Being Kind To Yourself.....

I have never been one to make New Year’s resolutions. I’ve always thought that you should be able to make a resolution anytime of the year- why wait until January? But at the start of this year, I made myself a list of 9 goals I wanted to achieve during the year. Some of these goals were things that I had tried to bring about before but was now more serious about achieving them & some were things that kept being put off in the daily grind of the day, so I thought that writing them down would have more effect.

Here is a few of the 9 goals that I gave myself at the start of this year-

1 date night per month with my husband

Lose 6 kilos by 1^st June

Read 1 book before June

Get 8hrs sleep most nights

And………… write 1 blog post for my business every 2 weeks for the whole year

So what did I achieve this year…..?

Date night with my husband every month- tick

Lose 6 kilos by 1^st June- I didn’t just lose 6 kilos by June, I lost 11 kilos by March! My husband joined me on my diet & lost 11 kilos also- tick, tick & tick!!!! Side note- we have also both kept this weight off all year, so that deserves another tick!

Read 1 book before June- this goal was really important to me. B.K & H (before kids & husband), I loved nothing more than getting my nose into a book. Babies came along, I started a business & suddenly, there wasn’t time to read anything more substantial than a newspaper. This year was my year to claim some of my “me” time back. I read 1 book before June & have since read 3 more books- tick, tick, tick & tick!

Get 8hrs of sleep most nights- my husband & I lead quite healthy lives. We walk at least 5kms a day & for the most part, eat healthy. (Carrot cake is healthy, right? It has vegetables in it & the cream cheese frosting has calcium!) Even though we both decided to lose weight this year, we were still in our healthy weight ranges. We were just both concerned that as 50 was approaching us faster than we cared to admit, we didn’t want any extra kilos that were going to be increasingly harder to take off as we got older.

The one thing that always concerned me about our health was that sleep was never a priority to us. It was always something that was fitted into the existing hours that were left at the end of the day. After listening to Adriana Huffington talk about the importance of sleep, I started to take notice.

I haven’t totally perfected this goal for every day, but my goal did say MOST nights, so this is a tick, too.

So with achieving these goals this year (when honestly, losing weight was a big enough goal for me), why am I so hard on myself when I wrote a blog post every 2 weeks all year, until September and then life got in the way & then I stopped?????

That is, I wrote 16 blog posts this year, one every 2 weeks until September and then stopped…

Why did I stop blog writing, when I had achieved nearly every other goal on my list?

Life had become too hard for a moment & something had to give. You see, what I haven’t mentioned yet is that this year has been one of “those” years for our family. One of those years when 7 of our immediate family have been in hospital- some a couple of times. One of those years when both of our children were hospitalised in emergency situations. Within 6 weeks, our first grandchild was born & my husband’s much loved Pop died.

As you can imagine, there has been many days off work for me this year, so when I was at work, I really needed to keep doing the things that kept all the balls up in the air & the lights on. To me, making sure I was keeping to my list of goals & writing a blog post wasn’t as important.

So why do I feel like I’ve failed…… because it’s human nature to focus on the one goal I didn’t achieve & ignoring the others that I did!

I have just decided to be kind to myself. I have had some great achievements this year, even though the circumstances around us were at times traumatic.

After all, I can easily put blog writing on the top of next year’s list!