It is yet another year come and gone, has anything changed in our personal life. Are we satisfied with the anticipated changes the year could bring? What can we do differently to enhance our chances for better results?

We hear so much about gratitude, even gratitude journals. It is important to feel gratitude and to express it to those we live with, work with and interact with. We can even pray and thank our creator for any good we experience in our life.

The world has endured devastating changes and should not be ignored. We can feel grateful for the good we have, and make the best of it while sharing when we have the opportunity.

In our personal life we always have seven areas in our life we can give extra attention to this year to bring about satisfying changes. Family, physical health and fitness, domestic, financial, spiritual, and our dream.

1. Family: If you have family, making a goal to do family oriented activities each week to bring about a greater family warmth. Taking walks, playing cards or board games, doing yard work together, changing the bedrooms around, going hiking etc. on the family calendar have scheduled each week activities that promote greater communication. If you do not have family schedule such activities with friends.
   
2. Physical Health and Wellness: Physical Health entails so many areas of our life. First start with how you feel, have you been to the doctor? What are your concerns? What are your doctors concerns and reccommendations? What can you do to improve the situation? Better sleep, a slight change of diet and nutrition, this is personal.
   The daily walks and regular workouts some people do. They are benefitting from their consistency.
   The rest of the people whom may not be consistent with such activities deny themselves a better level of health and fitness. If your doctor says you can exercize, seek out some type of exercise you can do 5 or more times a week. Whatever we can do to change up our routine to be stimulating, in the 1980’s there were aerobics classes very common in most communities that people did. Some movement is essential to our daily life, mentally and physically. If we have health or weight concerns, consistency can help us to improve our situation. Use our calendar to track our weight, measurements and even calories if we are up for the challenge. Each week I put my weight every Wendsday morning so I know exactly where I am, by the end of the month I can see if I am maintaining, losing or gaining. In the calendar I can show which days I walked by putting a W in the corner of each. Our calendar is there as a reference and tracker.
   
3. Domestic: Some people excel in this department, and some of us are flailing in this department. The ones whom excel put in the time, energy, and take pride in it. The rest of us feel no pride, joy, as we feel we can never catch up. Our time and energy is always depleted and therefore we feel little joy with the lack of accomplishment.
   Domestic includes many things, our homes, yards, home maintenance, cars, cooking, laundry, general upkeep, daily chores, deeper cleaning, closets, attics, basements, storage. For those whom are on top of all this, I am proud of you and I recommend you take up knitting, tennis or dance lessons. The rest of us overwhelmed with some or all, there is our calendar we can look at to decide a reasonable schedule to attend to the most important of these. I will write other articles about this as well. As, I am not an expert, my only experience tells me lack of consistency in anything impedes our rate of improvement.
   
4. Financial: Live within our means! A real challenge. Pay attention to how we spend it and see how we can have better solutions. Identify our regular weekly and monthly expenses. These obligations come first and is there anything left? Create an old school budget.
   
5. Spiritual: Mathew 5:3 says Happy is the person conscious of their spiritual need! Too many try to fill the void in unhealthful ways. Try daily Bible reading it makes the void disappear. The site jw.org has a free Bible download. It even reads the Bible to you.
   
6. The Dream: So you want to be a dancer, writer, woodworker, artist, explorer, musician etc. It is good for our minds and hearts to make time in our week for our dream activity if we are meeting our other obligations. Even if our life is so overwhelming, a little healthful activity doing a wood working project or knitting a scarf is good for the mind and heart. If we would love to be an explorer but cannot really go explore spend a couple hours a week looking up a location, learning about the place, people, economy, terrain, weather, etc. as that is almost like when we were kids doing a book report, it was fun. Create a file and work on it, a different continent each month.
   If I could sum up 2023 for me Consistency is the Great contributer to a Successful outcome. This is my goal, by using the calendar to chart, track and set up our weeks and months I feel some achievement is a desirable outcome. Try it with me.
   Written by: Gina Rydin of fatfitanfab.com