Tuesday Slice: Morning pages and my 2021 OLW

 

Inspired by a friend who is a new Slicer but a practiced writer, I have begun writing morning pages. I can't even find my unread copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way, but I know that morning pages are one of the recommended practices.  I ordered a dot grid notebook from Erin Condren, the one where you could put your "one word" on the cover and have it repeated over and over in the middle center, and then promptly covered that up with a cute winter cover. Maybe that's a Freudian slip, my avoidance of self-accountability and reflection--my focus of the year.

I found the perfect poster for my OLW on Canva, tweaked it a bit for my tastes, and printed it out to guide me while I set my goals and intentions for 2021.  I am allllll about the planning, but rarely stop to reflect and gauge results.

I have a hard time being accountable to myself.  And when I was staring at my goals pages in a workbook I use for such, I realized that I'd been writing the same goals for years...without results.  I was missing concrete action plans, the kind of SMART goals I used to write for my students' IEPs (not that I really miss doing that--I miss the students, but not the IEP paperwork).  I have been using my planners as to-do lists with just a peek now and then at my goals for maybe the first two months of the year.  Then December comes round with a look back...and no results to speak of.

I have talked about this before, I know.  Maybe even written a Slice about it.  I have read books about it, had support readily available, and still not followed through.  Maybe writing about it in morning pages will push me forward, if I take off the cutesy cover and let that one little word imprint itself on my mind.