Is It Too Early to Think of 2020 Goals?

Hello sexy people! ❤ 🙂

It’s Friday morning over here in my sunny corner of the globe and I am reading a book about goal setting ~ why? Because I want to set and accomplish some goals in 2020. I want to look back on the year with the satisfaction that comes from having earned new “gold stars”. And I want to be deliberate about it.

Now just to backtrack, I’ve always been a goal setter. Even when I became a full time SAHM I continued to set goals, daily, weekly, monthly, you name it, I’d set a goal for it. ‘s Matter of fact, I had a big goal for 2019 … it didn’t make it past the front gate.

Most of my goals do not make it past the front gate 😦

I kinda dabble at it in the beginning and then I get distracted and blah, blah, blah, & fa-la-la-la-la, la-la-la-la ….

I must hold myself to a higher standard, being a life coaching student & all that jazz!

So I have decided to devote the remaining months of 2019 to studying how to set goals. Because I’ve never really studied it.  I fish something interesting out of my head, buy a fancy whiteboard to write it on and hope that by placing it somewhere visible it will somehow get done.

Well, that strategy rarely, if ever, works for me. Obviously.

And it’s struck me that I am actually being flimsy with this powerful tool for life improvement.

So as I made this decision a few goals immediately started to materialize in my head (they’re like flies swarming about!). Now I’m trying to be choosy because I want these goals to actually mean something. The book I’m reading says that the stronger your emotions are around that goal, the better the outcome. So here they are so far –

A flat tummy by my birthday.

(Oh yes, I certainly have some strong emotions around this one!)

I want some tone in there, I don’t want it to bulge. I don’t need a 6-pack, I just want it flat.

Celebrate my birthday with my family at a nice resort in Bintan.

I have just very recently discovered that the next-door island to Batam (where I live), Bintan, is a paradise! I saw gorgeous pictures of luxury resorts and I’ve been itching ever since! There’s even a place that’s nominated to become a UNESCO world heritage site! Who needs Bali when it’s much farther & expensive?!!

So this is goal #2.

An online shop by July. Or within the 3rd Qtr. But the goal is July.

This was my 2019 goal but I did not even know what my product was going to be. Let alone the criteria for selecting said product – very important!

In fairness, I did experiment with a few options and learned quite a lot in the process ~ including the need to learn about goal-setting 😀

An outside hobby.

I do not want to stay cooped up at home anymore. I understand that most of my time will still be indoors with the adorable toddler but I want something that will bring me in contact with other adult human beings at least once a week. I can do once a week.

Notes on goal 2 & 4 

These sound more like to-do’s but these are sub-goals that I’ve broken down from a bigger, kinda nebulous goal which is to enjoy where I live.

An open slot for goal #5

I still lack 1 goal. I want to make it 5 because I am turning 45 next year and I just like to relate things and turn it into a fun game 😉  I’ll let you gorgeous people know as soon as I’ve finalized it 🙂

 

~~ meanwhile, let me ask you 🙂 ~~

Have you started to think about your own goals for next year already?

Do you enjoy setting goals?

What one new thing would you want to bring into your life next year?

👇👇👇👋

 

Not This Year

When I was still climbing the career ladder I was a very goal oriented employee. I would reverse engineer the annual performance review by picking out in advance the areas I wanted to stand out in, and proceeded to take on the shiniest projects that would showcase my excellence in those areas.

I had this system so well down pat that when I became a housewife I experienced some sort of crisis. It felt like I was let loose all of a sudden and all that freedom was just confusing, I didn’t know what to do with it.

For maybe a year or two I had a notebook and pen and wrote down monthly goals such as “learn to cook 2 new recipes”, or “learn to knit beginner’s level”, or “lose X number of lbs”.

But there was no annual review to prepare for, no boss to wow, no gold stars to earn & show-off on my imaginary wall of fame that I slipped into nonchalance. I set vague goals that I forgot the following week. Or, I didn’t follow through, or I list so many that I overwhelm myself into catatonia all the while thinking that I have all the time in world to do them anyway.

Lately though I have become conscious of it and I do not like it. The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that I’m not even showing up for myself. I say I will do something but I don’t even honor my word.

So I went back to my notebook, looked at the goals I set for this year and decided to re-commit. It’s not yet too late, I can still hunker down and make a dash for the finish line.

My goals for this year were/are:

1.  lose post-pregnancy weight – but I didn’t specify how much and how to do it (because, who cares except me, right?)
2.  learn Indonesian – I bought an online course & some books that are now just gathering dust in some nondescript drawer
3. start a separate blog dedicated to crafting – I did partially discuss this here, but I failed to clarify that I wanted a separate, topic specific blog because I want to do something with it later

I still wrote down a couple or 3 more but that’s just my sneaky brain trying to overwhelm me again and disperse my focus.

I am deciding to take deliberate action on these goals for the remaining 6 months so that at the end of 2018 I will have finished the things I set out to do. This matters because I don’t want to have to do them again next year, I want to create space for new goals in 2019.

And perhaps, even more importantly, I don’t want to excel at quitting, I want to excel at staying committed.

 

Photo by han song on Unsplash

Pebble of Wisdom from Chris Guillebeau

Reverse the Bucket List, Find Out What You Really Want

In the flurry of looking forward to accomplishing novel things in 2015, this reminded me to stop and appreciate the blessings of 2014 too. I think you’ll like this post a lot, just like I do.

Yoga with Morgan Webert

We’ve turned the corner on yet another year and based many of the conversations I’ve had it sounds like 2014 was a big one for a lot of you. Let’s just stop an appreciate that!

If you’re like me and get super stoked on new visions, ideas and plans, it’s easy to race into the next thing full speed ahead, heels on fire with the feelings of possibility and hope. But if we race past our chance to digest the experiences we’ve had, we can miss the whole point of racing toward them in the first place.

At a conference I went to recently I was introduced to the idea of a reverse bucket list as a way to practice greater contentment, happiness and gratitude. I love the idea!

Basically, instead of making a bucket full of things you want to accomplish, you create a bucket list of things you’ve…

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