Happy New Year!
Happy New Year! I hope you all have been enjoying fun times with loved ones and getting some rest before the new year. As I sit down with my planners and get ready for this new month and year, I want to take a minute to reflect on how I kicked 2015's ass and how I plan to stay consistent in 2016. As I am sure you can guess from the image above, I have FINALLY chosen my word for 2016: Consistency.
In 2015, I decided to choose a single word around which I centered my goals: Simplify. I was originally inspired in 2014 during my qualifying exams to simplify my life because I felt SO overwhelmed by the task at hand coupled with the amount of STUFF that seemed to be closing in on me. I suppose then it was more of a 2014-2015 goal because it has been a long road to simplification. I would not go so far as to say it has been a journey into minimalism but I have borrowed heavily from those practices. I wanted to clear out the physical clutter which, I have always believed, is a manifestation of mental and emotional clutter. After reading The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up (found on Amazon) in 2015, I was able to take the purging to the next level and even reduced a major component of my shopping impulses. Was it also a way to productively procrastinate during breaks from my exam? Probably! Did I significantly reduce the amount of unnecessary items from my home and life? Yes! I purged so many clothing items, office supplies, beauty products, toxic relationships, and knickknacks I had acquired over the years and it truly was a life changing and magical process! Not to mention it shifted my mindset and contributed to other 2015 wins: returned from medical leave with a clean bill of health, spent an entire calendar year hospital free, travelled internationally, empowered myself by helping others reach their goals, planned a new research trajectory, and survived my first semester back on my PhD grind.
I am SO excited to kick off this year on a positive and energized note. After making so much progress this past year, I want to make sure I keep riding this momentum by practicing consistency in all areas of my life. I want to be more consistent in managing my health, research projects, finances, relationships with loved ones and God, and more! I am a little nervous as I type this because now it's real and out there on the Internet forcing a new level of accountability. PHEW! In the spirit of holding myself accountable, I plan to use my next few posts in January to discuss my goals in more detail and discuss some of the tools I plan to use to achieve them (spoiler alert: planners, apps, and color coding are involved). What are your goals for 2016? If you also choose a word a year let me know in the comments below!