Blogger Challenge: Personal Goals

Oops, after doing well for a few days I fell off the blogging band wagon again. So here it is the end of another week and I almost did not get the SS Blog challenge done again. This is week 5. I still need to do weeks 3 and 4. I will get to them soon. I hope. So for this week from Pamela in MA:



As women we all spend time putting others first, worrying about them, taking care of their needs, scheduling their lives with little time left over for ourselves.

For this week's challenge: What is your most important personal goal for the year? What are you doing that is just for you? How are you trying to improve yourself?

Truthfully, I have a hard time thinking in terms of goals. I guess I always see it more as wants. Sometimes those wants have enough of a priority that they happy and other times well, they don't. So that is something I need to work on.

I often feel incompetent when someone asks me about my goals and I don't have an answer for them. This was the case with my now defunct CM business. My upline would ask me about my goals for my business and I would look at her blankly. My goal, if pressed, was to have a successful business. And she would ask, but how are you going to get there and I would give her another blank stare. Probably why eventually my business went nowhere.

Okay so those are my excuses but the reality is, it is a deeper seated problem. I lack self-confidence. If I set a goal, I will fail. That is the statement I hear in my head. Now someone is going to be asking the big question. Is she depressed? Is there a problem here? No I don't think I am. I find joy in many things. I just lack self-confidence. I talk myself out of good ideas. I posted in one of the other challenges about my dream of being a teacher. It is a great dream. It could even be a fabulous long-term goal but then the doubts come back. Could I handle other peoples' children day in and day out? Could I make it through school...again? Where would I find a job anyway? What about all the activities that my own children are already involved in? How would it all balance out? You see where this is going?

Oh and there is the fact that I am just not very good at holding a job. I am a homebody. I like the life I have currently.

But I have digressed a long way off the point of this particular challenge. Pamela wanted to know what my goals are for THIS YEAR. So I have thought about it. My goals, as I see them now are thus:

Improve my photography skills, through practice and online tutorials.
Do more scrapbooking, making a point to get 2008 photos printed and scrapped as we go. And make some progress on the backlog.
Learn more about the cool features of my photoshop elements program and designing papers and elements for digital scrapbooking.
Keep better control over my spending and the family budget so as to pay for our planned trip to Alaska this summer and start making some indentions in the mound of debt we have.
Lose weight and be more healthy by making weight watchers and the treadmill much more prominent in my life.

Okay, there they are. My goals. In black and white which means I actually have to do something about them. Check back with me in December.