2014 - Making Goals not Resolutions

I don't 'do' resolutions.Never have. Once or twice, getting all swept up with my bestie's new year resolution enthusiasm I tried my hand at it. Needless to say I couldn't even remember what I had 'resolved'. I've been going with the flow for the past few years but this is the year of change for me. This year, I have set myself targeted, action oriented goals with certain timelines.

The idea of goals and tasks is much more appealing.Something we tend to overlook is meaningful, timely, realistic rules while trying to achieve said goals. I set 6 categories of my life , where I wanted to make improvements.

My categories comprise of spiritual development, physical changes, educational milestones, personal achievements and something for fun

1.  Spiritual: I want to be more regular with my prayers. In order to achieve that, I now make an effort to schedule my break times around the time of azan( call for prayer).
   
2.  Physical: I'm overweight and usually I 'resolve' to loose weight but this year I have made running a half marathon my goal. For that I need to train. That means I need to start walking before I start running.That also means that my diet has to fulfill my nutritional needs and that I have to become more regular with taking my vitamins.
   
3. Personal: I want to be kinder to myself and be more observant of those around me. It's been a long standing problem with me, how I tend to judge myself rather harshly. I guess that comes with holding myself up to certain nearly impossible standards and inevitably failing, leading to harsh self criticism. No more of that from now on. I'm too young for the stress ulcers! I end up enabling people's bad behavior only to have it backfire on me some time down the road and  no longer will I do this disservice to myself and to those I love.
   
4. Educational: I have been putting off certain exams for various reasons over the years, mostly because of issues I have with failure. I tend to not try for fear of not being successful. Keeping number 4 in mind, this year I'm leaving all my issues behind and taking a fresh step forward.
   
5. Fun: I will take a dance class this year. This is actually the hardest one to manage so far if you can believe that!

I'm setting monthly goals that work towards the overall goals I have for myself this year and I'll talk about those as we go along. Next post I'll talk about the tools that have truly helped me keep on track and given me a lot more discipline overall in life aka Lists and Schedules.