How are your New Year’s Resolutions going?
Be honest - you’ve already given up on them, haven’t you?
Or you never had any to begin with. That’s fine - they’re probably overrated anyway.
Tim Dawkins from Beyond Our Walls joined the podcast on Ditch Your New Year’s Resolution Day. Research has apparently determined that 17 January is the day when most people call it quits on their resolutions. That yearly gym membership? Money down the drain. Dry January? You couldn’t resist calling your friends over for Jägermeister bombs, just for old times’ sake. That diet? Forget it, as you munch away on your Big Mac and fries, slurping away at your Coke.
Tim and I had an enlightening chat about goals, resolutions, end-of-year lists, FOMO, valuing what’s important, and the tremendous power of reflection: looking back on “where we were and where we’re heading,” and using “where we’ve been as a roadmap for what has and hasn’t worked.”
We also discuss why people ditch their resolutions and my best ever resolution, the simple one I made a decade ago that transformed my life. Tim provided some much needed wisdom and clarity to my nonsensical babbling.
Tim has two decades of experience in US public education and in Beyond Our Walls he writes about leadership, education, mental health, empathy, vulnerability amongst youth, and so much more. He shares with us where the name and inspiration for his newsletter comes from.
For my non-American listeners, you may want to consult this map of the northeast United States to see if you can work out Tim’s general whereabouts.
Tim mentioned my 2025 Reading Challenge and recommended this book, which I will be listening to next month.
Boo to SMART goals
I briefly brought up SMART goals towards the end and I ought to make it clear where I stand on these things.
From 2010 until 2023 I worked at the British Council in Kyiv. Like any organisation, education-related or not, we had our fair share of bureaucracy. Every year we had to do a Learning and Development Plan (LDP) with SMART goals: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Time-bound.
In the gentlest words possible: I fucking hated these plans, and I fucking hate SMART goals.
I was a good little boy and played the game for the first couple of years before I said, ‘fuck it, I’m doing it my way.’ I quickly acquired the reputation of a rebel.
One year my LDP consisted of me refusing to set any SMART goals and instead writing a long diatribe with impeccable references (including a case study from Harvard Business School and some sources cited by Oliver Burkeman in The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking), stating why I hated the idea of SMART goals. My line manager sort of shrugged and said, okay, fine.
In the years after that I took a similarly cynical approach, but I tried not to rock the boat too much. My philosophy behind being a rebel though? It was two-fold:
1 In an organisation like ours that demanded we create our LDP points early in the academic year, there was no telling how our interests and priorities would change as we met new students and happened upon new ideas in the course of our everyday experiences and research.
2 As much of my research suggested, any worker or educator truly interested in self-development, which I was, doesn’t need to be constricted by organisational requirements and instead should be trusted enough to take their development seriously and conscientiously. In short, goals can sometimes have serious downsides.
Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
Podcast theme music by StudioKolomna from Pixabay
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