Tag: Goals

2020: A Year in Books

Published on by Bubbles in the Brain1 Comment

2020 was the year all our plans got massively disrupted. You may recall my ambitious plan at the beginning of the year. Guess how that went.

Surprisingly well, in some regards! My hopes of travel and adventure were dashed, as they should be during a pandemic. I failed utterly at reading the New Testament. There was no one to bake for, working from home, so I didn’t really do much of that. The bushfires ravaged most of the places I was hoping to hike.

So what’s the perfect activity for a chronically ill gal craving mental stimulation? Reading! I read so much as a child, and this year really became the year I embraced that once again. In total, I had a goal of 32 books, and I am very proud to say that I managed it. As lockdowns continue across the globe, I thought it might be good for me to share 30 of the books I read, and maybe spark some ideas for you to add to your list.

Easiest read: ‘Midnight Sun’ by Stephanie Myer

Midnight Sun | BIG W
Image description: the cover of Stephanie Myer’s book, Midnight Sun, which features half a pomegranate with seeds dripping from it on a black background. The title and the author’s name are in white.

If you’re not a Twilight fan, this one is probably not for you. I am an unabashed fan. These books came out in my late teens, and I was the perfect age (and the perfect amount of angsty) to fall in love with them. Whilst I no longer think they’re the pinnacle of literary achievement, my nostalgia and enjoyment remains, and they even featured heavily in my honours thesis.

Accordingly, I was thrilled when Midnight Sun came out. It fills in a lot of gaps in Twilight (why does Edward pull so many weird faces? Does he realise it’s weird to watch girls sleep? How does he find Bella at the end?) and it shows a lot more of Alice’s gift, which involves some fairly clever writing by Myer. It also makes Bella more sympathetic (if not necessarily a better decision-maker). It’s a chunky book, but very easy to read.

Hardest read: ‘The Silmarillion’ by J R R Tolkein

Hard, but worth it. I actually couldn’t get through the written text and switched to the Audible version read by Martin Shaw, who does a stellar job.

The Silmarillion takes a long, long time to get going and can be hard to follow (I constantly forgot who the different subspecies of elves were), but once it picks up, it really picks up. The Lord of the Rings kind of gives the impression that Sauron ruined some nice golden age, but in reality (or canon, I suppose), Middle Earth has been a hot mess from the start. It’s a series of tragedies of Shakespearean proportions, but with Balrogs. If you like LOTR, you should give this one a whirl. Just set aside a lot of time. It’s 14 hours of listening.

Most profound: ‘A Train in Winter’ by Caroline Moorhead

Look, it might be cheating to list a book about the Holocaust as the most profound, but I cannot fail to be touched by the courage, determination and intense suffering of the people who lived through it.

A Train in Winter by Caroline Moorehead - Penguin Books Australia
Image description: the cover of ‘A Train in Winter’, which features three women walking through snow away from the viewer. The left woman has curly brown hair, a brown fur coat, brown trousers and open-heeled brown wedge shoes. The middle woman is a blonde with hair curled at the ends, wearing a blue coat and brown lace-up shows. The right-hand woman has blonde hair, curled at the ends, and wears a red coat over olive trousers, with brown heeled shoes. The title is imposed over their backs, with the subtitle ‘A Story of Resistance, Friendship and Survival in Auschwitz.’

‘A Train in Winter’ follows the stories of the 200 or so women of the French Resistance who were sent to Auschwitz in WW2. Just 49 survived. Reading about the loss, deprivation and cruelty they endured, and the courage and unity that carried the survivors through, made a deep impact on me. Many times I felt like crying as I read. It’s not a cheerful book, but it is an important one.

Most profound (fiction): ‘The Color Purple’ by Alice Walker

This book follows the story of Cece, who has to endure some fairly horrific stuff, but grows and learns and becomes an amazing person. That sounds fairly sappy, but honestly, it’s not a sappy book. It is a tear-jerker, and trigger warning for abuse and sexual assault, but my goodness, what a rollercoaster. Highly recommend.

