I recently got into gratitude journaling a couple months ago. It’s easy and fun and also rewarding. Some of the prompts are quite unique that I would never have thought of. One of the prompts today was: Express gratitude for the time you achieved a goal with your willingness and effort. That one was easy for me to answer. Back in January, with my cousin’s encouragement, I had set a goal to write at least one blog post per week. I also set a couple other goals for yoga and calling my friends. The one that I stuck to most diligently though was the blogging. And I have to be so proud of myself for that. At times it wasn’t easy sticking to it. It would already be Thursday and I still hasn’t written anything. Or it would be a Monday and I would have no idea what to write about. Or it would be a Tuesday and I would be sat down ready to write an astrology article with all my research out but not wanting to do it. I definitely struggled. Yet somehow every week I managed to do it and I don’t think I have missed a post for a couple months now. Or maybe just missed one. The reason I kept going wasn’t because I was super inspired all the time, or solely because I was excited ( I mean I was excited sometimes).
Most of the time, the reason I sat down and did it and completed it was because I wanted so badly to stick to my goal. I wanted to persistent with it. It took effort and hard work. I wanted to feel the accomplishment of doing the posts every week. I wanted to have integrity in setting out what I wanted to do. Of course at times I felt inspired, and really awestruck, or really interested. But most of the time my fuel was going back to the intention of sticking to it. That feeling of sticking to something strengthens your trust in yourself and builds confidence. That’s really the whole reason I was doing it. I love writing, that’s part of it, but really I just wanted to stick to something consistently and feel good about it.
And that feeling of accomplishment is fueling me to do even more creation, to set more goals. Because now that I now I can work on something consistently, I can add more hobbies to that and hopefully stick to those too. I’m just going to slowly add things, not all at once. And they are going to be fairly easy to achieve. When setting goals it’s important to make them moderately easy to achieve so that you can stay consistent with them. Creating just feels so good to me so it’s something that is in my values to do. This is why it feels like such a big accomplishment for me, because these hobbies align with my values.
I think it’s so important to set goals, put in the work to achieve them, and then be able to pat yourself on the back for actually following through. When we set goals, they need to be something we trust ourselves to do, something that is important but also fun so we end up doing it. It needs to give us some form of excitement so we keep going back to it, but we also need to know that it’s not going to be a walk in the park and sometimes we just need pure grit to get it done.
Gimme some honey 