My Goals for the New Year
I'm sure most of you reading this have your own goals for the year, and have your social media feeds full of people haring their 'New Year, New Me' style posts (I know I've seen my fair share of them already), but this is not one of those.
This is me, sharing with you what I am hoping to achieve in the next twelve months, giving myself some form of accountability for the end of the year. I want to be able to look back at this list and see what I've managed to achieve, specifically against the things I'm writing about here.
I've going to talk about each of these in a bit of detail, and hopefully give you a better idea of who I am and why I'm trying to do these things here. So lets kick off the list with an easy one.
1) Gold DofE Award
For those of you who don't know, the Duke of Edinburgh's award (DofE) is an award for people aged between 14 and 24, which aims to show personal development in a variety of different areas. The gold award consists of five key areas, which I've been working towards for the past 3 years. These are:
- Expedition COMPLETED
A 3 night, 4 day expedition, walking for around 8 hours per day, and camping at night.
- Physical COMPLETED
Spending one hour a week for 18 months improving myself in a physical activity.
- Volunteering COMPLETED
Spending another hour per week for 12 months volunteering within the local community.
- Skill IN PROGRESS
One further hour per week for 12 months working on improving/learning a skill of my choice.
- Residential TO BE COMPLETED
Spending 3 nights, 5 days working on a worthwhile activity with people you've not met before.
As you can see, I've done most of the award so far, having walked over 40 hours on my expedition, trained for an completed a half marathon for my physical, helped run the DofE Society while at university for my volunteering, and this blog & website is being used for my skill so long as I can keep updating and writing to you all for the next month.
The residential is what's holding me back at the moment, and while I have a couple of ideas, I need to follow through with these and get the award done. I have until I turn 25 to complete this, which means I have only 6 months to do all that I need to, write up my experience, submit the evidence, and get it approved!
2) Producing one of my short films
As you are probably aware if you've followed me for any period of time, or have looked about on my social media/previous blog posts, over the past few months I've been hit by the writing bug and have some up with several ideas which I've worked onto paper. So far I have three short film scripts, one play, and am working on another short film and feature film script as well.
So one of my goals is to get one of there films made. I have a favorite to work on, written under the working title 'Murder?', a dark crime thriller which involved several very interesting google searches on poisons, neurotoxin, and the psychology of the criminally insane. I've approached someone to work on it in the end of last year, but if that doesn't pan out I have a couple of other options which will hopefully come through for me.
My aim is to get this project entered in a few film festivals once it's finished, and hopefully you;ll be hearing more about this soon!
3) Increase my acting resume
This one is one of the more vague and harder to measure goals on the list, but is possibly one of the more visible achievements on the list. It's certainly going to be one of the things I'll be sharing more about on social media.
I love acting, and feel that in the past year I've learned loads about how to improve my trade, but there is no time to stand still in this business. So I've set this goal to force myself to keep learning and improving.
The goal is vague because I'm not sure how I should improve my resume at the moment, but I am always looking for ways to do so, whether it's attending an acting course, increasing the number of accents I can comfortably do, or simply adding some more credits to my IMDb page, I want to say that I have achieved something which I would not have been able to do last year.
How will I manage that? Will it be any good? Will I look back at this at the end of the year and say "What were you talking about?" who knows, but keep yourself updated by looking at the resume on this website here.
4) Healthier, in body and mind
This is arguably the most important part of this list. I already go to the gym regularly, and try to look after myself with my diet, so that's not really a challenge for me. What will be a challenge is setting myself a physical and mental goal.
Physically, I will keep going to the gym, but instead of aiming for a certain body fat percentage, or something general like to 'have a sixpack', my goal is to smash my personal bests. I have devised a total body workout which I will be doing at some point this week. When I do I'll write down all the stats I can think of about how well I did at this workout, and will re-test myself throughout the year. I hope to see an improvement, and that's how I'll measure success.
Mental wellbeing is more challenging, but is probably more important than physical wellbeing. So this year I'm setting myself the goal of looking after my mental health much more than I did last year. My plan is to get into a regular pattern of self-reflection and meditation, ideally every couple of days, and to use the book of 365 logic puzzles I got for Christmas every day to help me improve my problem solving skills.
By combining these two things, I hope that I'll hopefully be in a better piece of mind and able to control my emotions and self control in the future. Again, this is harder to measure (aside from the puzzles), but by the end of the year I should be able to see a difference.
5) Memories
Memories are one of the most important things we can take from life, so I want to make more of them, and make the most of the memories I have. Again, this is not the easiest of things to measure, so I think the best way of doing so it by making memories I won't forget. I'm going to do this in a couple of different ways.
Firstly, photographs. I'm going to take a photograph every single day of the year, ideally of something which I'm going to remember from the day itself. Although I can see this being one of the harder things I manage to do this year, particularly when I do things like my DofE residential, I will try to make 365 photographs which help me to remember the whole of 2019.
Secondly, time with friends and family. By my nature I'm not the most sociable of people, and can be fairly awkward when meeting new people, so I want to challenge that. I want to make sure that I spend more time with those I care about, especially doing things which are more useful, not just wasting time.
Finally, life. I want to do more with my free time, making more memories which will stick with me. This can be working on more projects, attending classes, just walking in the local park, or visiting different places. I want to make the most out of the time I have, and enjoy doing what I can with my time.
So that's my list of goals for next year.
What do you think of my list?
Do you think I'll manage to keep up with each of these for the whole year?
Feel free to let me know what you think, and share your own goals as well if you want as well.
Until next time.
Tim