Blog — Life of Cork

I actually have never really thought about actual New Year’s Day being the start of a new year. This is largely because my new year seems to start at the beginning of a new school year. New teacher planner, new school supplies, newly thought up lessons and units, new students, new classrooms, and the list goes on.

However, I have always liked the idea of a fresh start…a new beginning. I always liked the idea of a clean slate. For the past year and a half, I have been delving into some wonderful goal setting work. I have never started this work officially in January but this year, after about a four-month hiatus from goal setting, I would like to revisit my goals and rejuvenate my priorities for 2018.

Now for those of you who truly know me you will have heard me talk a lot about my dislike of resolutions and goal setting. Goal setting was always a pain in my backside growing up in the education system and I must admit I really don’t enjoy teaching strategies for goal setting with my students. I think to buy into goal setting you have to really want to make some changes. It has to come from you and no one else. When students are forced to set goals because it is a requirement, it loses its impact and effect. As I get older, I am now drinking the goal setting Kool-Aid. I have had an opportunity to see their benefits and I have a wonderful tool to share with you that might just help you out as well.

Through using Lara Casey’s Powersheets, an intentional goal planner, I have been able to make fairly significant changes in my life both personally and professionally. I think that I am like a lot of people. I always have aspirations of things that I want to do someday and it is the use of the word someday seems to be a problem. Because someday for me actually could mean never. A scary thought. This especially because true for me when I had Ephraim and all of a sudden, I had even less time to do some of the things I enjoy and aspire to do. The exhaustion of parenthood is real. Can I get an Amen to that? The time it takes to get even the smallest job done like clean a bathroom takes longer because Ephraim wants to “help” (although I love him dearly for his gentle, helping heart). As a result, I have really struggled to prioritize all the things since becoming a mom. This goal setting planner has helped me get to the heart of what really matters to me right now and how I can make small purposeful steps to make the things happen in my life that I have always wanted to do and achieve.

I have a quote of my bulletin board by my desk that is from Lara and the Cultivate What Matters team. Read this and see if it resonates with you…

“Little by little progress matters. Little by little a little becomes A LOT. It’s okay to grow SLOW. Good things grow over time.”

-Lara Casey

How powerful are those words? As we move into this new year, I would like to take some time during the month of January to share some ways that this awesome company of ladies has inspired me with their goal setting products, positive enthusiasm and fantastic message of grace, hope and love to help people develop goals that are intentional and life fulfilling. I hope that by sharing a bit about my goal setting journey I can encourage you to do the same for your life. Are you excited to learn more? As we all enter a new year, wouldn’t it be amazing to set some intentional goals without the need for perfection, without the tension of getting it done right now but slowly but surely moving forward towards your dreams.

So it is the second day after Christmas and I have to say as much as it was really hard to teach right up until the 22nd. I am loving this time to be at home with my family. Has anyone else experienced the joy of an actual hot cup of coffee recently? I have found that they have been few and far between ever since having my son but even more so since I have gone back to teaching full time.

Today I just took time to make a coffee. Dan bought coffee creamer for us to have over the holidays and I indulged in the most delicious hot coffee in my red mug under my tartan Indigo blanket and actually looked properly at our decorated Christmas tree.

This season of life is so busy and I am not just talking about the Christmas season but this season of life generally. There is so much to do and the to do list just never seems to end. There are always so many things that I should be doing but rarely are there things that I WANT to be doing. This morning, I did something that I WANTED to do and it was glorious. Living in the present is really hard for me. I don't usually do a lot of resolutions but this year if there is one thing that I want to remember is to live in the present moment. Notice the things around me, the beauty of nature, the laughter of my son, my handsome husband puttering around, and smells of home cooking (we got an Instapot...and we are so in love :-)).

I have so many things that I would like to share with you this year. I have been putting off getting this blog out there and maybe this will be my way of recording the good things, the things we should be present for. I don't want my life to pass me by...I am going to end with a fairly lengthy quote a friend shared with me today on social media. It is by Anne Lamott who I have only recently discovered. Wishing you a wonderful day of being present.

“(w)hat if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfection and people please that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, or imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen.
-Anne Lamott”

New Year...goal setting for those that hate it.

Living in the present...hot coffee anyone?