Goals or Wishes

I have started jotting down a general list of things I want to accomplish. Some of these are things I want to do daily. Some are weekly. Some are short term. Some are long term. Some are one time things I need to do. Some are ongoing. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to track my progress. I’ve downloaded a few apps but haven’t had time to really try any of them yet. Do you have any favorite methods? And now a quick update on my New Day Resolutions for week 1. The only 2 daily goals that I’ve been 100% on is that I haven’t eaten any meat and I’ve written every day. I missed my bible reading and daily photo goal on Friday. My Christmas decorations are still up and my closet is still a hoarder’s nightmare, but I was spending some much needed quality time with my husband, some new friends, and some friends that are really family. I’m okay with my misses this first week. I know I will get better and it’s okay if I do it in baby steps. Did you make any resolutions? How are you doing?

#15

So, I had planned to write a blog about my New Day Resolution progress. Instead, I’m just going to share this with you.

A New Goal or Two

As I started this blog hours earlier this evening, I had a different direction in mind. I had actually planned to choose a topic from one of my Soulful Journal series books to write about. I didn’t want to bore you again with updates on my New Day Resolutions.  However, after an unexpected art/love project, this is what you’re getting. Sorry about that.

I didn’t set any new goals today but I managed to accomplish all of my current daily goals. I drank more water. I maintained a vegetarian diet. Again I missed the mark only slightly for having a complete vegan day because of my coffee creamer and the cheese in my leftover nachos from dinner last night. I have tried a couple of different vegan creamers and I’m having a hard time making that jump. I’ll keep trying though. I think if I can ever jump that particular hurdle, everything else will be cake!

I read my Soul Detox plan and wasn’t quite as moved as yesterday. As a matter of fact, I actually had an almost repulsive feeling after reading Jeremiah 12:1-4. But thinking back on it now, I guess I see the reason for this selection since the underlying topic is toxic thoughts (DUH…sorry, the light just turned on for me). I’m going to spend some time reflecting on these questions asked in the introduction and I guess that’s kind of the point here huh? Here are the questions that I plan to ponder for a few days.

• Which types of toxic thoughts do you experience most often?
• What are some examples of your toxic thoughts?

One daily goal I haven’t written about here yet is my desire to be creative each day. I’ve sort of taken the easy way out on this by counting my writing and my photo a day on Instagram as the check off on this one. Today I get to check off the box because I actually got creative with a special project we did with the kids. I used crayons (like the art kit kind), paper, pencils,  and markers to MAKE something. It felt really good and now I’m even more motivated than ever to do more things like this. I’m going to probably add this to my goals list for maybe three times a week or something like that.

Speaking of goals, I’m still working though how I want to track these. I watched a great video tonight that talked about categorizing your goals and I like this idea. The categories suggested were Family, Personal Development, Social, Health, Financial, Work, Home, Fun, Spiritual, and Community. I think I can work with this. Here’s a link to the video if you want to check it out.

Now, I want to leave you with one thing that completely blew me away today. I was trying to catch up on some of my recorded episodes of Oprah’s Super Soul Sunday while I ate my dinner. In the episode Oprah was asking some big questions to many of the great thinkers of our day. The questions were mostly about spirituality and God and this one question and response from Iyanla VanZant left me awestruck. I have been a huge fan of hers since about 2000 and now I love her even more. Oprah asked her, “What is the difference between religion and spirituality?”  Here’s her response.

Religion is the rules, regulations, ceremonies and rituals developed by man to create conformity and uniformity in the approach to God. Spirituality is God’s call in your soul.

Whew…that one gave me goosies!

Winging It

Day Two of my New Day Resolution project is almost over and I had about the same success as yesterday.  I set basically the same goals for myself today, but with a couple of changes.

I was able to stick to a vegetarian diet today fairly easy, even when Gil cooked beef for the kid’s tacos this evening. How awesome was he to make us a tofu alternative?  I couldn’t resist the queso and shredded cheese though, so no vegan for me today. Besides, I had already blown that with the non-dairy creamer (which contains milk products????) in my morning coffee. It’s a good thing I didn’t set a goal for a vegan day.

