Tag: goals

Good Habits = Success

I am sitting in my living room at 7:30 in the morning looking at my nicely decorated Christmas tree. My honey is sleeping and Fenway is waiting patiently by the front door, a sure sign she is ready to go out for a walk. I love a quiet, lazy morning with time to reflect, relax and strategize. After the walk that is!

I am not a technical person, but have been experimenting with a new app called Productive. The free version let me track 3 habits that I wanted to incorporate into my life and I had so much fun (and success) doing that, that I asked for a 1 year subscription for Christmas. So now I can track unlimited habits and am enjoying the process. This is not a review of Productive, there are a bunch of apps available to help develop good habits and increase productivity; this is just the one I stumbled upon, liked the look of and decided to check out.

Still learning to embrace technology!

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2018 Goal Progress

OMG 2018 is more than half way over. It is amazing how quickly time zips bye, and if we don’t pay attention, those goals we set way back in January become forgotten. Goals that are written down in January and never looked at again are simply words on a page. They are like wishes, they sound good but are not going to come true without hard work, perseverance and tracking.

It is time to review my goals for the year to check in on my progress. Here in My Little Blue Kayak, I spend my time paddling toward optimized health, wealth and happiness. Therefore, I tend to write goals in these categories. In January, I posted my 2018 goals and you can check them out here. In that post, I also explained how my goals each year, fit into the bigger picture of how I want to live my life strategically. Go check it out if you have the time!

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What’s In Your Boat?

I started working at age 14 and my work ethic is strong. I feel the pull to be productive, to earn money and to pay my own way. By the age of 22, I became a manager at the human service agency that I worked for and by the age of 25, I was running a program.  Once I finished graduate school I was a department director overseeing 30 staff and 3 different programs. There is a sense of security when you have a career, climb the ladder and earn a salary versus an hourly wage. You know how much money is coming in each month and can plan ahead relatively easily. You know where you will be Monday-Friday for 8-10 hours per day. Security is nice.

Building a career to feel secure

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Staying On The Path

Back in February in a post titled “Don’t Just Go Through the Motions”, I shared my goals for 2018.   My goals are recorded on 3 notes on my Google Keep Page under the titles Health Goals, Wealth Goals and Happiness Goals. My Google Keep Page come up automatically every time I turn on my computer. This way, my goals are always accessible for me to review. My Google Keep Page contains 2 other notes related to my goals. One is where I record the next steps I need to take to reach my goals and the other contains reminders to prioritize my goals.

One note is titled “Sculpt My Life – Next Steps”.  This is where I write down the next steps I need to take toward reaching my goals. Periodically, I review my goals and figure out the next step for each and jot that down on this list. The second note is titled “My Strategic Life Reminders”. This is where I jot down helpful advice I have read about or heard about that I think will help me in my pursuit of health, wealth and happiness goals. They are reminders to prioritize what I say is important to me.  Currently, this list contains the following 3 bullet points:

  • What 1 thing do I want to get better at today? What opportunities will I have to practice it? Do it every day…
  • You are never going to feel like it
  • Act on ideas within 5 seconds or you will pull the emergency brake

Which direction will you follow?

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5 Steps to Take Your Goals to a New Level

As a nation, we spend over $3 Trillion (Trillion with a capital T) annually on healthcare. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), 75% of this goes toward the treatment of chronic disease. Medicare spends 93 cents of every dollar and Medicaid 83 cents of every dollar to treat chronic disease. Chronic disease is responsible for 7/10 deaths in this country.  Sobering right?

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Don’t Just Go Through The Motions

It is easy in life to just go through the motions of living.  Get up, go to work, run errands, cook dinner, watch television, surf the internet. Days, weeks and even years can slip by when we don’t purposefully allot time and energy to the people, projects and goals we believe are important to us.  

Back  in 2013  I wrote out what I called “My Destination” as a roadmap of how I wanted to live my life in the pursuit of health, wealth and happiness. This idea came from “Living the 80/20 Way” by Richard Koch  This is what I wrote at that time:

My Destination

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7 Days/7 Gives

Do you know what it feels like to be stuck in a rut? Every day seems the same and the Joy Meter is reading empty. I hate when I get stuck like this. It is a gnawing feeling in my gut and an emptiness in my mind. I go through the motions of living but in reality I am just trying to get through each and every day. I think that in order to get out of the rut, we have to do something different. We have to step out of our comfort zones and take a small step in the direction we want to be going.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be something huge but it has to be out of character. It has to be something that makes you think, feel, believe just a little bit differently than you do when stuck in the rut.

How to break free?

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A Year in Review

Today I want to look back at 2017 to see how I did reaching my goals. I have talked about goals in the past and how reviewing them regularly helps me to stay on track.  Half way thru 2017, I did a  review of my progress and asked the smart ass question “Are Your Goals Useless?”

In that post, I state “on New Year’s Eve, many of us make a big deal about creating resolutions to make changes in our lives. Resolutions, goals, intentions are pretty much useless unless you take the time to review your progress, identify your barriers and develop action plans.”

This is the year-end review of my 2017 goals to see whether they were met, addressed, abandoned, or simply not prioritized. It is proof that I follow my own advice regarding not simply making meaningless goals.

Add the word REVIEW before success.

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I am Still Sane!

I just wrapped up my tough month of work that I wrote about early last month. In that blog post I detailed some of the things I planned to do to stay sane. I am happy to report I finished the month without pulling out my hair, losing my cool or having any type of breakdown. But I didn’t do it alone! I had lots of help to stay sane while working a lot of hours in an environment that doesn’t nourish my soul.

I didn’t do anything crazy

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Don’t Follow the Herd

I have been in vacation and family mode for the last few weeks and have not managed to carve out time to work on my blog or to study for my health coach exam. I have managed to spend actual time in my little yellow (sit on top) kayak, the canoe and relaxing in the lake. My honey and I spent a week vacationing in the Adirondacks with a group of friends and Child #1. That week was full of laughter, games and lake time.

The Adirondacks are gorgeous!

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