Monday, February 7, 2011

Monday Thoughts

Last week was a long, hard, no good very bad week.  I'm glad it's over.  But today is a new day and even though the new week begins on Sunday, I always feel like the week really starts on Monday.  So, I am going to look forward to a new week and hope it is better than the last one.

My grandma used to be somebody pretty famous in our church.  She was known by millions in our church around the world and was also known by a large number of people in the US who were/are not members of our faith.  She was the General Relief Society President of our Church for the first 10 years of my life (the Relief Society is the women's organization in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, incidentally, it is the largest organization for women in the world).  She gave lots of speeches.  In one of those speeches she said this, "Goals are stars to steer by, not sticks to beat yourself with."  Somehow I always forget that last part.  I remember that my goals are important for guiding me to do better and be better, but I forget not to start beating myself up when I don't accomplish my goals. 

At this point in the year I have always made goals and I usually have done OK with some and completely forgotten others.  This is also always the time of year when I get mad at myself because I have not accomplished my goals.  It's hard not to.  Last night Dr. D had the kiddos get out their goal list & we also pulled out our family goal list, then he did something amazing.  He had us go through the goals one by one and evaluate them.  We talked about how it was going.  We had made some progress on some of our goals, and we weren't doing very well on some of the others.  The ones that weren't going very well we talked about and decided to do better.  It was like making the goal over again.  I think I need to do the same thing with my personal goals because I'm black and blue from beating myself up over what I haven't done.  I guess this is my reminder that what my grandma said needs to be true, "Goals are stars to steer by, not stick to beat yourself with."

6 comments:

Traci said...

What a great quote! Thanks for the reminder.

Amanda said...

One of my religion professors at BYU liked to remind us that if we could only love ourselves as much as the Savior loves us that we would be much easier on ourselves. That has really stuck with me. It's not about making excuses, but just realizing that we ARE a work in progress and won't be perfect all at once.

Richelle said...

I heard that quote from your Grandma once and even wrote it down. Thanks for the great reminder.

Andrea said...

What a wise women--there is a lot of truth in that quote. I will try to remember that...thanks, Leslie!

Andrea said...

I meant woman--I need to go to bed. :)

Anonymous said...

Thats so true! Its so easy to get fixated on reaching that end goal and not taking satisfaction in what you've done to get there!
Great blog by the way :D