I read day two of the Soul Detox bible reading plan and loved the passage today from Ephesians 6:10-20 regarding the armor of God. It is slowly becoming one of my favorite.  It will never get old to me how God speaks to us in ways we’ll never understand, at times we need it the most. Today’s message was about battling toxic thoughts and how you must identify and reject them. I think the hardest thing for me is to reject these thoughts when they appear. I have a horrible weakness in which I allow the thoughts to consume and overwhelm me. It’s almost as if I find myself enjoying the evil and destructive ideas that fill my mental being at times. I must find a better way to arm myself.  I must allow God to fight this spiritual battle for me. I must suit up in God’s armor so that I can resist the evil thoughts  and “stop the fiery arrows of the devil”. I think I’ll keep today’s reading plan handy for quick reference each day.

The only other goal I wrote down for today was to take down the Christmas decorations. I came home from work with every intention to do just that. However, things didn’t go exactly as planned. Gil and the kids were preparing the aforementioned taco dinner when I came in so we all ate and then cleaned up afterwards. Then there was a quick trip to Home Depot to get storage boxes which turned out to be not so quick. We did pick up a storage cube for Natalie’s room makeover that we’ve been promising for months. After Home Depot we stopped into CherryBerry for some yummy desert. I am in love with their Watermelon Sorbet (gluten free, dairy free, fat free). I got it in a waffle cup and topped it with fresh kiwi, strawberries, and pineapple. It was delish!

I’ve decided a need a better way to track my goals so I’m experimenting with a couple of online and mobile apps to help me with that. I’m hoping that by this time next week, I’ll have a much better outline of some regular short and long term goals I want to accomplish. I’m so much better at things when I have a box to check off or something to actually track. For now, though, I’m just going to wing it and see where each day takes me.

New Day Resolutions

I’ve never been one for making resolutions on New Year’s Day. I’m aware of how much of an opportunity for failure this creates and it’s just not something I want to do to myself. However, I recognize there are so many areas in my life that need to be tweaked, improved, changed or eliminated. Since I have no desire to make some big promise to myself to make a big change for the upcoming year, I’ve decided I’m going to take baby steps and set goals and desires that I can achieve in a single day.

One thing I recognize about myself is my tendency to beat myself up when I fail at something. During my Project 365 Photo A Day challenge, I would rake myself over the proverbial coals when I missed a day. And don’t even get me started on how depressed I became when I missed so many days in a row that I just threw my hands up in the air and surrendered to the failure. What I didn’t do was to celebrate the 306 days I DID post a photo.  I’m not sure why my brain works in this way but I hope to slowly improve and change this way of thinking. I’m hoping that by celebrating a daily goal reached I can create more positive thinking and less negative, self-defeating thoughts.

I started the day by listing a few things for my New Day Resolutions for January 1. My list included eating no meat, cleaning out my closet, spending some quality time with the kids, writing, napping, and starting the YouVersion Essential 100 Bible Reading Plan. Seems pretty simple, right? Well, it would have been had I not gotten sidelined by some stomach ailment that’s pretty much kept me in bed all day (check off napping). I never did get up the energy nor feel well enough to clean my closet so that’s going to move to another day in the near future. I also didn’t spend any time with the kids for the same reason but I’m hoping I get to do that tomorrow after work. I was able to avoid eating any meat and actually had a full vegan day so I think I should give myself a bonus point for that. I’m writing for the first time in months and it’s feeling great even though I feel like my thoughts and words are all over the place but I’ve also promised myself that I’m going to write for me and if that means rambling on and on in run on sentences that don’t make sense to anyone but me, then so be it. LOL See how I did that there? Clearly I can check off the writing goal for the day. The last goal was accomplished, sort of. I called an audible and started the Soul Detox reading plan instead of Essential 100. I’m calling this one a success because at the end of the day, the goal was to feed my soul with God’s word and I did that.

I’m happy with what I was able to do today, even with this stomach thing knocking me down. I’ve got one more goal to check off on today but I’ll be doing that with pen and paper. Gil picked us up these amazing Five Year Journals and today begins that project. I’ve never been much of a journaler, but I’m looking forward to doing this with him.