What do you want?
To travel? Learn a new skill? Accomplish a goal? Have a new experience? Add a certain regular quality to your life?
It’s important to know what you want. Sometimes as moms of young children we can become so engrossed in daily life and the process of raising small children that we let go of hobbies and stop thinking as much about our dreams and long term planning. While this can be appropriate to some extent for the season — it’s important to adjust your expectations to be realistic and let go of activities that aren’t conducive to life anymore — it’s also really important to keep some goals and dreams both alive and in front of you. We need this as moms so that we don’t stagnate and so that we can keep pressing toward the future for our families and looking for small ways to build toward the next season of life.
I really like Laura Vanderkam’s idea to write a list of 100 Dreams. Find a small chunk of time and stop and think about things you want and make a list. Thinking of 100 things is tricky but that is the point. It gets you past the easy big things and into smaller things, and a variety. It will make you think about things you love that you haven’t thought about in awhile. I hope it makes you smile! Include big ideas and smaller ideas. Anything that you would like to do/see/have/experience in your life someday.
To get started, you can read her post of her 100 Dreams List in 2015 , and a recent post on 100 Dreams progress to get some ideas from her post and from the comments on it. She also talks about this exercise in her book 168 Hours.
I thought her categories were useful: Travel goals, Personal goals, Professional goals, Family goals, Misc. I added Lifestyle goals for thinks like getting a house cleaner, and Learning goals because I love to learn new things!
Exercise: Make your own list, use categories or not, it’s up to you, but whatever you do make yourself go all the way to 100. It will make you add smaller and bigger items and ones you didn’t easily think of right away. Then come back and comment below! I’d love to hear how you liked making the list, what surprised you, and which ones you think you might work toward first.
I wrote mine a few months ago. I need to pull it out and organize it into categories like she did, and pick a few to work toward.
A few of mine are:
Travel Goals
Visit Yellowstone National Park
Visit Maine
Visit California
Drive across the country
Personal Goals
Experience skydiving (done! did iFly indoor, that’s enough excitement for me!)
Go backpacking and camp for a week (hopefully this year)
Go to a Washington Nationals game
Bike on the beach (done!)
Paying off credit card debt (hopefully this year)
Paying off student loans
Lose the baby weight (goal for this year)
Professional Goals
Start a blog (done!)
Visit a blog conference
Write a book
Co-author a book with a friend
Start a podcast
Speak at a mops mtg
Meet some of my favorite authors
Meet some of my blog readers
Lifestyle Goals
Hire a house cleaner for a season
Get a dog – a golden retriever
Have a successful vegetable garden