075: 2017 Wrap-Up: What I’ll do More and Less of Next Year

On Instagram recently I encouraged everyone to take a few minutes to jot down notes about their year. I think it's extremely important to look over your past year in order to recognize everything you accomplished, and what you can do better.

Some of my favorite accomplishments were:

Finished visiting all 50 states
Took 87 flights
Put myself through an online business course for 6 months
Celebrated my 30th birthday in London
Sold a lot more art and put on classes
Went to Morocco twice by myself
Painted a mural for Pat Flynn
Went skiing in Japan, Canada, and all over the States
Dated my boyfriend for year 5 of long distance
Finished my first year of podcasting weekly

Obviously, this was a pretty extreme year.

I tried to do it all and make "living the dream" a reality for me. While from the outside it looked pretty spectacular, I really struggled with feeling like I wasn't getting to where I wanted to be, professionally. This was in part due to two major things: 1. I traveled more than I should've while trying to start a personal business and 2. I didn't recognize and be happy with all the small things that I actually did accomplish.

Maybe what I did sounds like a lot, but unfortunately, my goals at the beginning of the year were more business related, and since my accomplishments are more lifestyle-related, it left me feeling pretty crappy about where I wanted to be at this moment.

Though I've been pretty hard on myself for not accomplishing more business-wise, I have to recognize the good and what I learned with everything I did, because truth-be-told, it was all pretty darn awesome and fun.

Being quite a dreamer and person that looks at possibilities instead of practicality, this past year has kind of slapped me around a bit and made me think about possibly having a happy medium work-wise. This brings me to my list of what I'll do more and less of in 2018.

I had to ask myself if stressing with the beginnings of solo entrepreneurship is actually better than side-hustling entrepreneurship. Kind of surprising myself, I had to eat a little slice of humble pie, and look at working a job in addition to just being an entrepreneur, and not feel bad about things not happening fast enough. So next year, I may have a job alongside my art business and podcasting. For me, this means I can actually be more creative while not freaking out about paychecks. So LESS stress is on the agenda; a roundabout win in my book.
As the year went on, I definitely developed MORE patience. And I plan to continue this until I get to the point where I'm not beating myself up if I'm not making everything perfect in 2 seconds. Patience is freaking hard in the social media world, when every time you jump on, someone you follow is doing exactly what you want to be, so on that note, let's go to...
LESS social media. This is hard because my business is online for the most part. But I'm determined to check out this Freedom app I keep hearing about, and do less watching of people I admire, and just put in my own work!
MORE money managing. I've always been interested in investments and such, but never in the whole money/watch your bank account game. In 2018 I'm changing this, mainly because of a couple books I've read recently, Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover (which I talked about in my previous podcast) and The Automatic Millionaire. I recommend both, and they got me really excited to manage my money more efficiently.
Talk MORE about everything with my boyfriend. Since my bf and I have been together for 5 years and long-distance, this is a pretty big deal for us. We spent most of the last 5 years on more surface level stuff, and yes, planning vacations. So we had some pretty serious sit-downs and decided this year is the year of goals and focus.
LESS people pleasing. As I was recently thinking over things I wasn't pleased with in my life, I realized a good deal of it is stress related to tryi...