End of Year Push: Focus on ‘My’ Story

The excuses we use to focus on everything and everyone else (but ourselves) mount, the moment we take our first morning breath.

Often, I mark the first hour of the day in the gym, an investment in self-care — body, mind, spirit — and for the most part, I have stayed true to that over the past 18 months or so.

Amid a fitness metamorphosis, this ‘me-time’ has been crucial to achieving and maintaining weight-loss and strength-gaining goals, as well as objectives related to inner (and outer!) peace.

However, it’s also true that minutes and moments and sometimes even, a good chunk of that hour lately are poured into clients’ needs, or energizing the care and feeding of personal or netweaving relationships.

Unintended Consequences

Over time, the unintended consequences reveal themselves through the slow suffocation of goals, akin to a fish that has washed ashore by the waves only to find itself gasping for its last puff of oxygen, before dying.

And, this inability to stay on course to personal initiatives continues throughout the day, and the week, and the month, and, so on and so forth.

Recalibrating Goals

So, as the summer of 2022 fades into fall, and the final quarter start line beams bright in my line of vision, I have decided to recalibrate and regain goal centricity.

This includes rebooting several personal and professional goals, one of which I am sharing in this blog.

By putting it out there, I feel a greater accountability to reach the objective, to march more diligently forward.

Pledge to Self

I pledge to author a full draft of my micropoetry book by December 31, 2022. This includes gathering and organizing all the most relevant poems I’ve written for the past 6-7+ years into a crystallized, albeit likely rough document, ready to polish, finalize and publish in first quarter 2023.

While I recently began the book-organizing process by pulling several dozen poems into a file, and I have determined a theme for various chapters, that’s where the process has stalled.

And, while desire for producing this written work has remained, time and energy has waned, as I continually have back-burnered this special initiative on behalf of other obligations, several which are self-imposed.

But then, just last night really, I had an epiphany: a lot of the focus on other things and people and duties was merely an excuse.

For example, most people whom I use as an excuse, are less concerned about the energy I’m pushing their direction — they have their own lives, families, obligations, areas of passion and independently driven goals and desires that not only do not intersect with mine, but also do not beckon my energy input, time or attention.

Applying Vigor and Discipline to Goals

This is liberating and a good self kick in the patootie to take accountability for my important goals. And without disciplined, diligent and daily actions behind those goals, they’ll never materialize.

So, starting today, I begin building my book.

Poem by poem, chapter by chapter, I step forward into a future as a published author, a writer with purpose and passion, and a zeal for completing what I started.

Today, I begin writing my story.

-Jacqui Barrett-Poindexter