The personal goals review post

Unfortunately I have been unable to keep my run of blog posts going as when I woke up yesterday I discovered I’ve got vertigo which makes typing just a little challenging (not just typing actually…). Not exactly the way I wanted to end my career break, but well, not a lot I could do to stop it so I guess it’s just a case of rolling with it (and boy does it make me feel like I’m rolling!). I’ve managed to find a strange semi supine position that enables me to see the screen without everything going haywire to write this, but it’s not doing much for my headache so this post may be a little shorter than I’d originally thought it would be! The post that I’d been planning for yesterday was my review of the goals that I’d set myself at the beginning of my career break, so I’ve decided to do that today instead and in a way it’s quite a good post for the last day. Assuming I am OK tomorrow, I’ll shift today’s planned post back a day and when you see it, in a way that will be a good fit too so I’m sure it will all turn out just fine in the end.

So, how do I think I did with my personal goals? Well, as with my post six months ago I think it’s a bit mixed but I do feel much clearer about things and so here’s my personal goals 12 month review.

I want to get my self-confidence back, fully back, so that I stop second-guessing myself all the time and start truly believing that I'm doing pretty damn well in life

When I returned from my trip I went to see some friends who asked me if I thought I’d achieved what I wanted to this year. I responded that I didn’t think I’d managed this one and I was so surprised by their response. They thought what I’d done this year was amazing and not necessarily something they could have done themselves. I of course disagreed with them; of course they could have done it, I think they were doing themselves down. And slowly since then I’ve realised I was doing to myself exactly what I was finding them guilty of. It’s actually quite incredible what I’ve done travelling in nine different countries by myself for eight months. I’m not sure I won’t do myself down at times, but there are times when I think ‘I don’t feel brave enough to do that’ and then I think to myself, you travelled on your own for eight months this year, of course you can do x, y or z. So is my confidence fully back, well I don’t know that for sure, but it’s soooo much better than it was!

I want to be proud of myself and my achievements, to stop comparing myself to others and always feel I come off worse

So this is one I do feel I’ve made massive progress on. If you read my last post, you’ll know that one of the quotes I found inspiring when I was away is ‘Comparison is the thief of happiness.’ This simple phrase articulates so well what comparison was doing to my life, it was stealing my happiness. As I mentioned in my last post that phrase really helped me to put things in context and helped me to stop (or at least minimise) comparison of my life and achievements with others and I’ve been so much happier since.

I want to become more spontaneous and stop planning the life out of everything

Well yes, this one again is something that seems to be going well. To the point that I sometimes think I could be a little frustrating at times for going too far in the opposite direction! I often leave it quite late to arrange things these days! But also it’s made me more willing to change my plans and be open to doing things differently to my original plans. Earlier this week I decided I had to do something today to mark the last day of my career break and so I planned a trip to Kew, treating myself to lunch there and then I had arranged to meet a friend for drinks this evening. And then the opportunity to meet another friend for lunch arose. It didn’t fit in with my plan and I know that in previous times I’d just have said we had to meet another day. Instead, I found myself thinking of how I could adjust the day to fit in a meet. And so we did, or at least we intended to until my inner ear stopped my head working out where it’s located and so we changed our plans again! It’s just a minor thing but I was really pleased that whilst my first thought was that lunch wasn’t possible, my second thought was how could I change things to make this happen? So I’m hopeful that a combination of an improved confidence and willing to be spontaneous means I’ll have a much more interesting life doing the unexpected and the unplanned.

I want to be someone who does things differently to the way society expects you to and really feel that that's OK.

So in thinking about this one I see it in two ways now. Firstly what is the way that society expects you to act; secondly, what do I see as society expectations to be and are they both the same? When travelling, you definitely live in a bubble and the people you meet generally have similar outlooks on life. However, all of them come to travelling in different ways and all with different life stories. On this trip I met a much wider age range of people than I did on my first trip and I really didn’t stick out like a sore thumb this time for being older or for having had the life that I have. I think that although I have had a very traditional progress through my career, even despite changing careers ten years ago and so I guess in that way I’ve met the standard expectations of career development that follows a ‘norm’. My life outside of my work though, whilst at times has done what people expect of me, it’s during those times I’ve often been the least happy. So I guess that when I put all of this together, what’s most important is the understanding that it really is OK to live my life my way, which may not be what is expected but providing I’m not hurting anyone, what is the ‘right’ way to live my life anyway? Surely it’s just the life that makes me happy. 

I want to learn to be silly again (I feel my list of challenges from Shalini, Kate, Amanda and Andrew will help with this - they know what they are and that's enough to be said about that!).

Well, those lovely people named here will get to the see the video evidence that I did meet most of their challenges! And they’re likely to be the only ones that will. But to be fair, I think really what I’d intended here is to just to learn to have fun again and I can say quite categorically that I achieved that!

This year has been such an amazing experience. I know I've said it before, but I've been so lucky to meet some amazing people, to see such beautiful places and to spend an extended period of really special time with my family. It's helped to give me a much more balanced perspective on life, to remember the things that are important to me, to determine the qualities I want to nurture in myself and know how I want to live my life in the future. I never expected I could have achieved so much.