While I don’t make New Year’s resolutions, I still started a tradition of setting goals a few years ago and I’ve been pretty good at sticking with them. Next week I’ll take a look at how I did with keeping my goals from last year. For now, here are some of my goals for 2021. What are some of your goals for next year?
- Finish my first book. I have several books that I plan to write and I’ve gotten a good start on the first one. While it’s primarily about communication, it also contains several other related subjects such as mindfulness, emotional work, and healing the world. It’s based on things I’ve learned from reading and listening to great communicators, figured out for myself, and learned through the many interactions I’ve had with countless people in every area of my life. I hope to have it finished by the end of 2021. Once I’m done writing it, then I’ll work on getting it published. I’m excited for this and can’t wait to see where it leads.
- Do even more emotional healing. This year forced me to work through a lot of stuff and I made huge amounts of progress. I’ve got much more to work through and I plan to continue doing so every day in 2021. Since I improved my life so much with five and a half months of consistent practice, I’m excited to see where I’ll be after doing this for a whole year. I’m confident I’ll keep this up since I now know both how to go about this and the benefits of doing it consistently.
- Spend more time with my friends. When it comes to socializing, I’ve done less of that this year than I have in almost a decade. Digital interactions and phone calls do help but they’re no substitute for in-person interactions. The interactions I have had this year have mostly been wonderful and I’m so grateful for them. I’m hoping to have many more of them next year, especially with some of my closest friends whom I hardly ever get to see.
- Read more consistently. I try to read a chapter of a book each day. This year, I was extremely hit or miss with that. Sometimes I went a week or more at a time without doing much reading and other times I read several chapters from multiple books in one day. Even though some of my books had extremely long chapters (over one hundred pages in some cases), mostly it was poor time management or emotional distress that kept me from reading as much as I wanted. So next year, I want to stick to reading at least one chapter a day (more if I like). I’ve gotten better at managing my time and reading throughout the day so I’m confident I can make this happen.