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The Year of Enlightenment

I haven’t done resolutions in quite some time. My goal-setting especially went out the window when I became a mother because I was like, “Can I get a restful night’s sleep? For once? Please God!” But over the duration of my lifetime, when I have done resolutions, I always seem to accomplish them. It’s nostalgic to read the goals from my younger self and how I achieved more than I put to paper. So here’s to restarting that trend!

If I had to give 2017 a theme, I would call it the Year of Enlightenment. I really want to be less distracted and focus on what’s most important (like family, friends, faith, my health and emotional well-being).

Relationships

  • Strengthen marriage – go on date nights
  • Keep up book club
  • Restart movie night
  • Girlfriend trip
  • One friend connection per week (List 52 friends I don’t see regularly and reconnect)

Personal Growth

  • Read one book a month (List 12 books for the year)
  • Get published
  • Work with a life coach
  • Blog refresh – update ‘About’ page

Faith

  • Pray every day
  • Go to church regularly
  • Have an understanding of the Bible, Torah, Quran, and the teaching of Buddha
  • Visit a church, mosque, synagogue and temple
  • Find fun religious events/experiences for Franco

Health

  • Get acupuncture/massage once a month
    Go on a retreat
  • Breathe and be present

Financial

  • Rent downstairs apartment
  • Save enough to be able to purchase another property

 Career

  • Find a new job
  • Have more balance and flexibility

 Important actions and habits to reach above goals

  • Create before consume (write before reading blogs)
  • Radical exclusion – actively minimize or stop doing things that leave no legacy or important impact
  • Tiny habits program: start small, make it automatic
  • Remember that there is so much support in the world (both within myself and through others). Tap into it.
  • LOVE

Would love to hear what yours are!

Here are some resources to help.

I have been reading The Art of Ass-Kicking for several years now. Jason Shen’s a graduate of Stanford, where he was on the gymnastics team, and also co-founded RideJoy, which was a Y Combinator startup. He’s successful, published, creative, introspective, driven and a decade younger than me, which makes me feel bad about myself, but also incents me to fucking achieve. We gotta show these millennials who’s boss! Jason had this great annual review post and also put together this tool that you can use to reflect on 2016 and what you hope for in 2017.

Here’s the Tiny Habits program I mentioned above. It’s a 5-day program where you inculcate 3 habits every day and they’re supposed to be very small habits (i.e., After I brush my teeth, I will floss one tooth.). I started on Monday and one of my habits is “After I first check my phone, I will pray.” So far so good. Check it out!

This morning on my commute, I looked up and saw a rainbow. Amazing.

Photo above was from Burning Man 2007. See the double-rainbow? Doubly amazing.

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01.11.17

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Janine Huldie

    January 11, 2017 at 3:29 pm

    Great goals for 2017 and love what you have also labeled your upcoming year, as well! 🙂

    Reply
  2. Cece

    January 12, 2017 at 8:28 am

    I haven’t made a list of anything. Don’t know if I will but I love reading other people’s resolutions. I like how you broke it into categories to really hone into all the areas of your life that you want to make changes.

    Reply
  3. Charlotte

    January 13, 2017 at 6:07 am

    What an inspiring list you have here! Great job… And I love that you break it down by different areas where you’d like to grow personally, professionally, financially, etc. That book sounds very inspiring (damn these millennials, lol) and I’d love to check it out–thanks for the AM kick in the pants this morning 🙂 I needed it and am going to reference this in today’s blog post if you don’t mind!

    XOXO

    Reply
  4. Dana

    January 18, 2017 at 2:14 pm

    I like the tiny habit idea – I will check that out! And I love “create before consume.” I do NOT do that, but I need to.

    My planner has a page for three goals a month, and I didn’t follow through last year. I’m going to try to do better this year. January’s goals are (1) write for 10+ minutes for 10 days (7 so far), (2) finish an online class I’m taking on creating content and (3) clean one closet in the basement. If I don’t meet the goals, they move to the next month. We will see how I do…

    Reply

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Welcome to my site, derived from an advice column I wrote while getting my MBA. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I give helpful, opinionated advice based on my own experience and from the expertise of my extensive network. For more, click here.

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