Welcome to my monthly post where I share an update on how I’m doing on my goals for 2017. I hope that this post inspires you in your own goal-setting journey!
It’s February 1, 2017 which means it’s time for my first goal update for 2017. I’ll be sharing a recap of each of my goals + an update on how I’m doing on each of them below. (If there’s no update listed, I have no update to report. Hopefully I’ll have an update next month!)
Personal Goals
1. Run 3 miles in 30 minutes — I took up running again this year — as part of my fitness plan that my nutritionist put together for me. I’ve never been skilled in the running department, but I’ve started to really enjoy it and am wanting to push myself here and be able to easily run 3 miles in 30 minutes.
February 1st update: I started in on an more intentional running regimen — varying between easy runs, long runs, progressive runs, and HIIT workouts + intentional warm-up and cool down. My nutritionist is a runner so he is putting together a run training schedule for me each week!
This month, I’m averaging about 2.2 miles in 30 minutes. I could push myself and do more, but my nutritionist is encouraging me to not push myself too hard, too fast and instead to slowly build up my endurance. So I’m trying to take my time and not get impatient. Because I know that slow and steady wins the race!
2. Make it to Phase 4 of the nutrition plan — I’m currently working through a 4-phase custom nutritional plan with my nutritionist. I start in Phase 1 back at the end of August 2016. He thinks that at the rate I’m going and progressing, I’ll be able to start Phase 4 by mid-2017! And I guess that when I hit Phase 4, I’ll feel absolutely and utterly amazing!
February 1st update: I started Phase 3 two weeks ago!!!! This means I get to introduce back in quite a bit more foods and have more wiggle room as far as what I can and can’t eat. Plus, it means that I’ll be eating even more — which is crazy because I feel like I eat so much right now. 🙂
I love how my tastes have changed so much in the last few months. I crave healthy foods almost all the time and rarely have a desire to eat something that isn’t something nourishing. I even like celery now — a food I couldn’t stomach before!
I think one of the biggest things that has changed is that I’ve really made taking care of my health a top priority in my life. And the benefits and results of that are pretty amazing!
3. Read 48 books I already own — I didn’t read as much in 2016 nor did I set any reading goals because I let myself have a lot more time to rest, feel, think, process, sleep, and just slowly go through one or two books at time. I wanted to see what that felt like… and I realized it was good for a year, but now I’m anxious to get back to more reading and having a few books going at once! I decided to challenge myself this year to focus on reading books I already own.
So I picked 48 books — a stack of 12 books that were old Christian reprints, a stack of 12 books that were story driven, a stack of 12 books that were about improving your life, and a stack of 12 books to encourage me in my Christian walk. My plan is to try to read one from each stack each month.
February 1st update: I’m so excited because I read 11 books and ebooks in January (see all 11 books and ebooks I read here)! Yay! It feels so good to be back to reading again!
The 4 books I read from my shelf from the 48 books I picked were: Candles in the Dark, Grace Not Perfection, A Trip Around the Sun, and The Giver. Of those 4 books, The Giver definitely was the one that impacted me the most profoundly. I wrote more about it here.
Marriage Goals
4. Go on a 4-day completely unplugged trip — Jesse and I went to Hawaii last year and it was downright incredible. I left my computer at home and didn’t get online or on social media the entire time. It was BLISS!! We walked for miles on the beach, I fell in love with the ocean, I read 10 books (!), we scouted out the cheapest food options (because the food is SO $$ there! But never fail, we found a Subway we could walk to a few miles away from our hotel!), and we just had so much fun together.
We’re planning to do the same sort of trip of this year, but we’re going somewhere different. We’re currently saving up and looking for deals so that we can do the trip for just a few hundred dollars like the Hawaii trip!
Family Goals
5. Go to South Africa as a family — Our kids have been begging to go back to South Africa and we’ve set a goal to make that happen this year. We’re hoping to find a great deal on tickets like we did last time during a timeframe that works for our friends in South Africa. The kids are already getting really anxious thinking about it (and of course, Jesse and I are, too!!)
Financial Goals
6. Sell our 3 rental houses in Kansas — So, we loved having rental houses and it’s been a great investment for us (we paid cash for them and have turned a profit on them pretty much every single month we’ve had them!), but we have decided that we’d like to sell them (and hopefully turn an additional profit when we sell them) and put that money into our house savings. Then, once we’ve purchased a house here, we’ll start saving to invest in local real estate.
February 1st update: Our renters moved out in one of our rental houses this month, so we just got the house put up on the market! I’ll keep you posted.
