Dear Diary,

It seems like we are always trying to improve something in our lives. If you are single you want to be married, if you have credit card balances you want to be debt free, and if you are overweight you want to be skinny.  The changes that you may want to make in your life can be as simple as wanting a new hair colour. Or it is very possible that you may want to improve more complex aspects of your lives such as always trying to earn more money and wanting to advance in our career. But if you are like me you are always trying to be happy, become a better person, and achieve your personal goals.

But what happens when you finally have it all?

I am definitely working towards achieving my personal goals and trying to have a more positive attitude every day, but I am a little bit nervous about what may happen when all of my dreams come true.  I have always been working towards improving some aspect of my life and I honestly do know what I will do with my life if I am no longer working towards achieving my goals because all of my dreams have already come true? And the thing that scares me the most is what if all of my dreams come true and I am still unhappy?

There is a difference between making mistakes and working towards goals.  If you have a job that you don’t like your goal may be to search for a new job or go back to school, but working towards the goal of getting a new (or better) job is completely different than having no job at all.  Self improvement and learning from our past mistakes sometimes go hand in hand, but they are actually two completely different things.  Are you currently working towards a personal goal or are you trying to improve yourself by learning from your mistakes? If your life is a little bit uncertain right now we have to get back on a clear path before we can start improving certain aspects of our life.

Another thing that worries me about achieving my goals and “having it all” is the fact that the last two people in my life who got their lives back on the right track both passed away.  My Step Brother overcame some personal demons to find true love and my best friend Kevin finally found a career that he cared enough about to become a mature young man.

Maybe life is a journey towards finding our personal happiness. This brings up the old age question of whether it’s better to die young in our prime or live to be older and watch our past life pass us by.  Some of us may live our entire lives never truly knowing how true personal happiness feels, and some of us may take comfort in knowing that we have passed away (maybe at a young age) having achieved all of our personal goals.

Does this sound completely irrational?

Love Always,

Dear Diary,

My relationship with with my family is reasonably stable for the moment and now the one main thing that is stressing me out is my weight. I know that it’s so cliché for young women to be self conscious about their body image, but unfortunately I am not the exception to this rule.

For the millionth time in my life I am going to try and lose weight.  I am going to try and lose 1.5 pounds per week over the next 10 weeks for a total of a 15 pound weight loss by September 1^st.   In the past I have tried losing weight by temporarily committing to various diets, counting my daily calorie intake, and even making a Twitter Promise with my virtual friends to exercise on a daily basis. I have also tried to lose weight with short term two week goals, but so far nothing has really worked out over the long term.  Lately it seems like I am always talking about losing weight, but not really doing anything about it.

I believe that the reason I have been so unsuccessful at weight loss in the past is that I start to slack off every time that I achieve some success.  I decide to eat healthy and then before I know it I am indulging in chocolate ice cream; it’s safe to say that my personal will power is very weak. The schedules of exercising and the stress of watching what foods we eat is a lot of pressure and it’s not very much fun. No one wants to feel burdened with extra pressure in their lives (or at least I don’t) and if exercising isn’t fun I won’t stick to it and I won’t lose weight.

They key to successful weight loss is to do it on my own terms. The pressure of having to eat the right foods and having to exercise on certain days at certain times is not fun. I am going to lose weight how I want to and not how I should, because being told what to do and how to do it is definitely not fun.

I am going to think twice about all of the foods that I eat and hopefully I will make smart and healthy food choices.  I am going to exercise at least three times a week, and I hope that losing weight will be enough motivation for me to want to exercise.  When I exercise regularly my skin looks better and I feel a lot happier, I am going to try and keep this in mind whenever I am unmotivated to get moving.

I know that I have picked a hell of a time to start working out considering the current hot and humid weather, so wish me luck as I try to lose weight from now until September 1^st.

Love Always,

What are you wishing for?

