What If Your Goals Need A Reset

Joy isn’t something we have to chase down or earn. It’s already here, tucked into the ordinary: a butterfly outside the window, the first sip of coffee, a gentle breeze on a dog walk, the smell of dinner on the stove, the relief of a soft bed at night. When the world feels noisy, I’ve learned that the real “trick” is attention. The more we practice noticing, the more joy we actually experience.

I’m Sally Burlington, and I’m getting practical about how journaling helps me do that noticing. My journaling isn’t pages of polished writing. It’s a way to sort my brain, quiet the mental clutter, and make intentional decisions about what I want to focus on. I share why I lean into bullet points and lists, why I use planners as journaling tools (not for calendar management), and how monthly prompts plus a month-in-review can anchor gratitude, progress, and reflection.

We also talk about quarterly resets and why goals set during the holiday season sometimes stop resonating by spring. I explain how I adapt rigid planner pages with sticker paper so my journal meets me where I am, plus a simple practice I call “journal mining” to flip back through old entries and spot themes you might be missing.

And yes, I offer a confession: I bought a wellness journal to support habits like strength training, whole foods, protein, sleep, and meditation and then didn’t open it for an entire quarter. That moment turns into a bigger takeaway about introspection, seasons, and asking whether a goal or tool truly fits your life right now. If this helps you breathe easier and refocus, subscribe, share the show with a friend, and leave a review so more listeners can find Create Harmony.

