Choose Your Energy Before You Choose Your Goals

" Energy flows where Attention goes"

Every December I watch the same thing happen, and it’s almost tender in how predictable it is. The year starts to thin out, the diary softens, the noise drops a few notches, and suddenly people who have been “fine” all year find themselves staring into space while the kettle boils, feeling a strange mix of gratitude, fatigue, hope, and something they can’t quite name. The world calls it planning season. The internet calls it goal-setting season. Your nervous system might call it, please can everyone stop asking me what I’m doing next.

This is the part no one really talks about when they’re Googling how to set goals for the new year. It’s not that you don’t have ambition. It’s not that you’re unmotivated. It’s that something in you is more honest than it used to be, and it refuses to sign up for another year of goals that look good on paper but cost you your peace.

I’ve had years where I’ve forced it. I’ve sat with a notebook and tried to manufacture certainty, tried to pick a direction, tried to pin down a version of “next” that felt impressive enough to justify the past twelve months. The plans looked great. The energy behind them was wrong. Everything that followed felt like pushing a shopping trolley with a wonky wheel technically moving, but exhausting and oddly demoralising.

That’s the shift I want to offer you as we close this year and step toward the next.

Before you choose your goals, choose your energy.

Not the aesthetic version of energy, not the “positive vibes only” performance, not the bypassing. The real thing. The state you live from. The internal climate that quietly decides what you tolerate, what you chase, what you avoid, what you create, and how you treat yourself when no one is watching.

If you’re searching how to set goals for the new year, let this be the upgrade: start from the inside, or you’ll drag the same patterns into January with a fresh calendar and a slightly prettier pen.

Step 1: Name the energy you’ve been living in, without judging it

This is the part people skip because it’s not as satisfying as writing a list. Still, it’s the foundation.

Ask yourself, gently and truthfully: what has been the dominant energy of this year? Not the events, not the achievements, not the narrative you tell other people. The energy. Has it been hustle? Endurance? Proving? People-pleasing? Survival? Over-responsibility? Comparison? Numbness? A low-level bracing for impact?

Nothing needs to be dramatised here. This isn’t a self-attack. It’s clarity.

Goals chosen from survival energy become survival goals, even when they’re dressed up as expansion.

Step 2: Decide how you want to feel before you decide what you want to do

Most people approach how to set goals for the new year like it’s a productivity exercise. The result is predictable: goals that demand a version of you that’s already tired.

Try this instead.

Choose your emotional baseline first. Choose your internal posture. Choose the way you want to move through your days.

Maybe it’s grounded. Maybe it’s calm. Maybe it’s spacious, focused, playful, devotional, brave, creative, steady. Let it be yours, not aspirational in a performative way, but true in a nourishing way. Goals that align with that energy will feel clean. They will feel possible. They will stop requiring you to abandon yourself to achieve them.

Step 3: Notice which goals are actually old coping mechanisms

This one is confronting in the best way, because it saves you months of self-betrayal.

Some goals are not goals. They’re strategies.

A strategy to be seen.

A strategy to be safe.

A strategy to be chosen.

A strategy to prove you’re worthy.

A strategy to outrun discomfort.

If you want the real answer to how to set goals for the new year, it starts with asking: if I achieved this, what would I finally get to feel?

Then give yourself permission to find a healthier way to access that feeling.

This is not about lowering your standards. It’s about elevating your self-respect.

Step 4: Create energetic boundaries before you create a plan

A plan built on leaky energy is a plan that collapses the moment life gets busy again.

So before you decide what you’re doing next, decide what you’re no longer available for.

The conversations that drain you and leave you second-guessing yourself.

The constant input that scatters your attention.

The environments that make you feel smaller, tighter, less like you.

The pattern of saying yes when your body says no.

People don’t fail at goal-setting because they lack discipline. They fail because they keep building their future on top of unprotected energy.

This is one of the most underrated answers to how to set goals for the new year: protect the energy that will carry the goals.

Step 5: Let the goals emerge from alignment, not urgency

There’s a flavour of January energy that is frantic, as though the year is a race and everyone has a head start except you. That urgency makes people choose goals that aren’t actually true, then punish themselves when they can’t sustain them.

Let your goals arrive from a quieter place.

When your energy is chosen deliberately, the “right” goals stop feeling like pressure and start feeling like inevitability. You notice what matters. You notice what’s ready. You notice what you’re genuinely excited to build, not what you think you should build to be taken seriously. This is the grown-up version of how to set goals for the new year: less noise, more truth.

Step 6: Commit to the energy, not just the outcome

Goals are seductive because they give your mind a finish line. Energy is subtler, because it asks you to live it daily. If you want a simple, powerful commitment for the new year, make it this: no goal is worth it if it requires you to abandon your peace, your health, your integrity, your heart.

Hold yourself to a higher standard than achievement.

Hold yourself to alignment.

This is where I’ll leave you, especially in this final stretch before Christmas: you don’t have to push for clarity. You don’t have to hustle your way into a new identity. You get to enter the next year with intention, with softness, with excitement, with fire if you want it, and with a calm kind of authority that comes from knowing you’re no longer available for the old way.

If you came here searching how to set goals for the new year, let this be the piece you didn’t know you needed: choose your energy first. Everything else becomes simpler, cleaner, and far more yours.

As this year draws to a close, let this be your permission slip to stop forcing answers and start listening more carefully to yourself. You don’t need to rush your way into January or have everything mapped out before the fireworks go off. If you’re wondering how to move forward when you feel stuck, begin by choosing the energy you want to live from and allow the rest to unfold in its own time. And if this reflection has stirred something and you’d like support as you step into what’s next, I’m always here, quietly, intentionally, and in conversation with what’s true for you. Until then, take this moment to breathe, soften, and trust that what’s meant for you is already moving toward you.

Big Love

Jenna ✨