**VISIT EVERY CONTINENT (MINUS ANTARCTICA) BEFORE I AM 30 YEARS OLD**
This endeavor wasn't a complete failure, I guess. I did make it to 4 of the 6 I aspired to visit:
- North America (have lived here my entire life and have also been to Canada twice and Mexico once)
- Europe (on 3 separate occasions)
- Africa (on 2 separate occasions)
- Asia (on 1 occasion)
At first I felt a pang of sadness when I realized I did not meet this goal, but that was short lived and I realized that:
1. I can extend my time frame and that I still have a whole lifetime to make it to the last 2 continents on my list.
2. I have been to quite a few places already and cannot discount the travels I have already accomplished. AND
3. I'm not so sure making it to every continent is on the top of my list of importance any longer. I used to be obsessed with travel, and don't get me wrong, it still intrigues me, but I feel more grounded now that I am married and have a baby. It has made me re-prioritize my goals (money is also a huge issue with this).
I only share this to illustrate that our goals should always be fluid. Never carve them in stone because it is okay to change them. As we grow and enter different times in our lives our priorities shift and that is OKAY! Don't beat yourself up for unaccomplished goals, look at them and change them in to new and improved goals!
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| Everyone should have a Bucket List |
I started a new book by Peter Walsh. He wrote, "It's All Too Much", which I mentioned in a previous posting. Reading that book was life changing. It motivated me to start cleaning the clutter out of my house and organizing room by room as well as letting go of materials items in a way I have never been able to before. I thought I would try out other books he had written. I picked up Enough Already! from the library and started reading it about a week ago. This book focuses on emotional clutter. At first all it was talking about was relationships and to be honest I was quite bored with the book. Last night, however, it took an amazing turn and went into WORK!
From what I read last night I came to realize that I have a very cluttered vision when it comes to work. I have a big idea of what I would like to achieve and where I would like to be in my life. I know that this is not it, but I don't know how to get from HERE to THERE, and furthermore I'm not so sure I know where THERE exactly is. I know I am not happy in my job and that I would like to begin a career (preferably in social work), but I feel incredibly stuck. In being incredibly honest with myself I have come to realize that FEAR plays a large part in my being stuck. I am unsure if I can be successful or if I can even have a career. Even though I do not like what I do and to me it is just a job that pays the bills, there is a comfort in knowing that every day I come to work that it is very clear cut and easy. It's quite mundane and very repetitive, but I know what I am doing. I feel very comfortable doing it and I know I'm good at it. That is absolutely no reason to stay in a job! True there are other jobs I could be doing, but to be honest my job pays well for what I am doing and there are amazing health insurance benefits that come with the position that I am just not ready to walk away from, particularly since my husband and I plan to have another baby in a few years.
I search for opportunities all of the time, but I feel I do it half heatedly. I find something that sounds interesting, but I always look for a reason why it wouldn't work or why they wouldn't hire me and I convince myself not to apply or I apply knowing in the back of my mind that I will not get it. These are mind sets I have developed for myself over the years and I have come to realize that I will never get anywhere in life with these mindsets. I am being proactive half heatedly. I need to do it full on! I need to apply for a position with the attitude that I've already been given the position. I need to interview as if I've been working in the field for 20 years already. THIS IS WHAT PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR! CONFIDENCE IS THE KEY!~
So, I am unveiling my next goal - Confidence and attitude change in my career search process. That's a pretty broad goal, so I will have to fine tune it along the way.
I took a seminar class at work last week. It was on stress. I did not find any of the information helpful and was pretty bored during the entire class, however, I gained one very important thing from it. They gave handouts at the end and amongst the papers there was a little chart that said:
Monday - Gratitude
Tuesday - Compassion
Wednesday - Acceptance
Thursday - Higher Meaning
Friday - Forgiveness
Saturday - Celebration
Sunday - Reflection / Prayer
I cut this little chart out and slipped it into my wallet. I look at it every day now and try to work on the concept for that given day. IT IS HARD!
