‘self-develop’. However, after the year we’ve all had, if reflecting feels like yet another thing on your to-do list, give yourself a moment of reprieve and find something else to centre yourself.
AR: Pausing was a major theme of 2020. Can we try and use that to our advantage when goal setting?
LT: Absolutely. Rest is perhaps the most essential ingredient in creating goals that are aligned with our respective needs, wants and values. An exercise I take everyone through in our Reflection & Intention Setting Online Workshop is to identify ‘feeling goals’ rather than ‘achievement goals’. When we set goals that are concerned with how we want to feel, rather than things we want to tick off or accomplish, we’re far more likely to remain on track and motivated. Identifying goals from a place of authenticity can only happen when we’re able to take pause and process so that we can move forward intentionally and purposefully.
AR: What are some exercises you find helpful when trying to process?
LT: Always writing! It’s such a cost-effective and accessible tool. Breathwork can be incredibly transformative too (when practised respectfully and appropriately). Processing can often be an overwhelming task, so talking things through with a trusted friend/partner/professional can often assist and aid in one’s catharsis.
AR: In your Reflection & Intention Setting Workshop you talk about intentional action. Can you describe what that practice is like?
LT: Intentional action is action that comes from a self-appointed and unique need or internal value-system. All too often we borrow other people’s goals, resolutions and ambitions because it’s something we think that we should want or need. But when we are able to check in with ourselves and identify the things that are truest and most valuable to us, we can take aligned steps towards achieving them.
AR: A lot of creatives have struggled to move past roadblocks this past year. What tools can they use to try and do so?
LT: I’m a big believer in collaboration as an antidote to creative stagnancy. Start exchanging ideas with friends, peers and contemporaries and work together on a project. It doesn’t have to be something grandiose; it might never be published or see the light of day. It could be something as simple as an email exchange, where you communicate using imagery only. When you have a career concerned with creativity, it’s important to remember that our value isn’t contingent on our outpouring of work. Creativity is a practice. Return to the small moments that make you feel inspired and know that rest and resistance is always a part of the process. Our Creativity & Resistance Online Workshop is a great place to explore resistance as a conduit to creativity, rather than an enemy of!
AR: After a year like no other, how can we begin to try and plan towards the next?
LT: It’s a great question and one I’m afraid I don’t have a tangible answer to, because if we’ve learnt anything during the course of this pandemic and the last year, it’s that making plans at the moment is a near-impossible task. The way I’m choosing to approach this next chapter is week-by-week, and when necessary day-by-day, because that’s all we really can do at the moment.
Originally published on Fashion Journal
05 - 01 - 21