Happy New Year!

Hello! I hope you had a great holiday season!

As our lives start to calm down from all the craziness, we are able to look forward to the future. Rather than setting resolutions for myself, I aim to try to solidify my goal of personal development, being financially smart and environmentally friendly. Personal development means a lot of different things to me, and it is ever evolving.

I challenge you to think of what you want to put out into the world and what would make your life feel more fulfilled. These don’t have to be a big statement of a New Year Resolution, but rather a part of your life you would like to work on. The beautiful things is no matter when you start or where you have been up until this current point, you can always move forward successfully. There is no such thing as perfection, you’re going to have hiccups and road blocks, it is how you work to strive past these challenges.

If you are like most people (especially parents of young children) during the holiday season, you are thinking a lot of other people and the things you feel you need to do to make the holiday magical. The new year is a time to breathe and take note of what is going on in your life as a regular. This is a chance to think about yourself and learn to establish a good routine for achieving what you want in life by establishing lifestyle changes rather than searching for an end point that you are constantly reaching for.

How can you move forward to a more sustainable change in this new year? Can you come up with a supplemental goal that may help lead to your ultimate goal? Is there something you want to contribute to that you’ve been too busy for in the past?

Specific goals are extremely important, but if you are trying to make a large lifestyle change, don’t feel like the new year is the only time and that you have to go all or nothing. Make smaller changes that can eventually lead to larger changes. Take an evaluation of where you are at currently, what you feel ready for, and what your ultimate goals are. Can you come up with a first step and go there? If your goal is to lose weight, start by being more active by 30 minutes a week and then increase from there.

You don’t need to make a large life altering changes in order to have success towards your goals. We were taught The Tortoise and the Hare when we were little kids and this holds true for reaching towards a goal. Slow, steady, dedicated, and driven is the answer to most success, it is not meant to happen overnight.

Happy 2021!