New Year’s is a pretty traditional time to set some big goals. I, for instance, sit down and settle out my financials from the previous year and set my annual and quarterly financial goals. I dream about chiseling my abs (so far, pretty sure I’ve got one ab, not sure if we’re into multiples yet) and cleaning one room of my house every day. I dream of proper hydration and thrice-weekly workouts and a maxed-out retirement contribution and giving out a compliment to a stranger every day and… oh, I dream.

As it turns out, some of those dreams are probably too big, too many. They’ve generally wilted by Valentine’s Day, replaced by a vague sense of failure and resignation. “There’s always next year!” But is coasting for 10.5 months out of every year any way to live?

My friend Ann-Michelle is the one who snapped me out of this doomed-to-fail set-up some years ago. She pointed out that I was making myself (more) anxious and all but forcing guilt on myself with the grand New Year’s resolution. Instead, she said, she was a big proponent of the weekly resolution.

What brilliance! Last year, I started off easy. I’m a little sheepish to admit here, to the world, but for the first week, I went with “floss every day.” Look at the Lululemon bags. Between their judginess and my dental hygenist’s pleading, I had reason enough to start small. I flossed every day. Week two, I added 10 pushups a day (on my knees, no bragging). I focused on taking care of those two things, doing them as soon as I thought of them, and just let the rest go on auto-pilot. And it worked! Soon I was building habits, like we talked about earlier in the month. Some weeks I’d try something I didn’t end up liking, but I’d stick it out for the week, and, yes, by about August, I’d totally lost track of the flossing routine. But I didn’t feel like a guilty failure, and that made all the difference. Each new week was a new week to try, try again.

This year I plan to get back into my weekly resolutions, maybe even making a list of a number I’d like to try so that I have a menu from which to choose each week. I also plan to grab another friend’s practice: no resolution, just choosing a word to define her coming year. In a future post, I’ll talk more about the role of ritual in wellness, but for now, let’s just say that my year’s theme is bound to come out of a transformative ritual from last September. I have yet to form a single word around it, but I’m tempted to choose “embrace.”