7. Save up to pay cash for a house here in TN — As I mentioned above, this is something we’ve been mulling over a lot this past year and thinking through and have decided to start saving aggressively for in 2017. We currently have around 15% of the total amount we’d like to save set aside in our house savings fund. By selling our rental houses, we should have about 75% of the total amount saved… which will mean, we should be able to save the additional 25% needed this year if we careful and strategic.
And yes, homes in this area are much more expensive than Kansas!! We could move about 30 minutes away and homes would go down significantly in price, but we love this area and we love being so close to our church, to the kids’ school, and to other places we go to on a weekly basis. We’ve also decided we’d like to buy something that would be our “forever home” and would give us enough space to have offices + bedrooms for each of the kids.
**Not listed specifically, but very important to us: We decided to take a leap of faith and significantly increase our giving this year. We didn’t feel comfortable listing the details of that as a goal here publicly, but we wanted to acknowledge that this was happening. Because honestly, it’s our heartbeat and one of the number one reasons I blog and have a business — so that we can give generously to causes and people near and dear to our hearts.**
Business Goals
8. Release 2 courses — We have plans in the works for me to release two full-fledged courses on two different topics. More coming on that in the next 3-6 months!
9. Start 2 new blogs — I shared more here about the big changes that are coming to the blog in 2017 — including two brand-new blogs I’m launching late March or early April!
February 1st update: We are hard at work behind the scenes getting CrystalPaine.com and YourBloggingMentor.com set up. I’m so excited about the designs and can’t wait to unveil them soon!
10. Learn YouTube/iMovie — I already told you about this goal! You can follow me on YouTube if you want to watch me learn! ?
February 1st update: I’ve had fun editing and publishing YouTube videos and feel like I’ve made a lot of headway in learning tricks and strategies and what works.
I have a long way to go, but I’m having so much fun! I also decided that publishing a video 5 days per week (what I was initially planning) is too much for my schedule. Instead, I’m shooting for 2 videos per week. That seems to be a good pace for me! You can watch my recent YouTube videos here.
2 Habits I’m Working on Developing
I decided to choose two very specific habits I want to work on in 2017. Both of these are ones that will make a big impact on our home and family for me to be consistent with. I’m using the habit tracker at the back of my new Brilliant Life Planner to keep tabs on my daily progress on these.
- Be offline from 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. every day. (This is one way I’m saying “yes” to my family this year. Aiming to have a more compartmentalized day — 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. = Work Time, 3 p.m. to 8 p.m. = Unplugged Family Time — is making a huge, positive change for our family and for my sanity and productivity and I’m so grateful and excited.
I hit this goal 19 times in January and hope to do this even more consistently in February! - Go to bed before 11 p.m. (My actual bedtime is 9:30 p.m. so I can get in a good 7-8 hours of sleep and still wake up by 5:30 a.m. But I’m giving myself a little wiggle room for the occasional later night or for weekends. ?) I didn’t do this perfectly in January, but I’m celebrating that I hit the goal 16 nights! And I’m hoping that I’ll be even more on target in February!
Robin Young says
These are my FAVORITE kind of posts, Crystal! Thank you 🙂
Carrie says
Drums fingers on table anxiously awaiting launch of new Crystal Paine blogs…
Meanwhile I rocked January!
http://carriewillard.com/2017-goals-update/
In large part due to the blog coaching program Crystal 🙂
Nichole says
One of my 2017 goals is to spend time in God’s word by reading through the New Testament at least 5 days a week. I wasn’t as consistent as I wanted to be at the beginning of the month, but actually made it through from Chapter 1-20 of John, so I call that a step in the right direction. I also made a goal to get down to a size 12 by the end of 2017 (I’m a 20 now) so I made my goal for January to exercise for at least 15 minutes a day (to get back in the swing of things), I have been consistent for the last few weeks, though I didn’t get started off well at the beginning. I’m making more progress this year than I have in the past, thanks a lot to your Make Over Your Mornings & Make Over Your Evenings courses, thank you for those, they were the best Christmas gifts ever!
Heather says
Love your goals and your updates! To encourage more reading this year we started a book club with a few girlfriends. Our first “official” meeting is this month and I am so excited. Not only do I have a fun book to read, we have a “purposeful” girl’s night in once a month for us to get together when we are usually way to busy to meet.
We are also purging 2017 items this year! My husband and I purged 300+ items so far! Slow and steady…
Crystal Paine says
Oh! I love your Girl’s Night Out idea! And yay for purging!
Jeni says
I’m inspired by your goal ideas and hope to put this idea to work for me too. On a side note, where did you get your place holders for your planner? I really like them 🙂
Crystal Paine says
I got them off of Amazon!
