Why I’m Setting Intentions, Not Goals, for 2026

2025 was supposed to be my year of writing—children’s stories about nature, biomimicry and climate change. These weren’t just random projects; they were meant to be part of a series I’d already begun, books designed to weave facts and fiction together to spark wonder in young readers. To show them that nature isn’t just something to protect in the abstract, but a living library of solutions, a four-billion-year-old research lab that holds answers to problems we’re only beginning to understand how to ask.

I’d set clear goals, something I usually avoid. I had links and notes about fascinating animals, plants and fungi. I had a clear vision of what success would look like.

And then life happened.

Things shifted in the world—the escalating climate disasters that made writing about solutions feel simultaneously urgent and futile, political upheavals that changed the landscape of environmental discourse. Things shifted in my private life, too. I lost someone. The demands on my time and energy became something I couldn’t have predicted when I was optimistically planning my year last December.

The goals I’d set became impossible. Not because I lacked discipline or focus, but because they were built on assumptions about circumstances that no longer existed. I found myself constantly revising plans, moving deadlines, and lowering expectations. Each adjustment felt like a failure.

Worse, every time I did manage to sit down to write, I felt nothing. The words felt hollow. The passion that had once animated my work on nature-based solutions and ecological design had been buried under the weight of everything that had changed, leaving behind only obligation and a growing sense that I’d somehow broken something fundamental in myself.

The Problem with My Goals

As December arrived and I started thinking about 2026, I found myself paralysed. How do you set goals when you’ve just spent twelve months watching them crumble? How do you plan for a year when the last one taught you that circumstances can shift beneath your feet without warning?

That’s when I stumbled across a video with learning coach Justin Sung. And something clicked.

I’d been approaching not just my writing life, but my entire relationship with the future, all wrong.

I’d set goals based on a version of reality that proved temporary. I’d built elaborate structures on foundations that weren’t as stable as I’d assumed. The goals themselves weren’t bad—regular content, consistent messaging, and contributing meaningfully to climate discourse. They were SMART goals, even. Specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time-bound.

But they were also rigid. They couldn’t bend when life demanded flexibility. They couldn’t accommodate the reality that sometimes the world shifts, and you have to shift with it. And when they broke—as they inevitably did—they left me feeling like I had failed, when really, I’d just been playing the wrong game entirely.

I’d lost sight of why I wanted to write about nature in the first place.

A Different Question

Recently, I encountered John Keene’s poem “Beatitude,” and one line really pierced my heart:

“Love the monster breeding inside you and slaughter him with love.”

The monster inside me was the voice saying I’d failed. That 2025’s unmet goals meant something broken in me. That if I couldn’t control circumstances enough to achieve what I’d planned, I should give up entirely. That the inability to execute on my vision meant the vision itself was wrong.

But Keene’s poem offers a different way. He writes:

“Love your fears, yesterday’s and tomorrow’s.
Love your yesterdays and tomorrows.
Love your beginning and your end.”

What if the question wasn’t “How do I set better goals that I can actually achieve next time?” What if the question was: “What kind of person do I want to be, and what kind of life do I want to live—regardless of what the world throws at me?”

When I asked myself that question honestly, the answer surprised me. I want to be someone who notices. Who sees the way a fungal network mirrors neural pathways, who marvels at how a kingfisher’s beak inspired bullet train design, who feels awe at nature’s four billion years of research and development.

I want to live a life of attention and wonder. A life that embodies what Keene writes about—that radical, expansive love for “the sky and sea, trees and rivers, mountains and abysses.”

Writing about biomimicry and climate change isn’t the goal. It’s simply what happens when I live as that person.

From Goals to Intentions

This is what the video calls “intention alignment”—a framework that focuses not on fixed outcomes but on continuously aligning your actions with the person you want to be and the life you want to live.

Here’s how it works:

1. Set an Intention (Not a Goal)

Instead of “publish 5 books about biomimicry in 2026,” my intention is: I want to be someone who pays attention to nature’s genius and shares that wonder with others.

2. Experiment

Live with that intention. Go for walks. Read about mycelium networks. Notice the architecture of a bird’s nest. Write when it feels alive. Don’t write when it doesn’t. See what happens.

3. Reflect

After the experience, ask: How did that feel? What brought me alive? What felt forced? When did I feel most aligned with the person I want to be?

