Hello everyone! Welcome to BirthMay 2020! Today I wanted to formally wrap up my Year 28 goal and reflect on what I learned from it.

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In case you’re new, BirthMay is my annual birthday celebration where I blog every day for the month of May. This is the fourth annual BirthMay and no matter how many BirthMays you’ve been here for, thank you for your support!

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Every year I pick out a new goal, sort of like a New Year’s resolution, but for my birthday. My Year 28 goal was “balance” because, at the time, I felt it was something I was truly lacking in my life. I was wrapping up my grad school studies and really struggling with finding a good, well, balance to everything. I figured it was the perfect goal! Sure enough, it’s really helped me out a ton this year. I felt like I was in such a better place mentally than I had been in pervious years! Here’s a few things I did to try to reach that goal.

• Keeping a list of what I wanted to do. I like to think that I have many hobbies and ideas that I can work on at any given point in time, but having too many means that sometimes I neglect a few here and there. To combat this, I’ve started to keep a list of things and curating Pinterest boards of things such as writing ideas, bujo themes I want to try, and more. This really helps me remember what it is that I can work on and when I need feel I need something fun or creative to do I have a stead list of ideas so I can jump right in to fulfill that need. That leads nicely to my next point!
• Constantly reflecting and asking myself “what do I need right now?”. I felt like before I was just always in a “go go go” sort of mode. I was always moving and working towards that MBA that it was almost like I had blinders on to anything else that wasn’t studying. Since then I’ve learned to stop myself and ask myself what I felt was lacking and addressing it head on instead of ignoring it. Sometimes, what I needed was a lazy day watching Netflix in bed and so I’d just do that!
• Planning ahead. I like to plan as far in advance as possible. In the past year I had a few months where it felt like I had a ton of plans, followed by months where I wouldn’t have anything really going on. I felt that was a good way to balance everything out! Or on weekends what I’d do is that one day would be for going out and seeing a musical or just running a few errands while the other day would be for relaxing at home. Or back in January I made sure to rest up in the early weeks of that month because I was going to travel for work in Houston one weekend, followed by a week at home before flying out for a two week vacation in Mexico. Trying to plan ahead and make sure I had plenty of downtime while also having exciting events to look forward to was really helpful! Of course, the quarantine did mess up a ton of those plans but I just adjusted accordingly. Now I try to do a morning of creative work such as blogging or writing, followed by an afternoon of job hunting or other not-so-fun-but-still-must-get-done tasks such as changing appointments or cleaning, and then the evening off to relax and recharge for the next day by reading or doing yoga.

Honestly, I feel like this was one of the most important goals I’ve set for myself so far and I really hope that I can continue to practice at this and get even better. I’m really going to miss this as my “active” goal for the year but I think my Year 29 goal (more on that in a future post) is going to be an equally great goal!

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So that’s my reflection on my Year 28 goal! I can’t wait to share the Year 29 one and the rest of BirthMay with you!

Thanks for reading!

Pamela

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