It’s important to have goals. Everyone knows this. When you make a goal, it helps you organize what’s in your mind and clears up the chaos. It clarifies your thinking. When you accomplish a goal, you feel… accomplished. Duh. Looking back and seeing what goals you’ve set and achieved, you can see what you’ve done with your time, you can see where you need to improve or increase effort, and you can see – especially when things don’t look so great – that you are much more capable than you give yourself credit for. (And, yeah, when I say you, I mean me. 😉 )

I’ve been thinking about this a lot today. Of course. First day of a new year and all. (Well, it’s 2am now on January 2nd but I still count it as the first cause I had a late start to my day.)

I’ve always been very hesitant to set New Year Goals and make resolutions. I wrote about that last year. I know myself and am resigned to the fact that my ‘sticktoitiveness’ is very limited. But~ thinking about the last two years and the ideas of goals that I had, I can see that I am quite able to stick to things. It’s just hit or miss, I guess. For instance, I wrote at the beginning of 2014 about how I wanted to write in my journal more. Well, I barely touched my written journal but just look at how much I’ve poured out onto this blog site! That’s more “journaling” than I’d done in the previous 10 years combined.

And then last year, I had planned to consciously not preemptively defend myself as much. I think I was fairly successful. Whether or not that new habit is working out in my favour is yet to be determined. Not the point…

I think the biggest indicator that I can accomplish something I set my mind out to do is with what I did for the Team Fireball #AYearOfTwilight thing. Starting on January 5th of last year, I had the idea that, as a group, my friends and I would post at least one Twilight-themed picture a day using the #fmsphotoaday challenge prompts on Instagram. As time went on, I had less and less help from the group and ended up doing the entire month of Decemeber with no input at all. Every day for an entire year. I didn’t miss one single day. I didn’t post past midnight (eastern time!) once. It may not be much, but I am kind of impressed with myself. I put everything I had into those posts too. I am not a person who can really half-ass it with the effort I put into something. I’m an all or nothing kind of girl. There were of course some days that I wasn’t as pleased as I could have been but even those mediocre (in my view) posts had a lot of work that went into them. And for the most part, no one had any clue JUST HOW MUCH effort I put out so that each picture looked the best it could or the amount of time I thought about how to best use the prompt relating back to Twilight. (It all goes back to Twilight, you know. LOL.)

And I did something similar with the 100 Days of Happy posts the year before. I didn’t miss a day on that one either.

So there.

I need to remind myself of all of these instances when I get that fear in me and feel defeated before I even start something. I can do things. I can see things through. I just need to decide to do them.

With that mindset, I have started a list. I plan to add to it over the course of the week(ish) as I determine what I want to do with myself going forward. Goals are good. It’s good to have focus. I need some focus right now.

Goals for 2017

• read more
• don’t do things only out of obligation
• be more verbal in speaking my gratitude
• lose 20 pounds
• shine bright like a diamond

That last one is in reference to a conversation I had with a friend earlier today about how we are “diamonds in the rough”/work in progress but valuable and rare nonetheless – and how not everyone deserves to have us. Only the people we love the most are deemed worthy enough to have our presence in their lives. And not to undermine our own preciousness just because someone else doesn’t see our worth.

I’m planning on writing more about each of those points later on, but it’s late now and I have to work in the morning.

There was also something I was going to add about my discovery today about bullet journals, but that will also have to wait.