To learn more, go to mycreateharmony.com 

Transcript

Noticing Everyday Joy

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome back to the Create Harmony Podcast. And our focus here is the joy that is around us all the time. It's easy to forget about that in the noise and chaos of the world. It's just nestled in little things. It's the butterfly that you see out the window, or the feel of a gentle spring breeze on your face when you're walking the dog through the neighborhood. It's the taste of your first sip of coffee in the morning. It's what it feels like when you lay down in your soft bed at night. Maybe it's the laugh of a loved one, or time out with friends. It's the smell of dinner cooking on the stove. All of these things hold a tiny little piece of joy. And the trick is noticing it. There is that joy available to us at all times, and all we have to do is shift our attention there, get in the habit of noticing it, and we experience so much more joy in our lives. So as a community here at Create Harmony, that's what we're all about. Really noticing joy and celebrating it. This is episode 168, and I am your host, Sally Burlington. And today we are going to talk about journaling. Now, I've shared with you that I like to journal. So if you've been around for a while, you know that I do some journaling. And I am not sure what you thought I meant when I said journal. I maybe have shared parts of my process before. We're going to revisit that again. I'm not sure if you envisioned me writing page after page of lovely prose or what what you thought, what journaling is for me. But what I want to say about that today is that for me, journaling is a process of me sorting my brain and sort of calming down the mental clutter that's up there and making decisions about what I want to keep my focus on or my attention on because I'm not great at keeping my attention on things. My my attention span is short and it likes to jump all around. So journaling for me helps me be intentional about that process and really notice what I want to focus on. So I have several different types of journals. I have shared in the past that I really just I just love to write something down on a piece of paper. I am old school that way, that I just like to write things down. But I don't write out longhand or prose typically. I will do that occasionally, but my journaling style is a little bit more bullet and a little bit more list styling. And it's somewhere between planner and journal. I use planners as my journaling tools. I don't use them for calendar management. I have whole different tools for that that are digital, but I do use a planner style because I found that that sort of has a rhythm that moves with me. And I have several, I have a couple different styles of that. I have one that is sort of a monthly quarterly rhythm, and it's from a company called Cultivate What Matters. And I this is not a, I don't get anything for endorsing them, but I just really like their products. And the reason I like it is because it helps me focus on what I want to tend to, what I want to cultivate. So the way that they have it happen is that at the beginning of the year or prior to the beginning of the year, you set some goals for yourself. You can set as many or as few as you like. And you go through a whole process at the beginning of the planner. There's pages for you to write down the things that are important to you and the things that you want to value and what's you can create some art about it, you can write a poem about it, whatever you want to do, to just focus on it. It sort of some prompts that pull that out, what's important to you. Here's what I find a little challenging about that process is because I want you to notice that I said prior to the beginning of the year, which if you think about it, prior to the beginning of the year is the holiday season. That's what's immediately prior to the beginning of our calendar year. And that makes it tricky because sometimes that means I have to set goals for the next year in the middle of or do some really deep thinking in the middle of the holiday chaos. And I so I put some goals down and then, you know, we go forward. But then you have each month, you have a chance to reflect again. In every month, there are there's a page at the beginning of the month that you write down the things that are you're important to do's, your goals that you want to make progress on, what's on your calendar and what's on your mind. So I love that those four prompts. You it has four boxes and you write things down about that. And then there are ways that you can sort of drill that down, take it a little deeper. I don't, that doesn't really work for me. So what I do instead is that I take a full sheet of sticker paper and I just, or a half sheet of sticker paper, and I just sticker over what's in the planner. So then that gives me the opportunity to write whatever I need for that month. And lots of times I will write down people that I'm praying for or a list of things that are on my mind, or uh sometimes I'll I'll write current situation and I just list things or write things about it. And that helps me to just have the freedom to where to meet myself wherever I am in that month. And I also at the end of every month, there is a prompt that you go back and review. It's called month in review, and you review your favorite memories, the action steps you're really proud of. You focus on some gratitude. There's a prompt for gratitude, goals that are going well, and then you look at what's not working, and finally you write down what you've read or what you've listened to. And the thing I like about that monthly review is that a lot of it is what's going well, what you did about the things that you're focusing on. And I I love that sort of that posture when I am going through my journal. And then every, you know, remember that I said that you have to set your goals in the holiday season, which is tricky. The quarterly rhythm part of this is that every quarter you get a chance to reassess that. You sort of do a reset. And if you set some goals at the first of the year that really don't resonate for you once you've gotten yourself to maybe April, you can just reframe those. You start again. You maybe subtract some of those goals, maybe you add some things that you didn't remember when you were, you know, cheerfully celebrating the holidays. So that's what I like about it. It gives you a chance to it. There's a section for like a quarterly reset at each switching of the quarter. And I love, I love that process. I do use some sticker paper for some of that too, so that I can just think more deeply for my own self, but that's just my my process. And then I have a daily planner from a company called Day Designer. And what I do there is I I like being able to sometimes write things that are a little more granular, to go a little deeper at times. And if you were to look back through, I also have a process that I call journal mining. Before we get to the daily planning, let me tell you about this. I have a process that I call journal mining, which means I go back through my journal and sometimes, you know, flip back through the pages and look at what's happening. It helps me discover themes that are running through my life. Sometimes it helps me rediscover something that I wanted to focus on that maybe has gotten lost. Maybe I've lost the thread of. But it doesn't have to be like you don't need to spend hours on this. You don't have to go back through every single page of every single journal. But just flipping back and looking, reflecting again, journal mining, you're gonna discover some gems in there. And if you were to take my daily journal from last year and you were gonna mine that, you might see that I have periods of time, like there might be three weeks where I write in that journal every single day. And I've got it, you know, with my stickers and decorated and just like I want it. But then there might be another whole set of three weeks where I didn't even open that journal at all. And that is because maybe I'm traveling or I'm having a busier season or I'm doing something else, or or I just don't need the process of daily journaling to serve me. And I don't stress about it. I do not consider it a report that I am needing to turn in for some sort of grade. I have it there if I want it, but I don't fret if I don't need it. If I don't rediscover it, that's fine. That may not work for you, but that's what works for me to have those tools that are available. And so at this point, I will confess to you, here's another way that I respond to journaling. When I was setting my goals at the beginning of the year, I had said that I one of the things that I wanted to focus on a little bit more was wellness because I felt like I had taken a few steps away, not just in the holiday season, but during some of the busier, we've had some busy past couple of years. And I felt like I had taken a couple of steps away from my own wellness practices. Maybe I was eating a little more processed food that I like, and I wanted to get back to whole plants and vegetables and things that are important. Wasn't doing quite enough strength training, not doing quite enough, eating quite enough protein, just the things that I know that are important. I am a what I call healthy-ish person. I it's not like I'm eating fast food every meal, but there were just some things that I wanted to elevate, focus on a little bit more. So from Cultivate What Matters, I bought myself a wellness journal. It's a whole journal about how to evaluate your wellness. And I was hoping that what I would do is not only see the things that I was wanting more of, needing to do more of, but also notice the things that I was doing really well. Maybe I'm meditating regularly, maybe I am getting good, good night's sleep. You know, all the other parts of wellness that I was doing really well, I wanted to focus on that too. And that was a goal that I set at the beginning of the quarter. And we are now one whole quarter has elapsed, and I have not even opened that wellness journal. This is my confession to you. I have not opened it, nothing has happened. So when I reframed my goals, I had to ask myself, is that what I need? Do I need the wellness journal? What is the reason that I haven't done anything about it? Do I need to keep that goal or figure out a different way to respond to that information? And that's still a question mark. I still don't know the answer to that yet. But I just wanted to share that with you because sometimes in journaling and planning or reflection, you just realize that that's not what you needed then, that this is not the season for that. We did an episode last week about not having to bloom all at once. And sometimes you just that's not the blossom that wants to bloom right then. So hope that can be a source of inspiration for you in the areas of your life that maybe you're not getting to, that you thought you were gonna do, or even you wrote down that you were gonna do, but it didn't come together. Sometimes what that means is that you just ask yourself the question. Sometimes you need to ask yourself the question and then you say, you know what, get on that. But then other times you ask yourself the question and you realize that didn't really fit me, and I I didn't really need to do that in the first place. And that's the purpose of introspection. So hopefully you'll feel inspired by that and be able to apply that to your life. So for our closing today, I'm going to share a quote from a book called Cheering You On. And it's sort of along the veins of planning, and it goes like this. We can trust God's plan in our lives, even when we have no idea what our future may hold. And that was said by Shelly Wildman. So thanks so much for joining us today as we talked through the different ways that I do journaling and what journaling means to me. And hopefully you found some nuggets of wisdom there for yourself. We'd love for you to come back next week and join us for some more spring content. And until next time, peace.