Scroll through any of your social media feeds for three seconds – tops – and you’ll see a pithy quote graphic. Most of the time I scroll right past them; I’ve never been into inspirational quotes, because they’re typically too general or insincere sounding for my tastes. But I saw one on Instagram the other day that caught my eye. It was about New Year’s resolutions, and the definition of the word resolution itself. The first definition is “a firm decision to do or not to do something,” but the second one is, “the action of solving a problem, dispute, or contentious matter.” The point of the graphic that I saw was that resolutions make you feel like there’s something wrong that needs to be fixed, which can be an unhealthy way of thinking.
Maybe that’s why so few people stick to their resolutions. I know I’ve never been good at them. But more and more I’ve seen people talking about their goals, and that’s something I’ve started to be really good at: setting goals for myself and then realizing them.
I need to work in baby steps, sure. If my end goal is to be able to do 100 push-ups (yes, this is a longterm goal for me – I’m tired of having the upper body strength of a toddler!) then I need to set some stepping stones along the way. Being able to do one legit push-up would be a good start. What’s nice about breaking things down in that way is that you feel a sense of achievement early on, which can be incredibly motivating. Look, I lifted up my body weight on my noodle arms one whole time! I can totally do this every day and make my way up to five, or ten, or fifty! Psyching myself up instead of psyching myself out. It’s tricky, but it works.
In the past few years I’ve been striving to get my life organized, and I’ve been managing it mostly online. Google Drive has been a lifesaver. I have a budget spreadsheet, a meal plan spreadsheet where I can keep recipes and my shopping list, and spreadsheets for nearly every other aspect of my life. With the app on my phone, I thought it would be in my face enough to keep my to-do lists in front of my eyeballs constantly. I was wrong. Which is why I bought myself a hard copy planner for the first time in probably a decade. It’s a Passion Planner, which started out really intimidating, but now seems so vital I can’t believe I ever tried to do anything in life without it.
Using their passion road map, I’ve discovered some things that I’ve been letting slide recently that are important to me. For one, I NEED to write more. Whether it’s snippets of original fic that will never see the light of day, or 3K of fluffy fic that three people including myself will enjoy, I need to write. Sometimes it feels like all the ideas and scenes and characters are clogging up my head, and I’m going to pop like an over-filled balloon. I also want to get stronger. I’ve been working on my eating habits and my diet is mostly under control, but I don’t do anything to make my body strong. I want to change that.
I also want to revitalize this space. I’ve been lazy about blogging. I’ve been pressuring myself to do things that I think will grow the blog, but I’ve burnt myself out and it’s showed in the traffic and the discussions here. We’re languishing, and we wanted this to be a thriving community, a place to share our feelings. We’ve lost that, but I think I’m finally getting a grip on how to get it back moving forward. I hope you’ll all still be with us as we go.
Those are my goals. I promise I have more concrete steps written out in my planner. They’re going to help me have my best year yet.
Did you set any goals for 2016?