Finally, March is just around the corner, and I want to say something that most goal-setting content won't: if you opened this article hoping for a fresh set of resolutions, you're two months too late, but that's not a bad thing.

March is not a second January. You're not starting over. You're eight weeks into the year with actual data on what worked, what didn't, and which goals were built on who you thought you should be rather than who you actually are. That information is more valuable than any motivational reset could give you.

This is the March Goals Reset — a recalibration framework, not a reboot.

Why March Is the Most Honest Month of the Year

By March 1st, the performance gap between your January intentions and your February reality is visible. The goals you kept are the ones that were genuinely aligned with your values and capacity. The ones you quietly dropped are data too; not about your discipline, but about your original design.

Research in behavioral science consistently shows that goal abandonment peaks in the second week of February, not because people lack willpower, but because the goals were set under optimism bias — we systematically overestimate what we can do in the short term while underestimating what we can build over twelve months.

March gives you something January never can: honest feedback from your own life.

Women's History Month makes this a particularly good moment to examine whose definition of success you've been chasing. The women we celebrate this month — the ones who actually changed industries, built institutions, rewrote rules — didn't optimize for someone else's timeline. They built on evidence of what worked, discarded what didn't, and moved forward with specificity. That's the framework.

The March Recalibration: A 4-Part Framework

Please do not see this as a reflection exercise. This is an operational review. Work through each part in order, ideally Sunday morning before the week starts, with a notebook and something hot to drink.

Part 1: The Audit (10 minutes)

Pull out whatever you wrote in January. If you didn't write anything down, work from memory — the goals you remember are the ones that mattered.

For each goal, answer three questions:

• Did I make any measurable progress in January and February? (Yes / No / Some)

• Do I still want this outcome, or did I want it in January-brain?

• Is this goal mine, or is it performing for someone else?

Be clinical about the third question. A significant proportion of January goals are social, meaning they're shaped by what looks like ambition, what other people in your industry are doing, or what you think a serious professional woman should want. None of those are bad motivations, but they're not sufficient ones. Goals need to survive contact with your actual daily life to be worth keeping.

Part 2: The Cull (5 minutes)

Drop anything that failed questions two or three in Part 1. Not pause, not deprioritize — drop. You're not giving up on growth. You're refusing to carry goals that were never yours to begin with.

There's a tendency — particularly among high-achievers — to treat goal abandonment as a personal failure. It isn't. It's editing. The writers who produce the best work are the ones who cut the most. The professionals who build the most sustainable careers are the ones who are ruthless about where they put their attention.

Part 3: The Sharpening (15 minutes)

For every goal that survived the cull, make it sharper. January goals tend to be directional: "get stronger," "be more consistent," "make more money," "build my network." March goals need to be operational.

Use this structure:

By [specific date], I will [specific measurable outcome] by doing [specific weekly action].

Examples:

• By May 1, I will have had three informational conversations with people in [target role] by scheduling one per month starting this week.

• By April 15, I will have submitted my performance self-review with documented Q1 achievements by writing down one win per week for the next six weeks.

• By June 1, I will have completed [specific course/certification] by blocking 90 minutes every Wednesday evening.

The date, the outcome, and the weekly action are all non-negotiable components. Any goal missing one of the three is still a wish.

Part 4: The Women's History Month Lens (10 minutes)

This is optional, but worth doing in March specifically. For each goal you're carrying forward, ask: who showed me this was possible?

Not as a gratitude exercise — as a strategic one. When you can point to a specific woman who has already done the thing you're trying to do, your goal immediately becomes more credible to the part of your brain that runs threat assessments. The research on role models and goal persistence is unambiguous: visible representation of success in a specific domain increases goal-directed behavior in that domain.

Use Women's History Month not as inspiration content, but as a research exercise. Find the woman who did the version of what you're building. Study her decisions, not her biography.

Your March Intentions: The Sunday Setup

Once your goals are culled and sharpened, the weekly system matters as much as the annual one. This is the Sunday setup that keeps Q2 from becoming what Q1 was for most people: a month of good intentions and inconsistent follow-through.

Keep it under 30 minutes:

Sunday evening, every week:

1. Review your sharpened goals: all of them, in one place (one page of a notebook, one note on your phone, one document, then pick one and use only one)

2. Identify the single most important action for each goal this week

3. Block time for those actions before Sunday ends: not "I'll find time," but actual calendar blocks

4. Name one thing you're not going to do this week that would otherwise eat up the time those blocks need

That last one is the step most goal-setting systems skip. Protecting time is not just about adding; it's about explicitly refusing. You don't need more hours, you need fewer commitments competing for the same ones.

The Women's History Month Goal: One for the Room, Not Just the Resume

Finally — one more goal to consider adding, specifically because it's March.

Every woman on every "women of the year" list got there in part because other women made her visible, opened a door, passed her name along, or told her she was ready before she felt ready. The individual achievement story is almost always also a collective one — it's just not the version that gets published.

Add one goal this quarter that is about someone else: a junior colleague you mentor, a peer you recommend for a project they haven't put themselves forward for, a name you say in a room when that person isn't there. This is not charity. It's how the ecosystem works. You benefit from it every time someone says your name in a room you're not in.

The goals that survive March are the ones that will carry you through the year. Not because March is magical (it can be in many ways!) but because you've now tested them against reality and chosen to keep them anyway. That's not a restart. That's a commitment.

Your Q1 data is in. Use it.

Save this framework for your Sunday reset session — and if you want the full Q2 planning guide, it's in the newsletter every Tuesday.