2022 has very swiftly come to an end and I am sure we can all agree that it was probably the quickest year ever experienced! I vividly remember the start of 2022 like it was yesterday, but here we are at the start of 2023 and 2019 was FOUR YEARS AGO. What on earth is going on here?

I love any opportunity to reflect, and I usually like to spend the last week of the year and the first week of the New Year looking back on the year gone by and planning for the 12 months ahead. This exercise can help us remember the highlights, low points and lessons learned from each, allowing us to go into the next chapter a little wiser.

In these days consumed by social media, where everyone seems to be living life to the fullest it can be easy to compare our unique and precious life to what we see online – in 2022 I am grateful for finding the joy in the basic and mundane tasks of everyday. My ‘highlights’ have included laughing with friends and family, sharing meals with my farm-community, making some wonderful new friendships and connections and learning some pretty transformative lessons. There are no grandiose adventures or huge lifechanging moments, but instead, the deeply nourishing moments have been found in the plain and ordinary.

Saying that, after a year of appreciating the smaller things and creating a more secure foundation, I have set some larger, more tangible goals that I can work towards daily to achieve in 2023.

I break down my goals for the year into 3 manageable categories as follows:

Personal

Professional

Health

I have chosen those as they are the three main areas I want to focus on long-term and my goals for them are along the lines of:

Continue on a journey of personal development

Aim to build a worklife that allows for independence, time-freedom and financial-freedom

Be the fittest and strongest I’ve ever been by the age of 30, along with trialing different holistic healing modalities to achieve whole health (i.e. parasite cleansing, eliminatory organ cleansing, water-fasting etc)

Now, they are relatively difficult to measure and work towards as there are no real specifics to keep you on track, focussed or accountable and the key to achieving your longer term goals lies in the smaller tasks you are able to maintain and stick to on a daily basis.

We can break them down even further into quantitive, qualitative, performance based, outcome-based or process- based goals. So mine, under the above three categories would look like:

Personal:

  • Read atleast 10 books (quantitative)
  • Practice more creativity through writing blogs, photography and calligraphy (process based)
  • Live with more love and practice more patience (especially in the moments where it seems the hardest) (qualitative)

Professional:

  • Fully commit and delve into working with Jade and learning all you can from her about holistic health and business (process and outcome based)
  • Do more courses and reading to learn about minerals, birth control and the impacts on womens bodies (process based)
  • Practice more discipline, organisation and better time management between 2 jobs (qualitative)

Health:

  • Complete the Manx Mountain ½ Marathon in April and aim to beat time from 2018 (performance)
  • Cycle to and from work as much as possible (i.e. when the weather permits) (process based)
  • Continue progressing with CrossFit (there are specifics with this one including reaching certain weights with certain lifts to make them more measurable) (performance and process based)

There isn’t really any perfect way to set goals for the New Year, but this is what I have found that works best and makes the most sense to me so whatever you find that works for you and helps inspire you to be the person you want to be and lead the life you want to live seems pretty good!

Our challenge to you:

Write down 3 goals for yourself. Put them somewhere safe and don’t look again until next New Years. You’ll probably even forget what they are by then and it’s such a fun ritual to see which goals you nailed and which might be put back in for another year 😉

Don’t strive for perfection, just strive to be better than you were last year. Slow, steady improvements with consistency is what gets you to where you want to be — and if we can be of any help to you this year, please just reach out any time.

With love,

Ellie (& Jade)