Goal setting for introverts

Let's crush 2024

Author

Brian Garland
January 04, 2024

Welcome to The Introverted Path!

Happy New Year, and happy belated Introvert’s Day!

Yes, you read that right. Us introverts have our own day. Hope everyone celebrated in solitude doing the thing you enjoy most 🙂 

It’s 2024, which is still wild to me. 2023 was an awesome year, but I am excited to set new goals for 2024.

So this week, I wanted to talk about goal setting.

And specifically — what are some goals introverts would most benefit from?

In today’s email:

  • How I approach goal setting

  • Goal ideas for introverts

  • Links to other content I enjoyed this week

Let’s dive in 🤙 

How I approach goal setting

Across social media the last few weeks, there have been loads of people flaunting their goal setting frameworks.

Reading some of them had me like:

IMO, I prefer to keep it simple.

I like to pick 2-3 goals for the year.

And then under there, you can have various tactics or plans associated to those goals.

Why 2-3?

Anything more than that, and I will end up doing everything half-assed, rather than giving my all to a few things.

An easy way to approach it is to set 1 goal across 3 domains of your life; for me, those domains are:

  1. Relationships

  2. Health

  3. Career

Your domain list could look completely different than mine — but these are the areas I want to focus on this year.

Once I have the domains identified, I pick 1 overarching goal within each of these for the year.

From there, you can take it a step further and set tactics to achieve that goal.

Ideally, each tactic builds on itself until you reach your end goal.

And that’s it. No fancy framework, process, or formula.

I’ll use one of my goals as an example:

Within the domain of ‘health’, my focus is on doing everything I can to reduce my left knee pain.

I injured my knee playing football in high school, have had 3 surgeries since, and it limits my ability to do what I want.

I’ve done a ton of stuff that helps - yoga, lost weight, improved flexibility. But I haven’t given it my full attention and still face issues with it today.

So I have decided that one of the best things I could do for myself is limit or resolve my knee pain. That’s why I decided to make it one of my 3 goals for the year.

  • Domain: Health

  • Goal: Reduce my left knee pain

  • Duration: 3 months

  • Tactics to get there:

    • 75 Hard Challenge to start the year to ensure I’m ready mentally & physically

    • Do “knees over toes guy” training program 3x/week

      • Side note … if you struggle with knee pain, highly recommend checking out all his videos

    • Hip mobility exercises 3x/week

    • Yoga 2x/week

After 3 months I am hoping to have a good foundation built, upon which I can create a new set of tactics focused on strength.

Hopefully that was helpful - if people have other ways they set goals, reply back and let me know! I would love to hear them.

Ideas for 2024 goals

I’m going to brain dump a bunch of potential goals that I think would be great for introverts, but honestly most of these would be good for anyone.

  • Pick up a new hobby

  • Join a community

  • Find a volunteer organization

  • Approach someone new once a month

  • Start journaling

  • Read more books

  • Call your family more often

  • Workout X times a week

  • Follow a diet

  • Start a side hustle

  • Start a passion project

  • Say ‘no’ more often

  • Say ‘yes’ more often

  • Build a budget

  • Start a meditation practice

  • Drink less alcohol

  • Cook at home more often

  • Take more walks

  • Write online

  • Create a routine

  • Get up earlier

  • Reduce your screen time

  • Eat more fruits & veggies

  • Prioritize sleep

  • The power of a thin skin (link)

  • The microwave economy (link)

  • Why great things never came from comfort zones (link)

That’s it for today - hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter!

Best,

BG