How are you ringing in the new year? As I've mentioned, I've been fighting a bad cold over the holidays. For that reason, Corey and I are reluctantly cancelling our NYE plans for an evening of relaxation and rest. I believe the agenda for tonight includes wearing sweats, sipping champagne, binge-watching Orange is the New Black on the couch and writing our goals for 2014.
Do you set goals or make resolutions for the new year? I don't mean the vague "join a gym" or "read more" but real, specific goals? A couple of years ago, Corey and I began putting our goals for the year in writing. We chose specific categories (Financial, Business, Physical/Mental Health, Family/Relationships and Spiritual/Charity) and listed our attainable goals. Then we revisited them monthly and wrote down smaller steps we could take each month to work towards them.
I'm not suggesting this method for everyone... To be honest, Corey and I both thought it sounded a little fanatical at the time, but it was a fun exercise and we knew we were embarking on some big life changes so decided to give it a try.
As with most new year's resolutions, we didn't exactly stick to our plan perfectly. Monthly checks were stretched to every other month... and then to every third month. Still, our goals were in writing and posted in my office and we saw them daily... although by the fall we had stopped reading them. By the end of the year, we were concerned about how much we had slipped and we were almost embarrassed to look at our list again. Finally, we mustered the courage to take a look and we joked to each other about how far from our goals we probably were....
Then something amazing happened as we read them. We realized that, not only had we reached almost all of our goals, almost every goal we didn't reach was within reach. In fact, we easily polished off that list in the first half of the next year... the last item being our engagement. ;)
We're excited to try again this year and encourage you to try it too. We were total skeptics but we will never again underestimate the power of putting goals in writing.
For those of you who are interested, here are a few articles about goal writing:
Set S.M.A.R.T. Resolutions in 2014
A Humorous Guide to Resolutions
A Good Reason NOT to Publicize Your Resolutions
I hope you all have a great evening and a terrific start to 2014! Corey and I are looking forward to sharing many things, including our renovation progress, the final chapters of the condo saga and our wedding this summer. In the short-term, I'm also a little excited for our non-plans this evening.
