Monday, January 16, 2012
Week #2 and All Is Well!
I decided to do something a little bit different this week.
You see, some of you are still on the fence about joining Project 52, or you have pretty much decided not to do it because it seems so daunting.
Well, my friend Shawna has a different take on the challenge this year, and I've asked her to talk about that today. So, please welcome my real-life friend and my first guest poster of the year:
Hello everybody! I’m super excited to be a guest poster here on Karen’s blog. Karen is my idol, both in the blogging world and the real world. I worship her. I have a little corner in my closet with her picture and candle and a $20 bill. (Ok, there WAS a $20 bill…there was a sale at Forever 21 and, well… I’m only human.)
In December of 2010 Karen told me about her idea for Project 52 and invited to me to join. I was pretty excited especially since my inner perfectionist loves making lists and goals and checking things off. So it was a complete no-brainer for me to join the Project. There was one small caveat though. I was 5 months pregnant last January. So while I was compiling my list of goals I knew that my life was headed for some major changes. But I went ahead and made goals anyway and I tried to make them reasonable. Now, I knew that having a baby was going to change my life, but I don’t think that I was really prepared for how much it would also change ME. Six months and one baby later I was looking over my goals and realized there were a lot of things on my list that no longer seemed important to me anymore. And even worse, my goals ended up holding me back from doing things that I actually really wanted to do. For example, I picked out 12 classic books to read. But in the fogginess of post-partum depression I found I couldn’t concentrate on War and Peace. Or Moby Dick. Or any of the other books on my list. Now there were lots of books that I probably could have concentrated on but because they weren‘t on my list I felt guilty reading them. So I didn’t read anything at all.
So this year I knew I wanted to make a smaller but more broad list of goals, so I made 12 general goals and smaller goals under a few of them. The 12 general goals are what I really want to accomplish this year, but I’m not so concerned about how I achieve them. This also gives me some wiggle room; that way if there are any major changes in my life, I can adapt my goals to those changes. For example, one of my goals is to enjoy life more. I know that is really vague so I set a few smaller, more specific goals to help me achieve underneath it like: reading more books, watching more movies, going to the beach, and revamping my makeup routine. Should my life take drastic a turn and let’s say I move from CA to the Sahara Desert then I would probably change those to: getting a tan, learning to use a divining rod, and taking up camel racing. But I would still achieve my goal of enjoying life more. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to back to that shrine in my closet so that I can start praying that I don’t actually end up moving to the Sahara.
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You can read more from Shawna at her blog Blondesense and Nonsense. Thank you so much, Shawna, for sharing your take on Project 52!
If you have an update this week, you can link up down below.
If you are ready to join Project 52, please add your list to the Master Linky here.
And while y'all are doing that, I'm going to go look for some chains and a basement. Because there is NO WAY Shawna's moving to the Sahara Desert...
You are awesome. And if you share this post, you'll be even awesomer!
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That's such an awesome idea! I love having general goals and specifics under them that you can change. Life can be so unpredictable that you really need some wiggle room. Great post!
ReplyDeleteGoals can change drastically over time - even just one short year.
ReplyDeleteThat's a good idea!
ReplyDeleteI purposely left my list "unfinished" for this very reason. Life changes, and I want my goals to be able to change to reflect that.
ReplyDeleteI already have to alter my list a little bit because something in my life changed and I didn't put that anywhere in my life plans for this year. It's a good thing that they're our lists and we can change them any time because we didn't set the lists in stone.
ReplyDeleteI'm still LOLing at her Forever 21 comment. That place is awesome.
ReplyDelete