Most useful: ‘The Barefoot Investor’ by Scott Pape

I’m not normally one for self-help books, or for doing what people tell me to, but I switched banks because of this book. If I really thought about it, I probably knew most of the stuff in it, but I never did think about it. This got me to do that, and then to put it into action.

Most exciting: ‘Trail of Lightning’ by Rebecca Roanhorse

The actual most exciting book I read isn’t yet published, so I won’t write about it here, except to say it was an amazing steampunk spy thriller/adventure. ‘Trail of Lightning’ is a decent second place, with Navajo demon hunters, gods and magic. Lots of action scenes and some tense romance makes for a very thrilling book.

Trail of Lightning (The Sixth World, #1) by Rebecca Roanhorse
Image description: The cover of ‘Trail of Lightning’. A woman stands on top of a red car with a white roof. She has short black hair and is wearing black pants and a black leather jacket with a white top. She holds a long knife and a gun. Lightning forks around her, and the title is written in red across her. A man is driving the car.

Honourable mentions:

‘The Colour of Our Sky’ by Amita Trasi – the story of two Indian girls separated by a crime and then a continent, and their journey to find each other again. TW for sexual assault. Heart-rending but very well told. Recommend.

‘Convenience Store Woman’ by Sayaka Murata – short, funny, easy to read. Tells the story of an unusual woman who works in a convenience store and doesn’t want to change that.

‘Outlander’ by Diane Gabaldon – it’s a long one but a good one. It’s exciting, with a mostly-likeable main character and mostly-attractive love interest. I loved it, but I take points off for the very casual mentions of sexual assault, and the unnecessary frequency of them.

‘The Pearl that Broke its Shell’ by Nadia Hashimi – the story of two woman from different generations in Afghanistan, both of whom experience violence at the hands of a patriarchal society, and both of whom dress as men to survive at various points. It has some pretty heart-breaking moments, but it’s a fantastic story of strength and courage.

‘Boys will be Boys’, by Clementine Ford. I loved Ford’s first book, Fight Like a Girl, and the sequel did not disappoint. It’s a book to make you rage against injustice, and to make you want to rid the world of unfair stereotypes that harm both boys and girls.

‘The Fall of the Gas-lit Empire’ by Rod Duncan. I love me a good alternative historical fiction. This one was a Steampunk epic that follows a young woman who lives in disguise to keep away from the law during a version of Victorian Britain, whilst trying to avoid officers of the International Patent Office.

‘Daughter of Fortune’ by Isabel Allende. I couldn’t put this novel down, but I warn you: the ending is NOT cathartic. It’s great anyway, though – it follows the journey of Eliza, an adopted daughter of a rich family in the 1840s in Chile, who finds herself pregnant and ends up following her missing lover to California.

‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,’ by Maya Angelou. This remarkable woman did not have the easiest life – racism, sexual assault, and a childhood that carried her back and forth across the US. The autobiography is written in an unusual way – thematic, rather than chronological.

‘The Winter People,’ by Jennifer McMahon. This is a horror set in snowy Vermont, spanning a century. It has scary bits, but it’s really horror-lite – minimal gore, and not that much suspense. I enjoyed it, but you’ll see the twist coming.

‘Shameless’, by Nadia Bolz-Weber. Bolz-Weber is a feminist Christian pastor, and ‘Shameless’ looks at how the church treats sex, and how people of all walks of life have dealt with the sexual guilt and shame that conservative Christianity has left them with, whilst still maintaining their faith and their love of God.

‘A Wrinkle in Time’, by Madeleine L’Engle. This is a children’s book, which I didn’t realise when I added it to my to-read list, but I enjoyed it anyway! A good vs evil romp through space and time, about finding your inner courage and strength.

