New Year, Same Dream

Well hello there 2020!! Man how we have been waiting for you! I feel like 2020 sounds more surreal than 2010 like when it was 2009 you weren’t like woah 2010!! It didn’t seem that different, but 2020 sounds so futuristic to me. My sister graduates high school in 2021 and I remember always looking at her graduation class when we were younger as that was lightyears away. It’s crazy as we look at 2020 to even imagine 2030. Where will we be in ten years? Look at where you were 10 year ago! Ten years ago I was just starting high school, I had no idea where I would go to college, what my first job would be, what city I would live in. These past ten years brought an incredible amount of change and growth for me.

I am excited to look back in 2030 (WOW!) and look at the last ten years and see my path. I think this year is so unique from most New Year’s because it is the start of a decade. Instead of just setting goals you hope to accomplish in 2020, take a look at the next five years, the next ten years and try to map out some general ideas of where you hope you’ll be by 2030.

I am a huge goal setter, and although I used to not be entirely into writing down NYE’s resolutions, I think you can still set goals for yourself. If you have been following me for awhile, you have seen me posting about New Years goals and resolutions for a few weeks and I thought I would open up and share what some of my personal as well as business goals are.

PERSONAL GOALS

First, I’ll look at my personal goals because I think it is really important to reflect on yourself and find ways to improve your habits and well being. No one is perfect and you should always be striving to be a better individual both to yourself and those around you.

One of the biggest things I want to work on with myself is being more present. I talked about this in my experiences gift guide blog post and it truly is so important and something I have majorly struggled with in 2019. This was my first full year of blogging and I was choosing to add significantly more day-to-day responsibilities and obligations to my life. This has positively and negatively affected those around me. Although they will never admit it, I feel like sometimes my personal relationships can suffer because of this. I need to be more present in the moment and not always worrying about how I should be doing something else for the blog. Being your own boss is great, but it also means you are your biggest critic and I constantly feel like I could be doing more. But I am only one person and I can’t let my relationships suffer because of my dream. I am striving to remind myself to be present while also not feeling guilty for not doing enough.

In relation to this, one of my goals for 2020 is to wake up earlier. I think this will allow me more time to set aside time for me and give my personal relationships more time to flourish! I am the worst when it comes to waking up early. I wrote a blog post about this in early 2019 and I am striving to follow my own advice. I need to wake up earlier! I am so much happier when I do this, I can workout in the morning and accomplish things for myself that make my day easier. This in turn will better help my personal relationships!

BUSINESS GOALS

Onto the business goals I have for Styled Zebra. Wow, everytime I get to sit down and think of goals for this platform I get so excited about all the possibilities. I have a slew of lists on my phone and I diligently plan out content in an excel document with notes for myself on how I can improve, what worked well, etc. This has been an absolute game changer for my blog. Planning out content is so important and still something I am working on being even better about. I really want to ensure I am creating content around my photos and not the other way around. Sometimes I feel like I can get so caught up in the day-to-day like I have to post and have to get it done and I start rushing and my content suffers. When I really plan and strive to create content around my photos, I am so much prouder of my work and I think that shows through my feed.

I also want to drive more traffic to other platforms and expand Styled Zebra on a multi-platform scale. I started out with just the website and Instagram and I don’t ever want my blog to be just on one platform. This is so important when you think about a ten year plan. Look at Vine for example, it just went away overnight so if your blog solely exists on Instagram and the trends change (which it likely won’t) your blog is only based on one platform. This is why I have always strived to create value out of my website and have it be a destination not an extension of my Instagram. I am also looking at the future generation of shoppers and consumers and what platforms they are using and how I could create content on a higher level that feeds to platforms where the next generation is active on.

LAST YEAR’S GOALS & RESOLUTIONS

I also wanted to take a look at my goals from 2019 and see if I was able to accomplish those! You can view the full post here, my biggest thing I wanted to work on was to stop wishing my life away. I constantly found myself watching the clock with “can’t wait for the weekend” or “how many more minutes of this do I have left.” I really think I accomplished this in 2019, I caught myself many, many times and really made an effort to be thankful for the moment.

My other goal was to stop apologizing when it is not warranted. I was really great about this in the beginning of the year, but have caught myself falling back in the past few months. I hope to get better at this in 2020! Adding it back to my list.

The last one is so important and I truly think it should be on my list every year. Fall more in love with yourself. I really strived to do this in 2019 and I can’t wait to do it more in 2020. Being confident and comfortable in your own skin is so important and I can’t stress enough how important it is to love yourself!! Be kind to yourself and remember how far you have come and accomplished. This is why goal setting is so important so you can look back and be like YES I accomplished that. I look back at my 2019 goals and am proud of what I have accomplished and how much I have grown and I can’t wait to see what 2020 has in store for me and this platform.

Styled Zebra

New Year, Same Dream