Welcome to my monthly post where I share an update on how I’m doing on my goals for 2017. I hope that this post inspires you in your own goal-setting journey!
It’s time for another goal update for 2017! March was kind of an off month for me because my assistant was offline for two weeks and then, the day after she came back, Jesse left for 13 days! So I’m posting this late, as a result.
We knew it was going to be a full and somewhat overwhelming 4-week period, so I gave myself permission to just make it through, take care of the essentials, and try to not neglect my health in the process.
And I MADE IT! I didn’t get a whole lot accomplished other than the essentials, but I learned a lot and grew a lot from the last 4 weeks, so I’m celebrating that… and hoping that I can get back on the bandwagon with my goals this month!
I’ll be sharing a recap of each of my goals + an update on how I’m doing on each of them below. (If there’s no update listed, I have no update to report. Hopefully I’ll have an update next month!)
Personal Goals
1. Run 3 miles in 30 minutes — I took up running again this year — as part of my fitness plan that my nutritionist put together for me. I've never been skilled in the running department, but I've started to really enjoy it and am wanting to push myself here and be able to easily run 3 miles in 30 minutes.
April 11th update: I’m on a more intentional running regimen — varying between easy runs, long runs, progressive runs, and HIIT workouts + intentional warm-up and cool down. My nutritionist is a runner so he is putting together a run training schedule for me each week!
This month, I’m averaging about 2.4 miles in 30 minutes — the same as last month. With everything going on in March (see beginning of this post), I decided to just maintain where I was at instead of trying to beat my times from last month.
(I could push myself and do more, but my nutritionist is encouraging me to not push myself too hard, too fast and instead to slowly build up my endurance. So I’m trying to take my time and not get impatient. Because I know that slow and steady wins the race!)
2. Make it to Phase 4 of the nutrition plan — I’m currently working through a 4-phase custom nutritional plan with my nutritionist. I start in Phase 1 back at the end of August 2016. He thinks that at the rate I'm going and progressing, I'll be able to start Phase 4 by mid-2017! And I guess that when I hit Phase 4, I'll feel absolutely and utterly amazing!
April 11th update: I started Phase 3 in February! This means I get to introduce back in quite a bit more foods and have more wiggle room as far as what I can and can’t eat. Plus, it means that I’ll be eating even more — which is crazy because I feel like I eat so much right now. 🙂
I love how my tastes have changed so much in the last few months. I crave healthy foods almost all the time and rarely have a desire to eat something that isn’t something nourishing. I even like celery now — a food I couldn’t stomach before!
I think one of the biggest things that has changed is that I’ve really made taking care of my health a top priority in my life. And the benefits and results of that are pretty amazing!
3. Read 48 books I already own — I didn't read as much in 2016 nor did I set any reading goals because I let myself have a lot more time to rest, feel, think, process, sleep, and just slowly go through one or two books at time. I wanted to see what that felt like… and I realized it was good for a year, but now I'm anxious to get back to more reading and having a few books going at once! I decided to challenge myself this year to focus on reading books I already own.
So I picked 48 books — a stack of 12 books that were old Christian reprints, a stack of 12 books that were story driven, a stack of 12 books that were about improving your life, and a stack of 12 books to encourage me in my Christian walk. My plan is to try to read one from each stack each month.
April 11th update: See all 36 books and ebooks I’ve read in 2017 so far here! Yay! It feels so good to be back to reading again! Here’s what I’ve read so far this year from books I already own:
January: Candles in the Dark, Grace Not Perfection, A Trip Around the Sun, and The Giver. Of those 4 books, The Giver definitely was the one that impacted me the most profoundly. I wrote more about it here.
February: Answers to Prayer, Hope in Front of Me, The Cozy Life, Be Real.
March: If, Lilac Girls, Just Do Something, Unashamed
Marriage Goals
4. Go on a 4-day completely unplugged trip — Jesse and I went to Hawaii last year and it was downright incredible. I left my computer at home and didn't get online or on social media the entire time. It was BLISS!! We walked for miles on the beach, I fell in love with the ocean, I read 10 books (!), we scouted out the cheapest food options (because the food is SO $$ there! But never fail, we found a Subway we could walk to a few miles away from our hotel!), and we just had so much fun together.