‘Yes Please,’ by Amy Poehler. I haven’t watched Saturday Night Live or Parks and Rec (I tried, but I don’t like Chris Pratt), so a lot of the references went over my head. She’s a good story-teller, though, willing to fess up to her mistakes, and full of a clear passion for theatre. References to her good buddy Harvey Weinstein don’t age well, though.

‘The Boundary’ by Nicole Watson. It’s a murder mystery with magical elements, alcoholism, infidelity, and gambling addition, as well as the racial and historical trauma endured by Indigenous Australians. It’s pretty dark, but I liked it.

Probably won’t read again

‘Fahrenheit 451’, by Ray Bradbury – it just feels like every other piece of 20th century dystopian fiction I’ve read. I’m sure it was revolutionary at the time, but I think I’ve read too many books that felt similar to enjoy it.

‘Great Gatsby’, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. It just bored me. None of the characters were particularly interesting, and none of them really had any redeeming features.

‘Catcher in the Rye’, by JD Salinger. It’s just a teenage boy making stupid decisions for several days, and deciding all the people around him suck in the most boring, repetitive language possible. It’s not that deep.

‘Mrs Dalloway’, by Virginia Woolf. Pretty and lyrical, but not riveting. A re-read is unlikely. I had to listen to this one, because Woolf’s hatred of the full stop makes reading it on paper quite hard.

‘Call of the Wild’, by Jack London. Too sad. A dog gets kidnapped and forced to become a tough, rugged sled dog, goes through all sorts of bad things, and when good things start to happen, it gets worse again.

‘Wide Sargasso Sea’, by Jean Rhys. It’s a version of the events leading up to Bronte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ from the perspective of Bertha, the mad wife. It’s barely comprehensible, and the only reason you’d know it had anything to do with ‘Jane Eyre’ is because Rochester is in it. It’s got no real plot and a bunch of unreliable narrators. I wanted to love it and was really excited to read it, but I ended up hating it.

‘Internment’, by Samira Ahmed. Another one I wanted to love – a speculative fiction about America putting its Muslim population in internment camps, and a young Muslim girl fighting back. Unfortunately, whilst topical, it just didn’t thrill me. The stakes never felt that high, even though they were (death and torture were very possible consequences in the book). Maybe I’m just too old for it?

‘Jesus Feminist’, by Sarah Bessey. This book is hailed in Christian feminist circles as something of a must-read. Unfortunately, I was hoping for something a bit more critical that engaged more heavily with the Bible; this was more of a “the vibe of thing” text. It might be useful for someone just beginning to consider whether their faith can also be feminist, but it was just overly simplistic for me (and unnecessarily wordy).

‘The Communist Manifesto’ by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. I am very sympathetic to the aims of Communism, if not necessarily the methods, but the manifesto itself makes some sweeping assumptions, and I feel like a lot of it doesn’t really hold up in today’s society.

‘The Hedge of Mist’ by Patricia Keannealy-Morrison. It’s book three of the Arthurian legends set in space. It’s very dense, very flowery, and just not that exciting. I loved the first book, ‘The Hawk’s Grey Feather,’ but unfortunately the trilogy got less awesome as it went on, I think.

‘Medea and other plays’ by Euripedes. They’re very easy to read – I got through all four plays in a couple of hours – and I’m glad I read them once, but I don’t think I’ll do it again.

Image description: A person wearing a grey jumper holds a book open on a brown duvet. There is a pair of glasses to their right, and a pair of pumpkins to their left.

That’s my thirty! I’ve got 24 on the list for this year (a new job means less time to read, I suspect), and I’m exciting to keep trying new things. What did you read this year? What did you love or hate? What’s on the list for 2021? Let me know in the comments!

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2020: Hopes for the Future

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Buckle in, friends. This is a long one!

I’ve written before about how the new year is always a time of hope for me – even though it is really just a Tuesday turning to a Wednesday, divided by the fairly arbitrary line of 31 December and 1 January, it always feels like a clean slate. I’ve also written about the importance of people with endo being realistic in their goal-setting. Today, I want to talk about my goals for 2020, and hear yours.

