A year about you

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my future. Where I want to be in life in a year, in five years, etc.

Suddenly it’s dawned on me (or maybe not so suddenly – it’s probably been coming on for a while now) that time is passing whether I do anything or whether I do nothing, and I’m not getting any younger.

This probably all came about as I realized that my daughter is going to be starting her final year of college and my son will be starting high school in the fall.

While it used to feel like these things were years away, they’re now around the corner. And what does that really mean for me?

In a year, my daughter will be finished with college and I won’t have quite the financial burden that I’ve been carrying for the past three years. This will free me up to begin addressing some of my own financial goals.

And in four years – which will go by very quickly if the last four are any indicator – my son will be finished with high school and I will no longer be tied to my current location/school district.

All of this got me thinking that I really need to start making some serious plans and set some goals for the next year so that I’m ready for the changes that are coming.

I need to make plans and set goals for my…

• Finances
• House
• Career
• Health and wellness

These are all areas that I’ve considered and would like to look different one year from now, or at least in the process of growth toward looking different.

None of these are small changes, yet I’ve begun to realize that to make changes we need to affect small changes on a daily or weekly basis that will add up to a greater whole over a period of time. So I will need to set some small daily and weekly goals that will hopefully bring me closer to my larger, long-term goals.

 This is no small undertaking. Especially for someone like me, who, to be quite honest, has resisted goal-setting in the past. I’ve had enough real life happen to me that I’ve had a bit of a fatalistic attitude toward setting goals. Along the lines of life is going to intervene in my plans anyway, so why make plans?

Well, with what I hope to be a bit of maturity finally setting in, I realize now that this has probably been a self-sabotaging attitude. That’s not to say that life won’t intervene and change my plans – I’m guessing that it always will.

But to avoid setting goals just because life might intervene and change up some of your plans – well, that’s probably a bit rebellious and foolhearty.

Over the next couple of weeks I’ll be writing about setting goals and following through. We can work through the process together.

So start to think about the changes you would like to make in this #SummerOfAwesome and things you would like to accomplish over the next year. Imagine what you would like your life to look like one year from now. Then we’ll work together to start setting some small, meaningful goals that will get us closer to where we want to be a year from now.

Because whether we do something to move toward our goals or whether we do nothing, time marches on, with us or without us. Let’s not let it leave us behind! Begin to take care of you. Make the next 365 days a year about you.