How-to: Finding Time For Me; creating realistic goals.

Creating goals for yourself can be difficult. Especially when you don’t really have a sense of where or when to start. Fitting in a hobby, meal preps, and workouts in between work, life, and a busy schedule can start to feel more like a task or burden than something you’re doing for yourself. Creating goals and creating a plan can sometimes feel like two different things. Especially when we feel like we don’t always have full control of our path in this life.

It’s easy. It’s easy to say I can’t because I’m busy. I would love to read more but I get home too late, I would love to change the way I eat but I’m too lazy. Choosing not to is easier than choosing to do something that might benefit you, your health, and your soul. I know, because I am infamous for saying I would like to read more or I would like to take more time to do the things I enjoy, and then instead I get so caught up in my schedule I never commit to those things I so badly want to do.

So one day I decided to start with mapping out my goals. Mapping out my goals has been one key way to keep me focused. It’s like creating a game plan for the person you want to be, or for the things you want to do. I like to do so on a schedule or any type of tangible visual because it gives me the opportunity to cross out, edit, and add as I need to. The one thing I learned is that it’s best to be flexible with your path, because as much as we can try to plan, we don’t always get it right. Giving ourselves the room to edit is visually and metaphorically allowing life to still happen. Life should not get in the way of our goals, and our goals should not get in the way of life.

I am not someone who has goals such as “Run a 4k” or “Learn how to make pasta” because I have always felt that, like New Year’s Resolutions, it was setting myself up for something that I had not really seen myself committing to. So, I would give myself a time frame and a practical plan. Be it how many books I would like to read and how many pages I would have to read and when. Or creating a realistic workout plan that has nothing to do with weight or minutes a day, but with focus areas and workouts I would like to try. When setting realistic goals for myself I begin to create maps and opportunities for growth, things that I would like to accomplish begin to have clear layouts.

Another misconception many people have is that you need to start at the beginning of a month or year in order to get to where you want to be. If you want to do something just do it, start, it does not matter the day or the year. Clearly laying out how you will get where you need to go will negate needing to start on the first of the next month or at the beginning of the next week. And lastly, don’t be afraid to mess up or to take time. If you have a goal to work out and it takes you longer than the next person to get to your goal weight, or if you want to read a new book and you can’t read more than a certain amount of pages in a day, take longer! That’s okay too. We have this idea of time and that time will make us lose sight of our goals. In reality, we are the reason we lose sight. We are the reason we stop or give up.

Finding time for you is not always easy, it’s not without challenge, or even discourage. But finding time for you should be the most important thing because it gives you the chance to renew, replenish, and refocus.