“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” Dr. Seuss

12 months

365 days

8760 hours

525600 minutes

That;s a whole lot of numbers for 2019, but it’s up to us and no one else to make the best of our experiences and our life during that period of time.

Starting a new year is exciting, fascinating and intriguing all at the same time, but I also think it’s very important to be realistic about our expectations and goal setting. At the beginning of every year all of our senses are over stimulated with information we receive from social media. Everyone seems to have the perfect solution for weight loss, fitness, home organization and personal growth and it can be overwhelming at times. I try to approach personal goal setting as if I were wearing horse blinders when browsing through social media. We might not have perfect peripheral vision as some animals do, but we are just as easily distracted at times and exposed to loosing focus.

Setting up goals can be an empowering way to kick off the new year, but we must take into consideration the fact that no one has a perfect life and that we are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world and things will go “south” so to speak once in a while. When the unexpected happens, it’s crucial to remind ourselves where we started off in the beginning of our New Year journey, why those goals excited us, what motivated us, and even who motivated us. When we start to feel the lack of commitment and enthusiasm creep in, that’s a perfect opportunity to take out our favorite journals and paper and write down our goals and dreams all over again and make them palpable.

Every year our family goes out to breakfast the first of January to celebrate the new year and every year we talk about goal setting. We reflect on the year that has passed and share some of our hopes and dreams for the future. This year we tried something new. Instead of just talking about our goals, we decided to make them visible and reachable so they could serve us as daily reminders. Each of us used twelve white tags and we connected them with a piece of string. Every tag belonged to every month of the year. We wrote the month at the top of the tag and below we wrote our goal (s) for that specific month. At the start of the project, we took our time, reflected on things we wanted to accomplish every month and started writing. What we learned with this activity was that by setting up different goals every month we were more willing and excited to work towards accomplishing them, as they seemed more realistic.

The goals we wrote down were as simple as reading a book from start to finish and (for me) planning a vacation with my husband - just the two of us - something we haven’t done in the almost 23 years that we have been married.

Goals don’t have to be big ambitions or require huge effort, but they do have to be accompanied by the willingness to work towards a desire result.

Here are the supplies we used for our New Year project and the end result. Every magnet box has magic inside ready to be unfolded!

This 2019 allow yourself every emotion. Laugh out loud, feel joy, have meaningful conversations with people, open up a little more to those you love, cry if you feel like it, get frustrated if you must, sing, dance, be silly, don’t worry about what people may think, and most importantly, be YOURSELF! The world is waiting for you… ❤