Resolutions? No! Goals? Yes!

No resolutions.  I don't do them.  Resolutions lead to breaking resolutions.  They are so all or nothing.  A big proclamation is made " I will do X every single day this year"  or "I will never do Y again"  Then when inevitably you don't get a chance or just don't feel up to X, there is no wiggle room.  You missed it. You can no longer do X every single day.  So you feel bummed.  Then next week you miss another day. More bummed.  Then you actually DO Y.  So you can't meet the expectation of EVERY, you can't meet the expectation of Never, what do you do?  Grab a pint of Guinness and  a pint of Hagen Daz and sit in the corner until NEXT New Years Eve.  Not exactly a formula for success.

Goals. Goals are good. Goals lead to a process.  Goals are the flags on the top of the hill.  Goals allow you to screw up.  Goals are more of a path than a giant set of doors.You don't do X today.  That's ok, you can do X tomorrow.  You did Y.  That's ok, we can start not doing Y again in 5 minutes. You work toward your goals, you aren't expected to be perfect 100% with the program on Day 1.  There is one catch with goals,  to achieve a goal we need progress checks.  A little bit of self examination.

I tend to evaluate my goals a few times a year.  The end of the school year - I'm not in school and my daughter is off in college, so from a practical viewpoint the only thing May/June brings is the need to move the Angie and her crap back from Philly.  But I guess, from all the years in school and all Angie's years in school, it has become a natural time to evaluate.  September.  Besides being one of my favorite times of year because I love stocking up on supplies.  I have half a closet with notebooks, paper, folders, pens, I love shopping for pens!  September seems like a natural time to look ahead and try to set new goals to accomplish.  December.  From my birthday at the end of November through New Year's I tend to really look at my life.  Some people that know me find it odd that I have goals. I know I do give off a very cocky, love my life attitude.  And don't get me wrong, I am pretty cocky, and I do love my life (well most of it) but everyone needs goals, either conscious or unconscious.  When I stop having goals, and stop moving forward, when I decide that inertia is ok , and start to stagnate, that's when I start to die.  Maybe not my body - but my ME.

Some goals we can share.  Some accomplishments we can share. Some failures we can share.  And some we can't.  Sharing goals helps with accountability.  It's sadly too easy to cheat our own selves.  It's harder if the world is watching.  So tomorrow I'll share.  That's a preview of one of my goals.  I pretty much dropped off the blog world the last 3 months. There were a lot of reasons- you'll have to wait until tomorrow if you want to know.  But sometimes reasons become excuses, and I had to decide if I really wanted to blog, was I over the blog thing ( I have a notoriously short attention span after all)..  As you can guess from 3 posts in a row, I decided that yes, I want to blog.  The process, the path is to figure out what I need to do to make that happen.  So tomorrow-