Looking back: Goals for 2009

It’s the last day of the year. Looking back, I think I accomplished quite a lot in 2009. I mentioned earlier that I had come up with some goals for the year ~ “9 in 2009” sort of thing. It is kind of fun to look back and see how much I accomplished from these goals, so I thought I’d share here~

My Goals for 2009

1. exercise more ~ aiming for 3x/week.
I think that I did a pretty decent job on this one. As part of my half-marathon training, I was running 3 or 4 times a week plus doing yoga classes. So I definitely hit my 3x/week goal for a portion of the year (my training plan was 4 months long – that’s a good third of the year!). It has been harder to keep it up but I’m doing much better than I did a year ago – even during the holidays I managed to get in a couple DVD workouts and a 3 mile run on my mother-in-law’s treadmill. Of course I could always improve on consistency.. but I’m pretty happy with my accomplishments here.
 
2. start volunteering
I joined up with a fundraising planning group, “Young Professional Leadership Committee”, and served as the media chair. I was a little scared of the leadership position that I took on, as I didn’t know a whole lot about marketing etc- but I really enjoyed doing this. Our main event, a beer tasting, was really successful, raising over $40,000. I plan to continue this in 2010.
 
3. start up book club at church
I did start a book club and mintained it for about half the year. The group got a few regular attendees and we had some great discussions. Unfortunately it petered out after awhile – we had a lot of attendance issues. So I decided not to continue this fall. But, I was contacted by some other girls who wanted to start a women’s faith sharing group in October. They are in charge of running it, but I’ve been going regularly and it has been really good. I’m glad to be back into a group for talking about faith issues, and I may not have gotten to this point if I hadn’t taken the initiative to start the book club up a year ago.
 
4. make a new friend
This was just me looking for a way to get myself to be a bit more outgoing. I’ve definitely made a new good friend at work this year, as well as several other friends through the church and volunteer stuff that I’ve done.
 
5. train for 1/2 marathon
Totally did it!! Had huge doubts about this one, but it went really well. I’m so glad that I pushed myself to do this. Training helped with my exercise discipline, and running the race gave me such a huge feeling of accomplishment. 

 

 that's me in the pink running, and after I finished - for proof that I really did it :)

 

6. finish the wedding album
Unfortunately, this one did not get done. I did do some more work on it but need a lot more time for this project. On the plus side, I learned a lot of cool photo editing tricks in GIMP, which I hope to put to use to finish up this album… it seriously needs to be done considering we’ve been married for over 2 years now!
 
7. write more
Starting this blog was a way for me to address this goal. It has definitely helped me write more!

8. host a party at our place
This one is another partially finished one – we had a couple people over for a super bowl party (yay steelers!) and for an Easter brunch. But no real serious entertaining. Our place is so nice that I would love to have a bigger party.. but it ties into my difficulties with social initiative in actually inviting people over ahead of time. So this is another one to work on in 2010.

9. Take an amazing trip somewhere
This is another big success :) Week long trip to Kauai for our anniversary definitely counts as an amazing trip in my opinion.

Overall – I think I did pretty good! Last year when I set these goals, I thought some of them were a little crazy, but I’m glad I challenged myself – because now I feel like I made some worthwhile accomplishments. I will have to come up with some new ways to challenge myself for 2010!