As we roll into the back half of January, the energy behind the goals and projects that seemed so essential at the start of 2024 may already be starting to fade. In a recent Forbes Health/OnePoll survey, they found that the average New Year’s resolution lasts less than four months and for many people, they don’t even make it past Quitter’s Day, (identified as the second Friday in January).
If we start with all the best of intentions, why does our resolve evaporate so quickly?
Canadian author Danielle LaPorte would argue it’s because we need to create goals that produce the “feeling states” we most desire. When our goals are in alignment, it can help provide some much-needed fuel to stay motivated and on track.
As an example, let’s say you have a 2024 creativity goal to write your first novel. What are some of the potential feeling states that this goal might satisfy?
Self-Expression - You have this idea in your head that you want to get down on the page.
Security - You see becoming a writer as a way to broaden your income sources outside your day job and create better financial security overall.
Connection - You long to become a part of the writing community and be seen as a valued peer.
All of these are legitimate feelings states that could be fueling that desire to write your first novel, however, as a coach, I would be teasing apart different ways to approach this goal based on the writer’s particular “why” behind it.
For instance, if it is a desire for self-expression that fuels you, but you’re being hobbled by questions around the marketability of your idea, I would be asking how much making money from the novel actually matters to you. Is the extra pressure of thinking that you need to make money from the novel stopping the writing process in its tracks?
If a big component of the writing process is a desire for connection, could you increase your level of motivation by joining a writing group where you can share your work as it develops and mentor other budding authors as well?
LaPorte sets out in her book, “The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul”, that we all have feeling states that we return to again and again. She calls these our “core desired feelings” and they represent the feeling states that make us feel the most ourselves and alive. When our goals produce these feeling states, it’s as if they’ve been struck with a tuning fork—they simply sing.
Identifying core desire feelings
Truthfully, I have no intention of stealing LaPorte’s thunder by trying to outline how you determine your own core desired feelings. The workbook portion of “The Desire Map” goes into great detail with many stream of conscious writing prompts and questions to help you drill down to your unique core desired feelings.
What I will say is that I did these exercises about a decade ago and I’m still returning to the same core desire feelings that I discovered for myself.
Mine were…
Mastery
Inquisitive
Safe
Vivacious
Connection
…and here’s a bit of how two of those core desired feelings have fueled some big goals for me.
How I connect my core desired feelings to my goals
Mastery
One of the biggest “aha!” moments for me after discovering LaPorte’s work was when I landed on Mastery as one of my core desired feelings.
I had a career as a web developer at the time and I couldn’t understand why I was so unhappy in my job. By all accounts, I was good at it and it certainly paid well, but the more years I sunk into that career, the more miserable I became.
After I landed on this as one of my core desired feelings, I realized that my dissatisfaction with web development was because I never felt like I could achieve mastery at it. Every time I felt like I got a handle on a particular programming language or way of building a website, the whole landscape of the web would change. I would be told that that way of doing things was out and I would have to learn some entirely new language or technology.
Some programmers love this kind of rapid churn, but I absolutely hated it because it felt like having to start from scratch again and again.
Once I understood that a need for mastery was key for me, it made my persistent desire to become an artist—in particular, a traditional artist—make so much more sense to me. As a painter, the tools of my trade are paints, canvas and brushes and these tools haven’t changed in decades, if not, centuries. I learned a glazing technique last year that is the same in principle as that used by Leonardo da Vinci.
Because of this, I feel like I’m building upon my skills as a painter year after year and seeing that steady, measurable progress as I continue to pursue mastery in my craft provides me with immense satisfaction.
Inquisitive
When this showed up as one of my core desired feelings I was a bit confused by it. How could dislike learning new programming languages so much because of that lack of mastery yet Inquisitive was also one of my core desired feelings?
As someone who has had to deal with some pretty extensive creative blocks in my life, I am always on the lookout for the elements that increase that feeling of being blocked and those that allow me to vault over my blocks.
If I focus on achieving a perfect result out of the gate or start thinking about how a creative skill might potentially advance my career or make me money… BLOCKED. Big time.
If however, I allow that Inquisitive core desire feeling to rise to the surface, then I’ll start getting curious, asking questions and engaging in creative experimentation. This is exactly what happened when I got curious about why I was pinning so many images of Tiffany stained glass to my Pinterest board.
What drew me so strongly to those images?
What was it about them that made them so beautiful to me?
I thought that I could answer these questions by painting reproductions of Tiffany stained glass. I felt like a detective following a trail of clues, but the clues were things like a fascination with fractured light and saturated colours that I explored and experimented with in my work.
At the time I only had a high school level of knowledge of acrylic painting, but as I went down this rabbit hole I got more and more excited with each painting I created. I was the complete opposite of blocked since every new painting spawned new questions that I wanted to answer.
Today my acrylic paintings blend the look of stained glass with real-life everyday moments—all because I was able to fuel my creative drive by deliberately feeding that Inquisitive core desired feeling.
How do your goals measure up?
Whether you’re someone who is resolutely marching ahead with their New Year’s resolutions or starting to feel them slip, take a moment to examine what the feeling states are that the goals are intended to produce.
Are these feeling states that matter to you? Do they sing with that tuning fork tone of a core desired feeling?
And, if they don’t, are they even the right goals to be pursuing?
Athena Cooper splits her time between being a fine art painter and a creativity coach with Tilted Windmills. If you’d like support with staying on track with your goals this year, consider connecting with her through our website.
I also like to remind myself that after the big hullabaloo around Jan 1 there is the Lunar new year (Feb 10 this year) and the Persian new year Nawroz and start of spring Mar 21 which are excellent reset dates. I figure if I haven't been able to make my resolution stick by the end of March then I probably picked an unrealistic, boring or depressing one anyway and it deserved its fate!