tales from a far-land

After much self-reflection and a thorough evaluation of my prior year's intentions, I found myself drawn to the concept of "flowering" as a person in 2018.  I have an amazing life.  I am surrounded by supportive family and friends.  I am lucky to have married a man who chooses to be with me every day of our life.  It may not always be easy, but we both continue to strive to make our relationship better and better every year.  We have remarkable children who fill my life with questions, frustrations, happiness and life lessons.  We have an incredible home and sanctuary. I am blessed to have a successful career where I can be a resource and expert to my colleagues and clients.  Honestly, I am truly grateful. However, life is full of teaching moments and this year I want to continue to grow and flower as a person.  I want to continue to blossom but in a more mindful way.  I want to be kinder and more flexible while also staying true to who I a...

For the past five years, I have created a vision board every January as a way to focus on my intentions for the upcoming year.   A vision board is a visualization tool in which you build a collage of words and pictures that represent certain goals and dreams you are trying to achieve. In creating my vision board for 2018, I found myself very drawn to examining and reflecting on my vision boards of the past.  I loved exploring what goals and intentions I had set for myself and how these aspirations transpired by the end of my goal year.  Some of my past vision boards were more focused on photos and less on words.  Others were more word and phrase focused.  Many of my boards shared many similar goals and yet each were uniquely different.  They even varied by color.  Some expressed much more vibrant colors while others were more muted or pale.   Here is my analysis of the past five years of vision boarding.  I hope you find it as intri...

For the third year in a row, I have created a vision board to assist me in keeping my life's goals on track.  This year my goals are specifically centered around turning the big 4-0  in October.  As I focused on what I wanted to include on my board this year, I started to realize that I would like to "re-frame" myself.  What this means to me is that I want to "re-frame"  what kind of person I want to be and what kind of person I am for others as I enter this new decade of my life.  As I grow older, I think it is important to appreciate who I am knowing that I can still strive to be a better person daily. I want to "re-frame" my mind.  I would like to start being more grateful for all the wonderful things that I have in my life.  I want to have less stress in my life, in general.  I want to be true to myself more.  And I want to enjoy the little celebrations in our lives more. I want to "re-frame" my relationships.  I want to mak...

I have never been very good at keeping my new year's resolutions.  Probably because I made resolutions, but I have never been very good at turning those resolutions into goals.  Well, this year I decided that instead of making a bunch of new year's resolutions, I would instead make goals.  For the past week, I spent a good amount of time thinking about the good, the bad and the lessons learned from 2012.  Luckily, we had more good than bad this year and for that I am very thankful.  Then, I shifted my focus to 2013.  What successes would I like?  What are my goals?  What am I lacking?  What would I like to change?  I quickly was able to list out all of my goals and thoughts for a successful year.  The last thing that I needed to do was to figure out a way to keep all of these great ideas on top of my mind so I could guarantee their success and not forget about them as life becomes cr...