Hi All!

So I find it hard to believe it is already 2013. Where did 2012 go? Every year that flies past and leaves me breathless makes me a little uneasy because, as I am sure a lot of people feel, I want to feel like I am getting the most out of each year I am lucky enough to be alive! And yet I know this year, it felt like I scraped by day by day, a bit of an emotional wreck just trying to finish University and deal with Life’s lovely challenges. So 2013 I want to try harder. Now I have this lovely wee corner of the internet I think trying out some goal-setting may be useful. Having my goals up here to see whenever I want makes me feel a little more accountable and I plan to do either 4 monthly goal review posts to see how things are going. Anyway, after that rambly introduction here are my rather random goals for 2013.

1. Look after my body better. Ok so I resisted my usual “lose 15kg” type of goals (although that would be great) because as much as I would love to be a skinny wee thing, I’m not and I don’t think its a particularly healthy goal, for me anyway. Instead 2013 will be a year to focus on health. This includes more balanced meals (not just skipping meals to make up for naughty takeaways the night before), more vegetables and fruit (which have been seriously lacking in my student budget diet of 2012), more exercise (3 times a week for half an hour, any kind of exercise I feel I can motivate myself for) and other generally healthy activities. All at once this probably won’t happen but over time I hope to make some small and manageable changes that will move me in this general direction.

2. Put myself first. In terms of my relationships I want to learn how to put the needs and wants of others aside every once in a while in order to focus on my own mental health and priorities as well as my relationship with Edd. I love my family and friends but life is complicated and putting my needs second in order to please everyone is the habit of a lifetime that I want to keep working on reducing. This doesn’t mean I don’t care about all these wonderful people but just want to put a bit of care into myself as well.

3. Make blogging more regular and less stressful. I love this little blog but I would like to improve the regularity of my posts. I want to become one of those people who has multiple post planned and drafted so that I am not constantly doing things last minute. Having a journal where I can keep a plan of when I want to post certain things is something I am going to start doing to keep things less stressful and more organised.

4. Become more organised in other areas of my life. This ranges from cleaning schedules, keeping my makeup and nailpolish under control, keeping more written records, sticking to my list making which helps me more productive on a day to day basis and so on.

5. Read more books. I love books and I don’t read enough thanks to 4 years of university which made me feel guilty every time I wasn’t reading lecture notes or text books. After seeing people do the 50 book project in 2012 I think 50 books is a good number but we’ll see how manageable it is once I get into a better routine. I would also like to share more about what I read on the blog, although I’m not sure people would be particularly interested haha.

6. Go on more dates. I love spending my evenings curled up on the couch with Edd and Callie, watching movies and eating pizza and popcorn, but I want to try more things with Edd and go out more often. As lovely as it is to stay home variety is the spice of life so 2013 will bring some new restaurants, new activities together, new holidays overseas and who knows what else!

7. Develop a more positive outlook on life. This something I started working on this year with my Made me smile posts which I found so helpful in encouraging me to look back on the past week in terms of the highlights and the positive moments. I hope that I can continue to improve in this area as my default position in life has always been more on the stressed and pessimistic side.

So there are 7 pretty general areas of my life that I want to work on in 2013. As I mentioned in my What I learned from 2012 post, change in these areas won’t come without some hard work and perseverance from me so I’ll do my best to use this year to its potential and enjoy each moment!

Does anyone else still set goals? I know they go in and out of fashion but I think setting goals is useful as long as there isn’t a lot of guilt and self-punishment involved when things don’t go to plan. For me I just need a little direction in life that keeps me on track and stops me losing sense of myself and what I want from the year to come. Let me know what you think and if you have set any goals or resolutions for 2013!

Xx

p.s. Last night I read this great post by a fellow tweeter and blogger which talked about the importance of Values as opposed to goals. Sarah discussed rather brilliantly the danger on having incongruent goals and values in life which makes achieving one’s goals harder than it should be. After reading her post I went and thought about the kind of values I want to focus on for 2013 and things that I wrote down were happiness, health, love and relationships amongst a couple others. I then used these to edit and refine some of my goals, removing a couple that I felt weren’t in line with the values I wanted to focus on. I highly recommend checking out her post (Here!) and her blog in general