Last night nature called and I had to get up around 3:30am to go to the bathroom. For some reason I startled my husband and I quickly told him to be quiet so he wouldn't wake up the baby. Not even a second later I bashed my knee into a fan sitting on the floor and it flew over and crashed into wall. And guess who woke up? I was so angry as I made my way to the bathroom with a throbbing knee. Not mad at the baby, but mad at myself. All I wanted was to go to the bathroom and crawl back into my delightful bed and go back to sleep, but in the process I had to be loud and wake up the baby. I tried to calm myself down as I thought about the list in my wallet. I was able to calculate that it was early Thursday morning, but the only word on the list that I could remember was GRATITUDE. I knew that wasn't Thursday's word, but since it was 3:30am and because I could hear my child screaming in her crib from the other room, I just went with it. I tried to think of how I could find gratitude in this situation. Here's what I came up with (I thought it was pretty good myself). In that moment it came into my head to feel grateful that my child was able to HEAR that loud crash that I made and wake up to the sound. I don't know of many people who would think of that example, but that is what I came up with. You see my nephew (born the same day as my daughter) was born completely deaf. I always have thought - that so easily could have been our little girl. It has made me grateful ever since for her ability to hear, something most people just take for granted. My nephew has since received cochlear implants and now IS able to hear! I mention this story just to point out that there are always, always things you can be grateful for even in the worst of situations.
Now to mention a little on the things I have been accomplishing. I found a really cool website for tracking my spending Spending Profile. I individualized it to my needs and have been tracking all of my spending for this month so far (I know it's only the 6th). I don't think that the website is set up in a way that you are meant to individually list each item that you purchase, however, I wanted to even more specifically know exactly where my money is going - so each day I review what I have spent money on that day and I individually track each item, where I got it and how much it cost. Once I have tracked the items both in my checkbook register and online on the website I can throw the receipt away (more on this later...I have a huge issue with saving receipts for EVERYTHING). It is working great for me so far and I'm excited to see the end product at the end of the month. I was most excited because even though it gives you categories it has already created, it also allows you to make your own categories so I can really individualize it to my spending!
I have sold more textbooks. I used a different website this time Sell Back Your Book. I sold 4 books back this time for a total of $119.52.
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| 4 books I sold today |
So I have sold back 9 textbooks now:
So I have sold back 9 textbooks now:
- 5 to Amazon for credit on their site for $191.22 and
- 4 to Sell Back Your Book for $119.52 cash
Now selling my books has not been something that has been easy for me. Just last night I had to re-evaluate the reason that I am doing this. I was worried that I was doing this out of anger. I do feel a lot of anger that I worked so hard in my grad school program and finished my degree but yet have been unable to work in the field. I tried to think of the reasons I was saving the books in the first place. I saved them as a resource that I may use one day. I have not touched my books since I last used them in school. It has been over 2 years for some of them, longer for others. Already new editions of those texts have come out. My point was illustrated further when I tried to sell some of my undergrad books online recently. I could not sell them, no one will buy them because they are obsolete now. I thought to myself, do I want to sit on these grad school textbooks for years and then go to try and sell them and get nothing for any of them. NO I DO NOT! So far I have gained $310.74 and that's not even 1/3 of my textbooks yet. Sure, that's nothing compared to what I bought them for, but it's SOMETHING and something is better than nothing! I figure, textbooks are always going to be around. If in the future I work in a job that I need to re-learn something specific I can go out and find another book on the subject and purchase it! Or simply research the topic on the Internet. It does not need to be the exact book that I used for my class and furthermore, by the time I need the information I'm sure they will have new and improved information that maybe hasn't even been published yet for me to read up on! With that said I am keeping a very select few books for reference, but the rest have got to go. I just don't have the room to store books that I may use one day.
Are there things that you hold on to that you think you may use one day? What are those things? Why are they hard for you to let go? Remember to live in the present! Don't save everything from your past simply for the reason that it is from your past and don't save everything for the future simply because you might use it one day! Live in the NOW and keep the things that you use NOW!
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