New Year's Resolutions...

Well...we're ten days in...how are you doing with your new year's resolutions? Mine are going well right now, mostly because I only made them yesterday, haha!

Part of my resolutions are business related of course: I am always trying to improve my store Flourish Boutique, and www.FlourishBoutique.com.  However, this year many are personal too!  In 2013, Flourish will turn five years old.  I have spent five years, unabashedly obsessed with being a boutique owner and being committed to making my business grow and....flourish!  That hasn't changed in some ways, but as the store has really taken off, I have found a renewed passion in making sure I have balance in my life.

To me that balance includes having a strong faith and of course a full family life too.  As any working woman knows, keeping all of these balls in the air, is really hard to do.  However: I find that the harder I work at it the more energized I am....it's when I left the balls all drop that I feel most discouraged and exhausted.  Funny, as you would think it would be the other way around.  But really, it's anxiety or stress when I feel like I am doing a bad job that gets me down.  The more plugged in I am to my work, and faith, and family: the more I get done, and the better I feel.  

For me, getting plugged back in though when I have fallen off the wagon of living a balanced life and on schedule is really hard.  If I start to fall apart and let the day just get the better of me, I can end up feeling like I never got to important things business wise or personal wise.  I can end up feeling so exhausted I don't have it in me to go to the grocery store...in which case I dont have the right supplies to make my son's lunch and he has to get school lunch.  I know it makes him feel loved for me to make his lunch, and I like to do that.  But once I start failing, it's easy to keep failing at all I have to do, and start feeling guilty, anxious, and overwhelmed.  To me, there's only two ways out of that downward spiral of anxiety: first compassion and love from the Lord, and then a personal commitment to try again and work off of a schedule.

Here's a scripture passage that speaks to this:

"God met me halfway; He freed me from my anxious fears" (Psalm 34:4)

As far as a schedule goes, the free spirit in me hates this.  But I find it basically mandatory that I adhere to the schedule... Otherwise the day will always overtake you!  A million things will come at you, trying to get you to abandon that plan and schedule, and thereby your resolutions...but if you can stick to it: then at the end of the day you will have made serious progress on all your to do's and feel like you touched each part of your commitments and responsibilities.  So with that, I am off to stick to mine, and I encourage you to make one for yourself too!  It's never too late:)