Dear Diary,

Have you ever woke up in the morning and thought to yourself…”What am I working for?”  If you are not (yet) exactly in the place in your life where you thought that you would be at your age you may be contemplating some (or all) of your past life choices and the impact that they have made on your life. The decisions that we have made in our lives have brought us to this point and they have made us into the person that we have become. If you are not (yet) completely happy with all aspects of your life then you may be wondering how your life would presently be if you had made different choices in the past.  Dwelling on our mistakes is not what helps us make changes in our lives, it’s learning from our mistakes that help us become the person that we want to be.

Have you ever sat down over a hot cup of tea and wondered… “Where is my life going?”  I am a thirty something (a young thirty something) year old girl who is at a point in her life when she is wondering WTF happened to my life.  I am definitely not where I thought that I would be at 31 years old.  The problem with that statement is that I actually have no idea where I want to be, but I do know that it’s not here…or is it?

Have you ever been talking with your friends and asked… “What the hell am I doing wrong?” We are raised to believe that we should fall in love, get married, and have children.  While growing up we are told that we will live happily ever after if we get an education, get a successful job, and make a lot of money.  So what happens when we wake up at 31 years old and we don’t have a husband or kids? And what happens when we graduate from university, are successful at our 9- 5 job, can afford the things that we want, but we are still not happy?

Whenever we are unhappy (or we think that we are unhappy) with certain aspects of our life what we need to do is make a list of where we are, where we want to be, and the changes that we have to make in our life in order to achieve our personal goals. Not so long ago I published my list of things that I really want.

Here is my current career priority and how I am going to achieve it:

Career

Goal: I want to be an author; I am also considering a career change to explore the world of publishing and editing since I love books.

How I am going to do it: I am going to search for a literary agent to get my young adult fiction trilogy as well as my series of “how to” personal finance books published and on bookshelves ASAP. Since I don’t exactly know how to go about this I am going to apply to university and go back to school to get a Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing with a minor in Professional Writing. This will help me sell myself to book agents and market myself online to potential employers.  I am also considering becoming a literary agent working specifically in the personal finance domain.

Love Always,

Photo by b4bees

Dear Diary,

There are so many things that I want to do in my life and so many goals that I want to achieve. I am 31 years old (I will be 32 in October) and I always talk about my dreams but I never really do anything about them.  I always talk about how I want to get my book(s) published but I am not actively working on them.  I say that I want to live in New York City but I have not even looked into the immigration process yet.  I definitely talk a good game about achieving my dreams but so far I have been sitting on the sidelines.  I decided that it’s time to get off the bench and start playing an active role in making my personal dreams come true.

I don’t want to be 60 or 70 years old and still dreaming about my personal goals. At 70 years old I would much rather look back on my life and talk about all of the things that I did, both the accomplishments as well as the mistakes.  I do not want to be near the end of my life and regret never trying to achieve my dreams.  I personally feel that it is best to try and fail then never try and regret.

The key to achieving success is to have a detailed plan that outlines our goals as well as how we plan to achieve them, or at least work towards them. It is easier to achieve a goal if we have a detailed path to get there, it is also easier to track the progress of little steps as oppose to working chaotically towards one big broad goal.  If along the way we decide that one of our goals is no longer our dream then we can move on to another dream.  Even if we don’t achieve our dream at least we can say that we tried.

Here is My 5 Year Plan

Within One Year – By the end of 2013 (at the latest) I hope to be completely debt free.  I am already well on my way.  I have a debt free deadline to have one credit card paid off every six months.

Within Two Years – By the end of 2014 I would like to have a book agent and at least 1 completed book in the Forget Him and Find Another Trilogy on the shelves of bookstores.  I hope to be working on my second book titled Kevin Michael as well as the third book called Love Always.

Within Three Years – By the end of 2015 I hope to be living at least 6 months of the year in New York City.  I also hope to travel to Europe once a year.  On my places to visit are Portugal, Italy, and Greece.

Within Four Years – By the end of 2016 I want to create and implement an introduction to personal finance and money management course into high school curriculums.  Young people need to learn about how to earn, save, invest, and manage their money.

Within Five Years – I would also love to write a series of “how to” financial books for teens under 20 years old, adults in their 20s and 30s, as well as older adults in their 40s and 50s who are getting ready to retire.

Love Always.

Photo by frankjuarez