Most corporate workplaces are awash in goal-setting and reviews. After you retire, those disappear. That can feel so liberating!
Although . . .
If you’re a Type A who likes to combine defined ways of measuring your success with a dash of external validation, it can be a little disorienting to go from constantly having structured feedback to just sort of drifting along. I suspect some retirees end up missing this without even realizing it.
Even if you’re a satisfied retiree who wants a low-key retirement, though, it can be nice to have a few goals. When they’re your goals, they align with what’s most important to you instead of factoring in the needs of an employer. However, having personal goals in retirement means you need to be motivated to come up with them. And, it involved a bit of introspection to figure out where you want to focus.
For me so far, it’s been physical and mental health.
I’ve been thinking a lot about goals this month while attending a three-session class aimed at healthy living. We had to set goals the first week and report back the next. I liked how we were instructed to frame things: Not success or failure, but did we achieve our goals “100%, 75%, 50%, 25%, or 0% of the time? And zero is OK!”.
Not hitting 100% just meant it was time to try again.
I started with what seemed like a pretty easy one: Have a “healthy plate” main meal 4 times a week. That means half your plate is vegetables, one-quarter is protein, one-quarter is healthy carbs. Unfortunately, I’m somewhat lazy when it comes to cooking complete meals, and I’m not a huge vegetable lover. The first week I only managed it for three main meals. Still, I was able to report “75%”, which felt a lot better than “I failed.” Encouraged, the second week I hit 100.
For my fitness goal, I’m already doing a lot of cardio exercise since I love it, but I haven’t been great about strength training. And by “haven’t been great,” I mean I haven’t been doing it for awhile now. So, that was the place to focus. I was told I should try starting with just once a week. That seems doable!
The ideal personal goal, as we hear every January during New Year’s Resolution Time, is both specific and reasonably achievable. When I was younger, I tended to go overboard on the goal setting (i.e. injuring myself in my 20s when training for a road race, or having half a page’s worth of ideas for the New Year). Now that I’m older, I better understand that incremental improvement is more likely to be sustainable improvement. Small change is still change, and it’s change that’s more likely to stick.
We’re more than three-quarters into the year and I’m pleasantly surprised to say that I’ve kept my main 2025 New Year’s mental-health resolution: Meditate every day. Now, my definition of a meditation session is a bit looser than my teacher’s 😅 I subscribe to Dan Harris’s version on the 10 Percent Happier app: If you meditate even for a minute, that still counts.
I’ve been aiming for what should be an easily achievable goal of 6 minutes a day. But on some days when I’m traveling, or when I had to leave before sunrise for an early-morning colonoscopy . . . 6 minutes still feels like a lot. So, I’ve done a minute some days. Actually writing it out looks kind of pathetic. Six minutes? One minute? That’s what I’ve “achieved”?
But, my meditation app shows a 298-day streak. And that feels pretty impressive.
And, how I feel about it is all that matters now. I no longer have to convince a manager that my goals are worthy. Or anyone, really, except myself.
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