Life Lessons from January

This will be the last of my Weekly Recaps. Now that I've made it through the first month, I feel it will be more appropriate to switch to a Monthly Recap from this point forward. I will, therefore, also cover this Month in Review.

Today I want to share the important discoveries of the past month and to address some of my personal let-downs. My goal is to use this information to help me make adjustments to the way I handle this blog (and my others) so that I can reach the most people who want or need the information I can provide.

I'm going to break this Recap into sections (similarly to how I did last week) to help me address the particular issues I've had with transparency.

(Source CC BY-NC)

How The "If" Mentality Led To Unpreparedness

I started this blog with no expectation of success. If anything, I came at it expecting the blog to fail. I'd started (and failed to maintain) several niche blogs in the past. Why, then, should this one be any different?

This blog was always intended to be a "side blog" where I could chronicle my experience with my other two (primary) blogs. When I started out, I thought "If those blogs succeed, won't it be nice to have my personal blog to help demonstrate to others who it happened?"

I would then be able to look back at this blog and see how things happened, what lessons I had learned, and how it panned out over time.

I'll tell you the truth, it was a great plan. (It still is. I'm not finished yet!)

Two weeks into the month, however, two big things happened. The first you already know about if you've been reading this blog: I dropped the two "main" blogs I had decided to write. The second is that I had fully committed to my morning journal.

This left me with an odd problem. I no longer had the "main" blogs I'd planned to keep up with, but I did have the blog where I wrote about personal lessons I've learned along the way.

When I had to put the other two blogs on hold, this blog became the primary blog. I was unprepared for the success of this blog. As of this writing, it lacks an "About Me" page or a mission statement. These are things I will now work on in the coming month.

I learned through this experience to maintain a "when" mentality when approaching any new project. If I go into the project expecting it to fail, I can expect failure. If I go into the project expecting success, I will adopt a "when" mentality.

"When this blog succeeds, others will learn from my life lessons in manifesting."

January Lesson One: Maintain a "when" mentality and approach new projects with preparedness and determination. The rest will follow.

How I Overcame A Lack Of Motivation With Commitment

I'll let you in on a little secret: Some days I don't WANT to write. Some days I wake up surly and churlish and all I want to do is go back to bed. 

Some days I even wake up and ask myself "what am I doing this for REALLY?"

Some days I can't even answer that question.

I might be a morning person, but I don't always leap out of bed motivated to start the day's journal entry, plan the day's blog activities, and then follow through. 

But I do it anyway. And I'll tell you another secret: It's not because I'm focused on the "big picture" either. Some days it's just as hard for me to see the big picture as it is to get out of bed. (We all have rough days, believe me!)

The big picture matters. It does. I spend at least a little time every day Dreaming (with a capital D, remember!). But it's not what gets me out of bed every day.

What gets me out of bed and drives me to the kitchen table to open up that little orange notebook is COMMITMENT. 

I made an agreement with myself to write in my journal every day (preferably in the mornings, but that wasn't the specific agreement, either). I made an agreement to myself and my readers to post in this blog three times a week.

It no longer matters whether I WANT to post today: It matters that I committed to writing (on a schedule). This has allowed me to continue regardless of motivation. 

January Lesson Two: Commitment is more important than Motivation.

How I Discovered The Path From "Purpose" To "Goals"

I have a lot of blocks, but the one which has caused the most stress in the past three months is the topic of "goals" and how they tie to "Life Purpose."

If you've read anything at all in this blog, you might have picked up on the fact that I LOVE the Rituals for Living Dreambook. One of the steps in the process of setting Life Goals and yearly goals is to determine your Life Purpose.

After that, the book takes you through guided questions to help determine what you want to achieve in your life. Then it asks you to create goals for the next year, three years, and so on.

I might have quit after the questionnaire.

I had trouble with the goals. I knew what I wanted, and I had written down my life purpose, but I couldn't figure out how to get from point A (Life Purpose) to point B (Goals) to point C (Dream realization).

Mainly I was hung up in the middle part. Purpose didn't give me a Path. I could see the starting point and the destination, but not what lay between.

It was my process of morning journaling which led me to find the path. This allowed me to concentrate on IDEAS (something that my Dreambook doesn't have space for in the early sections). Journaling was the form of brainstorming that worked best for me, though you might find that other methods work best for you (such as mind-mapping).

January Lesson Three: Sometimes you have to work backward to be able to break things down into their parts.

How I Learned Success Drives Success

Part of me knew this already. It just hadn't ever HAPPENED TO ME. 

Each day I wrote in my journal, I built momentum. Every blog post taught me a new lesson. Each time someone commented on a post, or there was a new follower on Facebook, I was reminded of my value.

Every small success led to another, often larger, success.

When something good happened, I felt compelled to push on and continue working on what had previously worked. Keeping track with my weekly recaps helped me to learn what worked for me and what didn't. I could then apply what worked to the next week.

This is a real-time demonstration of the fact that this blog WORKS. That's pretty amazing!

January Lesson Four: Keeping track of successes and learning experiences helps keep me motivated.

Looking Forward to February

These are the specific blogging-related goals for February.

• Create an "About Me" page for this blog (including personal photograph and mission statement).
• Reinstate the Tarot Blog under a new name. 
• Switch to a three-post-per-week format in My Magical Life.
• Plan (in my planner) which topics I want to build foundations for My Magical Life.
• Post daily on Facebook Fan Page. 
• Build Pinterest Profile.

I will update you at the end of February on what I have managed to accomplish for the month! 

It's been great having you here and I hope that you'll become a fan on Facebook, follow on Twitter, and pin with me on Pinterest!