5 Things I Want to Master Before My Birthday

Think of this as a mini bucket list.

I have mentioned how I want to get my life more figured out before my 25th birthday. That is in October so I have a deadline.

As a thorough Type 4, I have high standards for myself. My Type 2 tempers that a little with being a bit more relaxed about things, but at times my Type 4 fights back and accuses my Type 2 for settling for mediocrity. There are a few, maybe more, areas where my critical eye sees the possibility of improvement.

I'm not going to lie: I'm not super excited about doing these Improvement posts which probably means I really need to do it for myself. Change is hard and so is self-examination. Here it goes.

1. Exercise

I've already been working on getting more consistent about exercising. I love doing my morning yoga and I've gotten to the point where my days feels off if I miss my morning refresher.

I've cobbled together my own routine. I start with the warm-up from Maya Fiennes' Root Chakra video before doing a round of leg stretches, and close with some Sun Salutations. I feel good about it.

I would like to go the next step of incorporating more toning exercises to target my trouble areas. These don't have to happen all at once, but I'd like to see more thigh trimming, triceps toning, and fix my diastasis recti. Thanks to Pintrest I have plenty of possible workouts on hand to try.

2. Food 

From the beginning of our marriage, meal planning has been a big goal of mine. It's taken me almost five years to make any big progress here.

My big breakthrough has been switching to once a month freezer cooking. I love it. I get all the prep done in one day, I make sure I have a good variety of meals to avoid food boredom (there's my T1 popping out), and most of the meals I use are crock pot recipes. The foundation is getting in place.

The room for improvement is less with dinners and more with lunches and snacks. It's not like I don't have food on hand. That is surely not the problem. But I would like to make more deliberate choices in these areas. I have a mini library of diet books that I'm going to look to for more direction in how to go about reining in my impulsiveness when it comes to my less-supervised food choices.

3. Diet

I am also planning on doing another round of the Whole 30 regiment come August.

I've already done this diet once back in February 2015 and I felt I had great success with it. I didn't lose a whole lot of weight on in (only about 5 pounds, nothing to sniff at), but I did lose some inches and my skin cleared up wonderfully.

Cutting refined grains and other junk for a month is hard but definitely worth it. I'm really looking forward to it, mostly for the acne clearing benefits. My "Sugar Dragon" has gotten out of control and it visibly "breathes" through my face and I get quite self-conscious about it.

4. Scar Removal

On the subject of my face, I don't think I get super bad acne, but what I do get I have a hard time leaving alone. So I'm looking for ways to erase my scars.

I recently discovered a line of products from Rodan and Fields that sounds really effective, but before I even really consider shelling out the $500 I'd like to see what I can accomplish with things a little more within my reach.

Again, thanks to Pintrest, I have plenty of ideas to try.

5. A More Uncluttered Life 

My first thought in regards to clutter is strictly all the physical stuff of life. I'm not calling my house a mess generally speaking, but we just have so much stuff. Fortunately we have a bigger house to hold all of it but it still gets under my skin just how much stuff we have. And it just feels so good to be able to clear out the junk we don't need hanging around.

Case in point, we just went through our library of books and were able to move several boxes of books out. The funny thing is that the point of this exercise was to make room for the books we know we'll want to get in the future.

I forgot to take pictures so there won't be a separate post about this. You'll have to take my word when I say that, visually, it doesn't really look like we made a dent, but aesthetically speaking it looks a lot better. Before, a lot of the books were just stacked according to size to get more on the shelves. Now everything is upright with the spines all facing out, so there is more color if nothing else.

This was an instance of assessing our belongings in a Good-Better-Best standard. In general, I'd like to lean more towards the Quality over Quantity view, working to get to the Less is More theory.

I think there can also be a metaphysical kind of clutter to be cleared out as well.

Here there is another motto I'm working on adapting. I picked it up from Freakonomics. Recently they did a "Self-Improvement Month" series of podcasts. In the "How to Become Great at Just About Anything" episode there was great focus on the work of Anders Ericsson's work on "deliberate practice".

For me, the "deliberate" part of the phrase is what keeps bouncing around my brain. I'd like to be more deliberate in all areas of my life; to live more "on purpose" and less "just because".

So I hope you like Before and After posts as much as I do because there are going to be quite a few in my future.