Hello everyone and happy Friday

Today is my last day at work until the 11th of September. I’m having a few days of quiet rest at home and then I am flying to Gibraltar for a week. I will also be celebrating my birthday in Gibraltar this year on Thursday, which I’m very much looking forward to. My plan is to spend the majority of my birthday by the pool relaxing and just generally being myself away from the rest of the world.

One thing I often write in my personal journal, particularly when I’m on holiday, that I really enjoy my life. So as much as I enjoy holidays, I am usually very grateful to be home and back to my own life too.. I do love finding balance in life not just between holidays and generally living but I like having goals and positive challenges to keep me going forward.

One thing I do every year on or around my birthday is to create a plan for the year which is based around things I’d like to achieve and also events I know that are coming up. This plan really helps me focus my life and my efforts into things that are worth my time. I then use the content of the plan that I create to set goals and challenges for myself in a way that is trackable and measured.

Having goals that are aligned with my personal interests it’s really important to me. A often means I don’t encounter boredom and it also keeps me on track with what I view as really valuable in my life. What I will say, as I live my life by my standards and with what I want to achieve. I do not live my life by the standards of how other people think I should live my life.

I’ll share a little insight into goals I’ve had over the last year. My own personal focused for the last year has actually not been on my career development. I decided as part of the plan that I set a year ago for my birthday, that’s the bulk of my personal goals for the year we’re going to be around my health and fitness. I’ve been working with my coach and personal trainer in June of last year. So when I first started setting my goals in September 2024, I had only been working with my coach for a relatively short period of time. Set my personal goals around fitness were to become stronger and around fat loss. I’m here to talk about myself and the things that I needed to do, not how I think other people should live their lives.

Over the last year I’ve achieved weight loss of over 17 kilogrammes and also had a remarkable improvement in my strength and fitness in workouts. That’s been a huge focus for me in the last year. With regards to my career goals for the year I decided to focus just on where I am right now so becoming better at the job that I do and building skills in this area. I actually enjoy my job that I do currently and it’s something I wanted to develop my knowledge in. I feel some people view career development purely as the next step up. I set my career goal as learning new skills in my current job and learning more about people generally.

Over the last year I’ve had trackable goals around my fitness and I’m very pleased to be able to say I smashed my goal weight target that I’ve had for over a year a few days ago. I’m giving myself a few days in the run up to my holiday and whilst I am away to run my current fitness goals in a holding pattern, so that I can then set new goals around my health and fitness on my birthday for the year to come. I do know a lot of my goals that I set during that process will be around my health and fitness for the year ahead.

I did also want to challenge myself. I’m bigger and stronger than I used to be and two things came to mind with this. I enjoy boxing as a workout so I have already begun the process to improve my skills around boxing . And from the 1st of September I am undertaking a charity challenge for Cancer Research UK. For every day of September I’ll be doing 100 pushups. Each and every day. That’s 3000 pushups in September, all raising money for charity. I’ll promise to give you an update on how that’s going when I’m back from my travels. I’m very much looking forward to this challenge as it will give me a short term goal to focus that’s very trackable and it will help inspire my new goals for the coming year.

Goals keep me on track and fuel my positivity and happiness. The outputs of my goal setting run through all parts of my life including at work. I personally feel my plant I create in September each year is one of the most important things I do for myself. The last year of goals has radically altered my type 2 diabetes. My health has improved immensely, almost exclusively by following through on my personal plan.

Whatever goals you may have, writing them down is a great way to inspire yourself and bring some happiness into your life.

I hope you all have a fantastic weekend. I’ll be celebrating my birthday a little over the weekend before my travels begin. I hope you can all find some time for peace and relaxation over the weekend.

Remember you have totally got this. I’ll see you all on the other side.