Set Better New Year Intentions with Tarot

Or, how your tarot cards can help you set more meaningful and intuitive resolutions this year

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Picture it: The afternoon of December 31st, 1995. Ten-year-old me acutely aware that the clock was ticking and I still hadn’t thought of a new year’s resolution.

“What about ‘Be nicer to my sister’?” my mother offered.

“That’s it!? You want me to devote my year to just that!? I’d have to wait an entire year to tackle anything else! No, thank you!”

“Okay, be nicer to my sister and do all my homework,” she revised.

“I already do all my homework. I love homework.”

“Okay, be nicer to my sister and do all my homework and brush my teeth every morning and night. That’s plenty.”

Hmm, we were getting closer, I thought to myself as I pushed the red tortoise shell eyeglasses I had just picked out at the optometrist’s office higher up on my nose.

I leaned forward to write “NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION” in alternating colored ink at the top of the first page of the brand new diary I had just received for Christmas, my thick hair brushed out into a fuzzy bird’s nest of a bob around my tiny face.

Beneath it I wrote: “Be perfect.”

You don’t have to be Little Miss Perfectionist (now in recovery, thank you very much) to understand the immense pressure this time of year can bring. If you’re like me, you’re aware of the great potential in you and you have such high standards and hopes for yourself that you tend to take things like the new year quite seriously.

And if you’re super duper like me, you never met a blank slate you didn’t like! (In fact, don’t you love when New Year’s Day falls on a Monday like it does this year? That’s how strong my Virgo moon is.)

But listen.

Achieving a goal doesn’t mean anything in and of itself. Trust me. This is coming from an expert goal-achiever who had checked off almost every achievement on her life’s to-do list before 30 and never felt more lost and unfulfilled. (Just read my About page. It’s what brought me to tarot in the first place!)

Incorporating tarot into our goal-setting process is a beautiful way to turn high-pressure and often unfulfilling New Year’s resolutions into authentic and aligned new year intentions that come from a place of self-love, joy, and creativity.

In this week’s newsletter, you will probably learn way more than you ever cared to know about intentions and goals and - the best part - where your tarot cards come in at each step to help you align with your highest good and set yourself up for success and joy in the coming year.

Ready?

Grab a notebook, pen, and your tarot cards and keep reading!

Wait. What’s wrong with the way I’ve been going about New Year’s resolutions?

Over a decade ago, I was reading Steering by Starlight: The Science and Magic of Finding Your Destiny by Martha Beck for the first time. In it, Beck insists that because so many of us have trouble pinpointing what we really, truly want in life, we might not be setting the best goals for ourselves. In her words,

"What we think would bring us happiness often won't do the trick. What we're really after when we yearn for something is a feeling state."

For example, I may think I want to make at least six figures a year. So I write that down as my goal. But I’m not really after the cash. I’m after the feeling state having that money will bring me. In other words, I want to feel abundant and financially secure. That’s what making six figures means to me. That’s my true desire in this example.

These feeling states are often better encapsulated by an intention rather than a goal.

Focusing solely on tangible goals may or may not create the change you crave.

Goals tend to name desired achievements or measures of progress we want to make, while intentions focus more on how we want to feel and act on a regular basis. And if we want to actually change the way we feel and how we experience daily life, we are probably better off setting intentions rather than just goals.

Let’s take the desire to feel abundant and financially secure again. (Remember, we ditched the superficial goal of making X figures a year.) We can now set an intention to embody abundance and think and act in ways that align with financial security. This now becomes a guiding light for how we want to show up in our lives every day which will, in turn, change the way we experience life.

Shifting from setting goals to intentions focuses less on the external marker or symbol of "success" and more on how we want to feel everyday. And why is that important? Because intentions honor our feelings and actually invite us to regularly check in on them. In this way, they tend to be more authentic and aligned with our highest good.

Goals, on the other hand, aren't really concerned with how we feel as long as we’re ticking milestones and accomplishments off our list. The sad truth about being solely goal-oriented is that you can be the most productive and impressive goal-achiever on the planet and still feel empty, joyless, and unfulfilled if you are achieving goals that don't mean anything to you or don't get you closer to the person you want to be and the way you want to feel.

We can make six - hell - seven figures a year and still feel poor as hell. We can still panic about money, have a fearful lack mindset, and not enjoy a single penny we have worked so hard to earn. I bet you know people like this! That’s precisely why setting and achieving a goal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

On the other hand, setting the intention to recognize the abundance around you every day will definitely make a difference in your experience of life over time. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it gave you some new business ideas, some positive energy at work that lands you a promotion, or the realization that you already have so many blessings to be grateful for.

Not ready to abandon goals completely? I know, me neither.

Intentions can be fuzzy, intangible, and so subjective. How do we know if we’ve succeeded? Goals - at least smart ones - are specific and measurable and often give us a clearer path to success. They tell us exactly what to work toward and let us recognize when we have reached our aim and can celebrate our achievement. Isn’t that important too!?

That's why I think that when it comes to setting new year's intentions or any time we are designing and planning for the life of our dreams, we probably need a combination of both feeling-based intentions and more actionable goals.

How setting intentions first can help you set better goals

In fact, intentions need to come first. Here's my step-by-step process, complete with how to integrate your tarot cards for each step.