I really wanted to keep this post brief, but it’s hard! Please excuse the back-to-back LONG posts, but I promise it’ll be worth it (and that my posts won’t always be this long). I plan on doing a progress post on my goals each month, and it only made sense for you to know what those goals were beforehand. So for the sake of brevity, let’s jump right in…here are the intentional goals I set for 2016!!
1. Grow closer to God
Although this may seem like a vague goal, I put my focus on spiritual disciplines that I want to be better about in my life. For me that means being intentional about praying and reading my Bible daily and getting involved in a church/small group again. Over the last few years while dealing with some health issues my husband and I had simply fallen out of the habit of going to church regularly. I’m not legalistic about going to church (maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but I have zero guilt if I miss a week), but I value the community and accountability of being surrounded by people who share my beliefs.
2. Love my husband well/have a stronger marriage
I consider my relationship with my husband, Tye to be the most important one I have on earth. It only makes sense to work hard to keep it a strong relationship. We currently have what I think is a good marriage, but I’m of the mindset that things can always be better! So for me, this goal looks like having intentional ‘quality time’ with each other at least once a week, doing marriage devotionals together/reading books about marriage, making sure I’m encouraging Tye (texts, notes, verbally), and serving my husband well. For the last one, if you’ve ever read The Five Love Languages, Tye is definitely an ‘acts of service’ person! In this season of our life, serving him well looks like planning our meals (he actually does a lot of the cooking), keeping up with laundry, helping with the dishes, and generally keeping our house clean. I’m kind of a neat freak, and since I work from home, keeping up with all those not-so-fun domestic tasks helps me to be productive throughout the day too (win-win!).
3. Get healthy—mentally and physically
I won’t go into too much detail on this one, because you’d get bored. The subtext of this goal is that I want to lose at least 20 pounds this year (I gained 25+ pounds over the last two years from all the crazy medicines I was put on…yikes!), exercise more often, work to reduce my chronic pain, and improve my sleep. Some of the ways I want to accomplish this are to exercise 3-5 times a week, go to bed at a decent hour, do stretches/exercises for my pain issues, walk my dog regularly (i.e., get outside & soak up some vitamin D and fresh air!), and keep up with doctor’s appointments.
4. Simplify our life/Work to reduce debt
Years of graduate school came with a lot of student loan debt….whomp… whomp. I’ve never been a big fan of debt, so we’re always working on ways to reduce it faster. A little over a year ago, my husband and I agreed to look into downsizing to a smaller house. Because all the stars have to align for the math to work out in our favor, we agreed not to rush into anything. So in the meantime we are slowly paying cash and DIYing minor updates to our current home in order to make a profit on it, and also just simplifying our possessions and our life. Although the original intent of simplifying was debt reduction, we’ve seen so many other benefits in the process as well (this is a post unto itself)!
5. Cultivate community!
If you follow me on Instagram you’ve heard me talk about community and relationships. As an introvert and someone who works from home, it’s super easy to just hang out with my husband and avoid the rest of the world. Just keeping it real! In an effort to not be that person, I made an intentional goal to tend to the relationships in my life. This looks like calling my family (most of whom live in another state) at least once a week, have friends/family over for dinner once or twice a month, and attend our church small group monthly.
6. Expand my creativity/design skills (this one relates to my biz)
This goal is fairly straightforward in that I am signed up for a number of self-paced classes for things like Adobe Illustrator and hand lettering. Essentially I just work on the classes and practice the skills. I plan on using these skills as I launch my stationery business in a few months!!
7. Use my spiritual gift of encouragement to bless others
I remember when I was in college and someone pointed out that I was a good encourager. Although I already knew this to some degree, it sparked something in me that made me want to be intentional about encouraging people. I often do this without thought, but I also wanted to do more this year. This goal looks like sending encouraging postcards to friends/family each month, sending encouraging texts to friends/family on a weekly basis, and being mindful of the comments and posts I put on social media.
8. REST WELL
I don’t want to look back on my life and realize I’ve spent most of my downtime just watching television! So instead I want to be intentional about doing things like reading books and going on ‘weekend adventures’ (going to new places—even within my own city, riding bikes, hiking/kayaking, etc…). I also wanted to reduce my social media time, and make going to bed a priority.
So there you have it, folks…my overall goals for 2016! Stay tuned for the first installment of my monthly goals and what my progress towards these goals looks like! Also, make sure you check out my post on TOOLS I use to help make these goals happen.