Successes, Struggles, and Soon-to-Bes: August 2016

I have been thinking a lot lately about living life purposefully, setting goals for myself and following through, working on changing who I am and becoming who I want to be. I'm really good at setting unrealistic goals for myself, like deciding that in the next year I'm going to run a marathon, become fluent in three new languages, learn all the Chopin etudes, and read 250 books. And do you know what follows that goal list? Failure...generally on the first day...and then self pity and depression, because I can never change. I will always be stuck in my rut and I will never be the person I want to be. So I'm trying to approach life differently this year, trying to set realistic small goals that, over time, help me achieve the bigger, less realistic ones. So my plan is to write a monthly blog post outlining some of these goals in the hope that the accountability will work in my favor and slowly I can become more of the woman God created me to be. 

Successes:

My biggest success in August was that I actually took time to write out some goals and some even bigger dreams and a few steps to get me started in the right direction. Even this blog post is a huge first step for me. So yay me!

Also, our annual family camping trip this year was a huge success (in my opinion). Beautiful weather, great bike rides, many books read and board games won, and no injuries! Oh! And I tied with my dad in game of mini golf (he usually wins), so that was great fun! 

My last success for the month was having a better balance in my reading. I say I like to read a lot of different things (and I do!) but my reading list in the last few years would not have reflected that. This month I managed to read classics and non fiction, as well as my usual fiction. I read 10 books this month which is fairly average for me but...

Struggles:

...seven out of the ten books I read were in the last week of August while we were on vacation, meaning up until August 23rd, I had only read 3 books, so that is actually a pretty poor reading month for me. Which gives some insight into my biggest struggle right now: Spending too much time online!!! This is huge for me. The internet is a great tool, but I should not be spending several hours every day watching youtube videos, or playing backgammon, or book shopping... I can't even begin to tell you how quickly 5 minutes of internet time can suck me in and suddenly my whole day is gone and I accomplished nothing. I hate it! So I am instituting some pretty strict internet rules for myself this month in the hope that it will help me to be more productive in many areas. 

My other biggest struggle (which is definitely related to internet usage) is discipline in general: Discipline in eating right, exercising consistently, being diligent in the time I spend with Jesus, spending time online, how I spend time in general, how I spend money. It's a huge, overwhelming thing that I need to work on. I don't want to waste my life. I don't want to be the person that looks back and talks about all the things they were going to do. I want to be the person that does them and has great stories to tell!

Soon-to-Bes:

And all that brings us to this section, where I get to talk about the things that are coming up for me and things I want to change in the coming month. 

First of all, we're headed back into fall and more piano lessons. So I'll be setting up my lesson schedule in the next week. Also, I'm looking ahead to Christmas and making plans for church Christmas choir which will be starting up in just a couple weeks. 

For goals this month, I already mentioned limited internet time. I also want to start running again. I really would like to do a marathon someday...not this year...but I think I can manage a 5k by the end of the year. 

In closing:

Thanks for reading my rambling little blog. Honestly, this is more an exercise for myself and less for you guys, but maybe I can inspire you a little bit too and we can journey together. Speaking of inspiration, I have two people that deserve serious credit for inspiring me. Nathan Johnston, who always inspires me, but specifically this post inspired this blog, and secondly Caitlin over at BookChats (check out her youtube channel here, it's all about books!) who graciously gave me permission to use her Successes, Struggles, and Soon-to-Bes outline.