Jen Brown says
This year I (well, my whole family) have one goal, to spend Christmas in the new house.
Last month we finally took the plunge and sold our house and all/most of our belongings and purchased a camper. We are finally building our dream home (we are building it ourselves). It has already been a rough two weeks but I know in the end it will have been worth it.
Crystal Paine says
Oh! Do you know that we did something similar when I was a child? I wrote about it in Money-Making Mom! We have SUCH fond memories of that year — even though there were some crazy and rough trials in the midst of it (especially for my parents!)
Beth says
Hooray for camper living! We choose to travel with my husband when he works rather than be apart so we are about to set off on our 3rd camper jaunt. This next one looks to be the most challenging yet but if we can do it anyone can!
Lisa says
Hi Crystal,
My family and I are in South Africa now. Not on missions, but visiting for a few weeks. One of the things that really struck me was the radio. We were driving one day and tried to find some kind of decent music when all of the sudden a radio station started playing amazing and current Christian praise music. It was such a breath of fresh air and really made me want to support that station. I don’t know the details on how to do this yet, but I really enjoyed reading your link above about your trip to South Africa. What is the name of the group you work with in South Africa?
Crystal Paine says
We work with Take Action Ministry. If you search on my blog, it pulls up a LOT of posts I’ve written about our visits to South Africa!
Tiffany says
Hi Crystal, my husband and I are looking at investing in rental properties in Kansas. I would love to know more about the ones you are selling. You can email me if you are interested. Thank you! Tiffany
Heather says
Thanks Crystal for sharing all of this!!! I truly love reading and how you keep yourself accountable!!!
I have done something similar the past few years in setting my goals and it works!!
One thing I have to know, how did you do Hawaii for hundreds and not a couple of thousand? A dream of mine is to go there with hubby, and maybe the kids, in the next couple of years, and while my flight might cost a bit more coming from Maine, I would love to know how you did it adorably?
Crystal Paine says
We saved up our points and gifts cards from travel and online purchases and Swagbucks and then we found a place to stay at where we didn’t really have to spend any extra $$ once we were there. We biked into town or walked into town to get Subway and/or buy groceries so that we saved on food.
We have friends who found tickets that were less than $100 each to Hawaii a few years ago by watching travel deal sites and jumping on it. Great deals are out there — even if you don’t have points to use from business travel like we did!
Rebecca says
I loved reading your goals for this year. I especially enjoyed your reading goal. I did something similar last year but got a little too enthusiastic and pushed too hard. This year, I plan to read slower and enjoy more. Good luck on your 2017 goals!
Crystal Paine says
I love it! Thanks so much for sharing! And yay for reading goals!
Maura says
I set a few different type of goals this year. Personally, I want to run a 5K, read one book a month and spend more time in the Word. I have booked my race and have been training. I finished the first book for January and have been a part of Read through the Word yearly Bible reading. I also wanted to book a fun family vacation, and we booked last week!
The professional goal was harder for me, I have a goal, but I have been struggling with which way to go. I had a great call with a life coach that I have used in the past and feel better about the struggle. I am still investigating which path to take and I need to give myself grace with timing.
All in all, it has been a successful start to the year!
Crystal Paine says
Yay for a successful start to the year!
Elizabeth @ Wonder Woman I'm Not says
Wow – it looks like you are off to a great start. I’m sure it will be nice when you can get into your forever home that’s a great fit for your family.
I kept my goals simple this year. Last year was pretty rough, I needed to keep it simple and focus on me.
My health is my number one focus, I’ve been making strides to take care of some chronic issues that I haven’t been taking care of. So far there aren’t any results but at least I’m on the right track. State by the course is my goal 🙂
Crystal Paine says
That sounds like you’re being really wise about your goals this year. Way to go!
Pamela says
One of my goals for 2017 was to keep a *much* closer look at our finances. We were doing ok, but I thought it could be better. Anyway, I did our January analysis last night and was really happy with what I saw. I also found a few baby steps for next month! I’d really like to have another child – I know they say don’t wait until you can afford it because then you never will, but at the same time, I feel like we need to make a responsible decision about that. My analysis last night let me know we’re getting on the right track financially! Woo hoo!
Crystal Paine says
YAY!!!
Meagan says
Question- how did you find a nutritionist? I have been contemplating meeting with one, but I really don’t know how to find someone. In general, I want to improve my eating habits but really need guidance and accountability. Perhaps this could be a future post?
Crystal Paine says
Mine is long distance. I found him through a blog reader! He works with clients all over the country and does everything via email, text, and phone!