2012 – No Goals, Just Future Successes

I don’t think there has been a single year of my adult life where I haven’t had some kind of New Year’s resolution. They are almost always a reflection of the things I didn’t accomplish in the previous year. It occurred to me recently, that starting out by setting expectations for the new year based on my perceived failures of the previous year, started me on a journey that was bound to fail. So this year, instead of spending too much time lamenting on what I didn’t do last year, I’ve decide to just plan the future successes of this year.

In order to not only set them but help me stay accountable for resisting laziness and actually seeing them into fruition, I’ve joined a couple of groups:

MomWriter Goals Group – a fantastic group of, I’m sure you’ve already guessed, Mom Writers. They opened up the group for new members and all I can say is that I am in awe of their goals for the year. I posted my measly four future successes and felt pretty proud of myself. Then I took a peek at what some of the other ladies had planned…holy cow, Batman! If I can sop up even a handful of the determination and organization that these other ladies seemingly exude from every pore, then I have no doubt I’ll see this book finished in no time. This group offered me a chance to set some future successes for the year, so here they are…in no particular order:

1. Finish this book. I’ve been puttering around long enough, if I can’t finish it this year, then I think I will have to retire it for a while and move onto something else.
2. When I finish that book, it will need several rounds of edits. If I can write it this year then I can edit it this year too.
3. Move my family to the East Coast, and get settled in (i.e. find a house I can love, a job I can tolerate, and schools that are the best I can provide for my children.
4. Create 10 downloadable business courses for the Military Spouse Business Association. I ran my own business for four years before deciding to close. I learned so many lessons the hard way, the hope is to share some of the lessons learned and some of the great social media experience I’ve had since then, to help other military spouses achieve their own future successes.

I have also decided to participate in Row80, another writing-based goals group that has broken up the year into four 80-day sessions, with a couple of days off here and there. Another layer of accountability, inspiration, and hopefully motivation to make this year the year I can say I am an author. I like this group because they require a blog post to be a part of the action and because I can take the bigger future successes for the year and break them up into four, nicely organized quarters. So, for the first 2012 round of Row80, here are my future successes, again in no particular order:

1. Write 8 chapters of my book. That’s ten days a chapter. No inner critic shouting at me to write it perfectly, no going back and rewriting the previous chapters, only forward movement, and a fast clip at that.
2. Row 50 miles. My weight and I have been battling each other since I got out of the Army and had three babies pretty much back to back. I’m done hating the way I look, I’m done dreading shopping. Hubby bought me a fancy-schmancy rowing machine for Christmas. It tracks cumulative distance rowed, so the goal is to row 50 miles between now and the end of this first 80 session.
3. Give feedback to every post in my dedicated review group over at Writer’s Village University. These are like my writing besties and I have been neglecting them as of late. I never feel more inspired to write my own book, then when I read their own creative installments.

There…I’ve committed it all to print, my future successes for 2012. What about you? What are your future successes for this year?