4. Abstract

Look for patterns. What are these experiences teaching me about what I actually value? About what kind of writing feels meaningful versus obligatory?

Then repeat. The cycle is ongoing, self-correcting. If my intentions shift, that’s not failure—it’s growth.

Let me show you what this looks like in practice.

Last week, I went for a walk early in the morning. The frost had transformed my garden overnight—every blade of grass encased in ice crystals, spider webs turned into delicate sculptures of frozen water droplets, the whole lawn sparkling like someone had scattered diamonds across it.

I stopped. I looked. Really looked.

The frost wasn’t random. It formed patterns—dendritic structures that branched and rebranched, following the same mathematical principles that govern river deltas, lightning strikes, the veins in leaves, the bronchi in our lungs. Nature uses the same solution over and over because it works.

In that moment, I felt something I hadn’t felt in months: alive. Curious. Connected.

Later, I reflected on why that moment mattered. It wasn’t just pretty—it was that I’d given myself permission to stop and pay attention without it having to serve a goal. I wasn’t gathering material for a book. I wasn’t trying to hit a word count. I was just being the person I want to be: someone who notices.

The abstraction? I realised that my writing doesn’t come from forcing myself to sit at a desk. It comes from this—from moments of attention that fill me with wonder. The writing, when it comes, will be an overflow of that attention, not a separate task I have to manufacture.

Why This Feels Different

The traditional goal-setting approach made me judge every day I didn’t write as a failure. It made 2025 feel like a lost year because I didn’t hit my targets. It left me afraid to plan for 2026 because what if circumstances shift again? What if I set new goals and they, too, become impossible?

The intention alignment approach changes everything. It makes every day I pay attention to the natural world a success, regardless of whether I publish anything. It means that when circumstances change—as they inevitably will—I don’t have to see it as failure. I can adapt, adjust, and still be living in alignment with who I want to be.

If something happens in my private life that demands my attention, I don’t have to choose between my goals and my reality. If the world shifts in ways that change what’s possible or meaningful, I can shift too without feeling like I’ve abandoned myself.

Keene writes: “Love the shipwreck of your body, your mind’s salted garden.” There’s something in that line about accepting what we’ve been through, about tending to the aftermath rather than pretending the storm didn’t happen.

Do I still want to write children’s books about how toucan’s beak can inspire passive cooling systems and architectural designs, about the genius hidden in every corner of the natural world? Yes. Will I? I hope so. But I’m also open to exploring other topics and ideas, whatever wants to emerge from this practice of attention.

The writing is now a byproduct of being the person I want to be, not the metric by which I judge my worth.

My Intention for 2026

2025 wasn’t the year I planned. My goals didn’t survive contact with reality. But that wasn’t an end—it was data. It taught me that rigid goals set me up for a sense of failure when life inevitably shifts. It taught me that I’d been measuring success by the wrong metrics. That’s valuable information. Now I can approach 2026 differently.

I intend to return to what pulled me toward biomimicry in the first place: a sense of wonder at nature’s solutions, a desire to pay attention to the more-than-human world, a belief that we have so much to learn from four billion years of evolution. I intend to write when writing feels like an extension of that attention, not a separate obligation.

I intend to be someone who, as Keene writes, loves “the sky and sea, trees and rivers, mountains and abysses”—and who lets that love guide what comes next.

I intend to practice what Keene calls for in his poem: “Love everywhere. Love in the absence of love.” Even in grief. Even in uncertainty. Even when I don’t know what comes next.

I don’t know if this will work. I found this framework three weeks ago, and I haven’t lived it long enough to know if it will hold when life shifts again—as it will. But I do know this: after a year of rigid goals that shattered when I needed them most, trying something flexible feels like the only honest path forward.

I know that the frost on my lawn last week made me feel more alive than any word count I hit in 2025.

I know that writing from attention feels different from writing from obligation—it feels like breathing instead of holding my breath. And I know that whatever emerges from 2026—children’s books or essays, or silence—it will come from a place of alignment rather than force, from curiosity rather than obligation, from love rather than fear.

That’s not coming home. It’s more tentative than that. It’s opening the door, looking inside, and thinking maybe, just maybe, I could learn to live here.

Are you setting goals or intentions this year? What kind of person do you want to be in 2026? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

AI was used as inspiration.