Today I’m thankful for Growth; specifically, my own. I’m thankful that I have grown enough in the last few years that I didn’t beat myself up for not posting yesterday. I’m usually relentless with myself about fulfilling commitments; if I said it, I’m going to do it– come hell or high water.
For a lot of areas in life, I think that taking commitments seriously is a very good thing. My clients know that if I said I’d do it, it will be done. My kids know that they can depend on me, and my husband does too. But in the past few years, I’ve learned to relax a little bit and have come to terms with the fact that setting goals for myself is great, but I can also give myself a break too if I want (or need) to.
I remember when my husband and I were newly married and trying to save for a house. I hadn’t been good with my money before getting married and had decided that that was something I didn’t want to carry over into my marriage. So I sat down and figured out how much money we needed to pay our bills each month and earmarked the rest for saving for a down payment on a house.
Unfortunately, being inexperienced with money, I had left absolutely no wiggle-room in our budget, nor did I plan on any ‘surprises’ like needing car repairs, replacing a refrigerator or paying for Christmas(!). Of course, these things are unavoidable, so when anything like this happened I reluctantly took the money from our savings, vowed never to let it happen again and worked more overtime to replace the missing funds. (Just thinking about that now exhausts me. It’s a good thing I was young and had lots of drive!) I never gave myself a break.
Now I realize that life happens, so in addition to my planning my finances with some flexibility I have also built some wiggle room into my “work first/play later” attitude about time. Yesterday I wanted to stay away from my computer and office, so I did. Growth is good!
