My Quests for 2022

I have found that I am great at writing personal and professional goals for myself. They are spectacular, perfect in their composition, and very clear to all who read them. 

...and, that's as far as they go. 

Once I have written them, I lose interest, never flip back to that page, and then feel like a failure when I have not done what I wanted to do earlier.

So, I have decided that I am not making goals for this upcoming year. I am setting quests for myself!

My word of the year is "Explore," and I have come up with five areas of exploration for this year - places, health, ideas, identity, and connection. As you can see in this bullet journal spread, I have a small piece of paper for each area with some ideas of how to complete these quests. I am not setting endings for any of these because I don't know where I will be at any time. These are just the things that I want to think about during the year of 2022. Rather than shaming myself when I do not get to my end goals, I will record what I do each month and week to work on these areas - to explore these areas.

Some of the quests are tangible. For example, one of the items on the places sheet of paper is passport. I need to renew my passport. That kind of quest can be crossed off the list once it is completed, but many of the others are less concrete. The entire identity sheet of paper is less practical and more existential, but it is an area where I feel I need to do more exploration to be able to understand the perspectives of others. So, it is my quest - to seek more and different understanding through exploring what identity means to others.

On my monthly calendars, I am going to be a bit more specific about things to do to complete my quests. This one says "tasks," but that will change in February to say "quests." These are a bit more objectified - I can cross these tasks off when I have finished them which satisfies my therapist heart a bit - documentation is important, right? 

I selected one thing from each of my five quests - update passport; read a book about identity; take a skillshare course; exercise 3X/week; and get my webinars going for the month of January. These are all things that I want to do, and I can record them in my bullet journal as I finish things up. The quest part of all of this is to continue to explore things as I go through the next 365 days. My quests are less structured, and my monthly explorations may not have as much structure as this month does just because this is the first month that I am doing this thing. 

The last piece in all of this is my monthly spread.

I have a place in each week where I will record my weekly quest work. These will go back towards the monthly quests which relate to the big quests. If all else fails, I will be starting a new journal in June, so I can update things at that point to see if this idea is a good one for me or not.

I am ready to start my quests.

I think I will start this new year off by doing a bit of exercise in the morning - we may be snowed in for a bit, so getting on the exercise bike would be a good thing for me. I also want to find my books about identity that are packed with my bedroom stuff which are probably stacked in the piles in the guest bedroom. If I can find one, then I can get started with my reading goal. If not, then I will examine free books on Kindle to see what I can find. I may even have some digital credits that I can use to buy something. The passport thing is easy to do, I just have to get pictures and the application done. The SkillShare class is also easy to do - I just have to find one to go through.

All of these quests have nothing to do with my current focus - unpacking and organizing things so I can use them in my new house. That has to happen as well. For now, though, I am going to spend some time sitting in my new chair (put it together myself yesterday morning), watching Star Wars cartoons, and doing some TME development and composition. That reminds me...where is my keyboard?

I'm curious - how do you work on your own development? Does anyone else struggle with working on goals? Is this just a strange Mary Jane thing? I have a suspicion that it is just a strange Mary Jane thing...

Happy End of 2021!