18 in 2018 – Progress in April

This year, I ditched the New Year’s Resolutions and instead opted to set myself 18 goals and intentions for 2018 (you can read all about that here).  As part of my own accountability and to hopefully help inspire you to stay on track or get on board with your own goals, I’m posting on my progress every month.  I’m not going to talk about each goal – we’ll be here all day – so I’m just going to pick out the ones I’ve been working on (or not!) this month.

You can check out last month’s progress too.

Run 1,000 miles in 2018

Hmmm, April has not been a good month for running. I don’t why but I’ve not had a lot of energy for it. I ran 60 miles in April. I nearly wrote ‘only’ there. Me? An overachiever? Don’t know what you’re talking about.

I’m about 50 miles behind my target, which isn’t great but it’s not terrible. I can catch it up over the coming months.

I really love having this goal for the year. It is helping me stay focused with my running. On the days that I don’t feel like doing a long run, I will least get out and do a couple of miles because it all adds up and something is better than nothing. I’ve just got to remember that it is a totally arbitrary goal and reaching it or not does make me a good or bad person!

Read at least 24 books

I love reading so much. I enjoy learning new things and understanding the way the world works a bit better. This month, I learnt so much about hormones and the menstrual cycle in Alissa Vitti’s Womancode: Perfect Your Cycle, Amplify Your Fertility, Supercharge Your Sex Drive and Become a Power Source; if you follow my work at The Practical Balance, you’ll be seeing more of this in coming weeks as I learn about managing my own cycle now I’m off the Pill for the first time in about 17 years.

I learnt all about living in my zone of genius and “Einstein time” in Gay Hendricks’ The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level. This was recommended to me by a fellow coach and I think it’s a great book for anyone looking for meaning in their life.

Finally, I got my statistics geek on with A Field Guide to Lies and Statistics: A Neuroscientist on How to Make Sense of a Complex World. A friend of mine recently completed her PhD in Psychology and was bemoaning the poor grasp so many of us have on statistics. I read a lot of research now for The Practical Balance so I wanted to make sure I had a better understanding of how research is conducted and presented. This was a great practical guide with loads of examples. I suspect I’ll be dipping in and out of this one for a long time.

Write something every day

Every month I say I’m going to do this. April was not that month. Trying again in May!

Learn to code

Yay! I did this one 😀. General Assembly have an amazing self-paced course that I have been working through. I’m not going pro any time soon but I do understand the differences between HTML, CSS and Java now and can understand the format of code when I see it. I need lots more practice – remembering all the field names and tags etc is tough – but it’s really cool not to be completely bamboozled by code now.

Qualify as a yoga teacher

After 18 months of training and hard work, I am finally a qualified yoga teacher! Still waiting on the certificate to arrive – seriously, they couldn’t have dragged out the end of the course any longer if they’d tried. I was so pleased with the feedback from my final teaching assessment (my teaching was described as “outstanding: accessible, humorous, authentic and targetted.”) and it feels amazing to have achieved something that felt so, so far off two years ago.

I still haven’t figured out where teaching fits in my portfolio of work. It’s hard to teach a regular class when I’m travelling quite a bit for my consultancy work. So, for now, it’s probably going to be part of my coaching and maybe some 1-2-1s and cover classes. But watch this space!

Start saving into a pension again

This is a boring but super important goal. Recent reports suggested that the gender pension gap is even worse than the gender pay gap and two-thirds of entrepreneurs don’t save into pensions at all. So, yes it’s sensible to do but for me it also means that I’m doing more than just breaking even.

I was delighted to have stayed in the black during my first year of a portfolio career but I don’t want to stay just scraping by. Having enough to put into long-term investments like a pension is an indicator for me that things are going well financially,

It’s not loads at the moment and I hope to be able to save more throughout the year but it’s a good start.

Do one new thing/go to one new place every month

I became the trustee of an amazing charity – The Cares Family – in April. I’ve been mentoring their Operations Director since the start of 2017 and they invited me to join the Board. I really love working with the team and am looking forward to being able to support them enough more. I’ve never been a trustee before so lots to learn in the coming months.

The Month in Review

April gets a B, as months go. I was super-busy with work, juggling consultancy days and The Practical Balance. My energy has been a bit funny too. I think I’m actually moving into a place of better balance, rather than constantly go-go-go, and I’m taking better care of myself.

So, it’s been easy to write it off a bit. But writing this post has helped me reflect on everything I have done in the last month. I have a terrible habit of achieving things and immediately moving on the next. Having this monthly reflection on what’s been going on against some personal goals is really helping me stand back and look objectively at what I’ve achieved. And I’m pretty proud of myself!

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So now it’s your turn.  Did you set goals for the year?  How are you getting on?  How are you keeping yourself accountable?  What are you struggling with?  Let me know and let’s keep making 2018 the best year yet!

My 18 in 2018
* Run 1,000 miles
* Run a half-marathon in 1hr40
* Do yoga everyday in January
* Eat more plants – go vegan for a month
* Eat more healthily – give up sugar for a month
* Complete a one-month no-spend challenge
* Have a monthly “interesting people” dinner club
* Read at least 24 books
* Learn to code
* Write a draft of a book
* Qualify as a yoga teacher
* Start saving into a pension again
* Do one new thing/go to one new place every month
* Do my first GA talk
* Run my first coaching workshop
* Work with a coaching/portfolio career mastermind group
* Write something every day
* ????

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