Resisting the Urge to Make Goals for Myself

It is the Saturday before school starts for me, and I usually spend some time putting together some goals for the new school year. I am trying NOT to do that this year as, I mean, this year has not really been all that conducive to making plans and following through with said plans! Since most of what I wanted to do during the 2010-2020 school year was thwarted by viruses and things changing so rapidly over the past five months - several times with limited to no notice - I have decided not to make any formal goals for this upcoming school year.

Now for the difficult part of all of this.

I am not someone who can easily give up on my goals for myself. I want to be the type of person who is continually learning, growing, and pursuing "better." I enjoy dreaming about the future and what I might be able to accomplish, but I am not always as interested in reaching those goals as I am in writing them. I've found that with my business dreams and attitudes. I am not all that interested in doing the business stuff, but I still want to offer things to other people. I'm trying my best to figure out what all this means to me as a therapist and as a human.

Since I am not going to make any active goals for this school year, I am going to take some time to review the goals that I established at the beginning of 2020 - ah, naive little MJ, sitting down at her bullet journal and writing goals for the upcoming year little knowing that all of her goals would be brought down by the introduction of a novel virus that would sweep across the world. I seriously felt that this was a sign from the universe that I should NOT be focusing my energies on what I wanted for myself, but then I gave myself a reality check and realized that this was not personal AT ALL!

At the beginning of 2020, I wanted to focus on several things. I chose the word "evolve" as my focus word. I have chosen a focus word for the past two years, and I find that this one word can help me make decisions about what to do in various situations. "Evolve" encompassed all the other words that I considered for my "word of the year," so it seemed like a good focus for me.

I decided that I would work on adapting things I cannot control while changing things that I could control in my life. I wanted to work on a retirement plan (yep, I'm thinking about that - it's not for a time yet, but I want to make sure that I can retire when and where I want to when it comes time. I also want to experiment with different things this year. One of my major goals was to step out of my comfortable rut and try new things. I wanted to be an exhibitor at a music therapy conference. That did not happen, but I am starting to share what I make with other people in other ways. I wanted to get back into reading as part of my regular routine - it is something that I love, but I had moved away from reading things for fun. I am back to doing that - reading on my Kindle as well as physically real books. I have set a goal of 150 books this year - I have finished 120 as of right now. Only 30 books to go for the next five months. I think I will finish that up with more. I got back into offering webinars for music therapy students and interns, and I have also made more Teachers Pay Teachers files for my shop. In the past week, I shared with my friends that I make books out of paper and cardboard and the like, and they want to buy them! That intimidates me something fierce, but it also invigorates me.

It's funny, but not sitting down and making goals for myself is helping me to realize that I have actually done quite a bit this year, even through the changes and instability that COVID-19 has wrought. Yay!! 

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