Playful Intention Setting for the Year

For anyone who follows the Gregorian calendar (the common standardized calendar with 12 months) we have now entered a new year. Many cultures also follow their own calendaring system, subsequently resulting in a different “New Year” day, such as the Lunar New Year (February 17, 2026), Diwali (November 8, 2026), and Rosh Hashanah (Evening of September 11, 2026 to Evening of September 13, 2026). Each of these new years have their own traditions and ways to celebrate.

Some examples for Gregorian New Year (January 1) include people banging on pots and pans at midnight in order to drive out unwanted spirits and poor fortune in Ireland, eating 12 grapes for luck (sometimes under a table) in Spain and Mexico, deep cleaning your home to welcome in the god of the new year in Japan, kissing someone in America, or just giving strangers hugs in South Korea. For Rosh Hashanah people dip apples into honey for a sweet new year, Lunar New Year includes red envelopes given out with money as a symbol of luck and prosperity, and you will see many people decorate with colorful decorations and flowers to celebrate Diwali. A common theme for them all is that you are being intentional about how to welcome in a new chapter.

When it comes to taking care of ourselves and our mental health, sometimes we have an idea that we need to be intentional, set that goal, and achieve that goal without delay or divergence or else we have “failed” at that goal. New Year’s Resolutions tend to commonly feed into this narrative, with statements such as “New Year, New Me” and deciding that January 1 is when you will go to the gym every day for SURE. While this is great in theory, as it is a wonderful goal to improve oneself and going to the gym helps our physical health and mental health, this black and white thinking - either being successful 100% or failing 100% - is not helpful when we struggle with things like executive functioning and depression, or find this time of year to be especially traumatizing and stressful. Instead of setting broad all-or-nothing goals, I encourage you to set SMART goals and utilize playful means to make and keep your goals for the year.

But what are SMART goals? SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time Bound. A non-SMART goal would be saying, I want to go to the gym every day, while a SMART version of it might be I want to go to the gym for at least 30 minutes 3 times a week for 3 months consistently. These are ways to personalize a broad goal into something specific for you as an individual. Maybe you are able to say that you want to go to the gym every day and be able to achieve that with minimal difficulty, but adding in those extra layers of explanation can help you recognize that you have made progress to the goal and completed the achievement. 

So for this year, how can you incorporate SMART goals and play into your new years intention setting? Well here are three options for you to try out and see what might work!

1. Bingo Cards

Bingo is a fun game that involves luck and randomness, but in creating your own bingo card, you can have variety in your goals while ensuring you can see your progress being made.

A good way to create goals with a bingo card is to give yourself some categories of goals you want to achieve, such as working on finances or mental health, and creating specific goals from those categories. It is also important that you have fun things, not just “responsible” ones, as we seek out enjoyment in life too and you should be able to monitor that success as well, especially if you experience things like depression or anxiety.

Then for each bingo you get, you can give yourself a little reward or celebration, and a larger celebration if you get blackout by the end of the year. Remember, this is also to be intentional throughout the year, so don’t give yourself goals that will all be completed in the first three months of the year unless you want to create one for each quarter of the year!

2. Punch Cards

Punch cards you get at coffee shops and nail salons can be so satisfying to complete! We use this a lot with kids as a reward system, such as star charts and chore charts, but why not make one for ourselves for our new years goals as well!

You can create as many or as few as you would like, adding as many punches as you would want to achieve before being able to say you completed the goal, and it does not have an expiration date - each punch is a successful step towards that goal completion! This can look like “Reading Books I Already Own” and the reward is buying a new book, but it requires you to have done 10 punches on your card - it is a way to make it specific and achievable, without giving you a time constraint as you can modify the time it takes to what you need.

3. The 12 Week Year 

This is much more of a business-model way of thinking, but it is the idea of breaking up the year into 12-week quarters and making each period more manageable. It allows you to see the entire year and realistically create benchmarks as to how to complete these goals.

If you go on social media, you will see people making these using tri-fold poster boards and essentially creating a vision board of what goals they want to set, and visual benchmarks for how to achieve these goals/how to see if they are on track. This lets you very clearly ensure that you are being realistic with the completion as well as remind yourself the true amount of time you have to complete these projects.

(Image courtesy of https://www.tiktok.com/@toriroyelle/video/7324463733101628718)

Takeaways

It is completely up to you how you set your goals and achieve what you want for the year. There are new years days frequently, and so binding yourself to the January 1st start date is not always the best/most helpful. Feel free to decide that you are going to celebrate each equinox as a new year, or achieve specific goals only in one quarter of the year.

A year is both an incredibly long time and not that long, so determining how you perceive time and can break down the year will help with intention setting. Make sure to give yourself credit for completing tasks and making progress, as slow intentional progress is sustainable and will help you long term. Just like in therapy, we can’t fix everything overnight, but if you come in and put in the work with intention on a weekly or bi-weekly basis, you will see the changes.

We wish you a safe and healthy 2026 and hope you are able to achieve all you want and more!

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JoAnna Hubbard, LMHC, NCC works in both the mental health and legal realms, working as a law clerk, therapist, and psychometrist. She has studied psychology and sociology (BA), criminal law, mediation, and contracts (JD), and clinical mental health counseling (MA), dedicating the past decade and a half to learning about these systems and assisting with bridging the gaps in understanding between them. Through this work, she has found a love for incorporating her passions of gaming, books, and art to help people overcome the barriers they face in their day to day life. If she isn't working, you can find her performing, reading with her dog, or spending time with loved ones.