The ASPIRE Grid

Last January, as the year of the rooster dawned, MY year, I sat down to make a list of personal goals. I wanted to create a map for myself, things to accomplish that would move me forward towards self-actualization.

At first it was just a random list, but I realized fairly quickly that some items were short-term or immediate goals and others would take longer to implement. I also decided to group the goals to give them some semblance of order.

I came up with some categories: fitness, money, education, marriage. The usual. But this didn't really fit. After all, this was supposed to be a year of massive change -- some of my items included dumping my husband, moving, getting a full-time job, and going back to school.

My new categories were Education, Economic, Relationships, Physical, Artistic, Spiritual and Employment. Some additional tweaking got me to : Physical, Relationships, Artistic, Intellectual, Spiritual and Economic --PRAISE. The year would be in PRAISE of myself. Eww.

But look how else these can be arranged: ASPIRE. Now that's some goal setting!!!

Well, I didn't reach all my goals in 2005, but I did a pretty good job. I also changed or retooled some of my goals. For example, I didn't dump The Artist after all and we're doing better than ever.

I'm going to share some of the new ASPIRE-ations in this blog, but for now I'm just happy to have written today. I am a writer.