Like most people, at the end of one year I start thinking about the next and what I want to achieve over the course of that year. In the Western world at least, this is programmed into us from birth. Personally, I think a good starting point is reflecting on the previous year and what you have achieved to work out how you can build on that for the next. So here are some of my highlights from 2011:
- Jan – moved out from the parental home into a room in a shared house
- Feb – promotion at work
- Mar – completed run of Teechers at Progress Theatre
- Spring – sold my beloved Mini Cooper which kept breaking and bought a rubbish old Punto for cost savings (moment of previously unseen maturity)
- Spring – started my Candida blog
- June – moved back home for a month, before…
- July – moved into a house with the bf
- July – went on my first girly holiday
- July – sold rubbish old Punto and bought sexy Corsa VXR
- September – further pay rise at work
- October – took bf away for a holiday, (our first one) though just in the UK
- November – made redundant
- November – started eBay shop
- December – secured new job at big global company!
All in all, it’s been a pretty busy year and my bf was not wrong a year ago when he said 2010 had built the foundations for 2011. This year has been insane, so much has changed! However, you’ll notice a few steps backward along the way, as is often the case in life and it seems to be these that I dwell on. Despite having made significant progress towards my goals overall, I still feel like I have wasted my year and like I’m way behind my peers in sorting out my life. Now, I confess this is partly because I happen to have especially successful friends but actually, I think it’s mainly down to me.
The bf and I had a conversation about what we had achieved this year and he could clearly check off 2 of his 3 goals and has set similarly achievable goals for next year…as has my sister. These are both people who I admire for being “sorted”. I however realised that I never break down my goals, I simply have huge ambitions which I can never achieve in a year so I am left feeling like a failure when I don’t get there. The problem is that I’m so impatient that short of achieving all of my goals in one hit, I’m not sure what success for me will look like in 2012. How do I set myself some resolutions or goals for 2012 that I can actually achieve and still feel like I’m moving fast enough? What if I set the bar lower and still fail?
Is anybody out there good at setting personal goals and can offer me some advice or do most of us live this way? It’s a vicious cycle I’d like to break some I’m on the hunt for some advice from those who are in the know…I’ll let you know what I find! x
30 Something Dreamer 