We're planning to do the same sort of trip of this year, but we're going somewhere different. We're currently saving up and looking for deals so that we can do the trip for just a few hundred dollars like the Hawaii trip!
Family Goals
5. Go to South Africa as a family — Our kids have been begging to go back to South Africa and we've set a goal to make that happen this year. We're hoping to find a great deal on tickets like we did last time during a timeframe that works for our friends in South Africa. The kids are already getting really anxious thinking about it (and of course, Jesse and I are, too!!)
April 11th update: So, after quite a bit of investigation and back and forth with our friends in South Africa, we don’t believe that it’s going to work out for us to go this year because the only window of time we have long enough to make it happen this summer (and allow time on either side of the trip to prepare and recover) is the one time when the families there can’t do it. Instead, we’re planning a family trip to London this summer (!!!!) and are getting a trip planned for 2018 to South Africa.
Financial Goals
6. Sell our 3 rental houses in Kansas — So, we loved having rental houses and it's been a great investment for us (we paid cash for them and have turned a profit on them pretty much every single month we've had them!), but we have decided that we'd like to sell them (and hopefully turn an additional profit when we sell them) and put that money into our house savings. Then, once we've purchased a house here, we'll start saving to invest in local real estate.
April 11th update: We sold one of our houses!!! We’re putting the other two on the market in the next 2 months. (We wanted to give our tenants enough time to find other housing options so we gave them a longer notice than usual — because I know what it’s like to be a renter and want to treat our renters like we’d like to be treated!)
7. Save up to pay cash for a house here in TN — As I mentioned above, this is something we've been mulling over a lot this past year and thinking through and have decided to start saving aggressively for in 2017. We currently have around 15% of the total amount we'd like to save set aside in our house savings fund. By selling our rental houses, we should have about 75% of the total amount saved… which will mean, we should be able to save the additional 25% needed this year if we careful and strategic.
And yes, homes in this area are much more expensive than Kansas!! We could move about 30 minutes away and homes would go down significantly in price, but we love this area and we love being so close to our church, to the kids' school, and to other places we go to on a weekly basis. We've also decided we'd like to buy something that would be our "forever home" and would give us enough space to have offices + bedrooms for each of the kids.
April 11th update: Since we sold one of our rental houses (see above), we are now at 40% of our savings goal!!! If we can sell the other two houses in the next 3-4 months + save all we can during that time period, we should be really, really close to our goal!!
**Not listed specifically, but very important to us: We decided to take a leap of faith and significantly increase our giving this year. We didn't feel comfortable listing the details of that as a goal here publicly, but we wanted to acknowledge that this was happening. Because honestly, it's our heartbeat and one of the main reasons I’m highly motivated to be strategic with what I do online — so that we can give generously to causes and people near and dear to our hearts.**
Business Goals
8. Release 2 online courses.
April 11th update: We are in the process of putting together not just two courses, but an entire SERIES of courses for YourBloggingMentor.com that we’ll be slowly launching over the next year. I cannot WAIT to share more! But first, we have to get the site done (see below).
9. Start 2 new blogs — I shared more here about the big changes for this blog in 2017 — including two brand-new blogs I’m launching.
April 11th update: We made a TON of progress behind the scenes getting CrystalPaine.com and YourBloggingMentor.com set up. Everything is almost finished for the launch, but we decided to add some extra things before we launched, so we pushed the date by a few weeks. Look for more details on the launch of YourBloggingMentor.com very, very soon and then CrystalPaine.com will be coming soon after that.
10. Learn YouTube/iMovie — You can follow me on YouTube if you want to watch me learn! 🙂
April 11th update: I’ve had fun editing and publishing YouTube videos and feel like I’ve made a lot of headway in learning tricks and strategies and what works. I’ve subscribed to some new YouTube channels over the past few weeks to be inspired and I feel like I’m slowly getting more and more confident in this area and learning new tricks each week.
I have a long way to go, but I’m having so much fun! I also decided that publishing a video 5 days per week (what I was initially planning) is too much for my schedule. Instead, I’m shooting for 2 videos per week. That seems to be a good pace for me! You can watch my recent YouTube videos here.
How are YOU doing on your goals for 2017? Leave a comment and let us know!