First, a brief note on my 2019 goals. I achieved two of them. They were to improve my Arabic, get my scuba qualification, and read the Old Testament of the Bible. Well, I succeeded in my scuba qualification (a few months later than planned) and will be getting my advanced qualification later this year. I managed the Old Testament with time to spare, and I’ll crack on with the New Testament in 2020. As for Arabic – turns out that is really hard to learn yourself, because trying to get any two courses, youtubers or Arabic-speaking friends to agree on the way to say something is impossible. There are too many dialects, and trying to find a consistent source for Modern Standard Arabic was a wild goose chase. However, I did start Mandarin lessons, and I can now tell you ‘Wo mao feichang shuai,’ (my cat is very handsome), although apparently you should only say ‘shuai’ about people, not cats, even though Max is a very handsome cat indeed.

IMG_0023.jpg
Image description: A ginger striped cat with green eyes is lying on his side on a concrete floor, looking just below the camera. There is a garage roller door behind him.

Ultimately, I think I took the lessons from my own post to heart, and the Arabic failure was because I lacked resources (which I should have researched more) rather than because my goal-setting process was flawed.

This year, my goals are a little different. I still want to finish off the Bible by reading the New Testament, which is fairly easy to plan out and achieve; it just requires a bit of commitment. My other two are more projects than goals.

Project 20 in 2020

My first project is very involved. Have you heard of the ’20 in 2020′ craze that’s sweeping the bullet-journalling community? Basically, you set 20 goals to complete in the year 2020 – bonus points if they somehow incorporate the number 20 (e.g. 20 days with no social media, 20 days of walking 20k steps or more, etc). Now, trying to do 20 sets of 20 things isn’t realistic for me, so some (most) of my goals are per month instead. I’ll be trying the following:

  1. Publish 20 posts on this blog!
  2. Reading 12 types of books I don’t normally read (e.g. I’m a fantasy/sci-fi girl, and rarely read autobiographies);
  3. Reading 20 books by women (my first list was a little male-heavy; this list is also diverse in terms of ethnicity and genre);
  4. Watching 12 movies I don’t normally watch (I’ve committed myself to such cinematic horrors as a gangster film and a sports film – two genres I would never normally touch);
  5. Listen to 20 new artists (I felt like 20 works for this category as it is pretty easy to listen to music – please leave some recommendations in the comments!);
  6. Go on 12 walks around the local region;
  7. Go on 12 adventures (a coast trip, more scuba, a day at a museum, laser tag – anything fun and different);
  8. Go on 12 dates with my husband;
  9. Run 20km per month (or swim 4km, if running isn’t possible);
  10. Go to the gym twice a week;
  11. Save 20% of my income;
  12. Write monthly emails or letters to my grandparents;
  13. Write monthly notes to my sponsor child;
  14. Bake 12 new things;
  15. Cook 12 new meals;
  16. Complete 12 art projects;
  17. Do 12 pieces of calligraphy;
  18. Complete 12 pages in my beautiful Citrus Book Bindery journal that my wonderful parents bought me for Christmas;
  19. Get rid of 20 items of clothing (that is a net reduction – if I buy 20 new things and get rid of 20 old things, that doesn’t count – I’d have to get rid of 40 old things. Getting rid of can mean selling, donating, re-purposing, or binning only if it is beyond salvation, as a way of trying to live green).
  20. Finish one computer game per quarter (I’m terrible for buying a bunch of games and then just not finishing them, unless they are Batman or Tomb Raider).

Now, this may be an epic failure, because on the face of it, it breaks a lot of the rules I set out in my goal-setting post. However, take this list with a pinch of salt, because it has two important rules.

  1. My health comes first. If trying to complete these things starts to cause my health to decline, everything else takes a backburner, no guilt, until things are back where they should be.
  2. Even if I remain in perfect health all year, this is a list to try, not a list I will berate myself for not completing. The aim of this list is to be open-minded, try new things, have adventures, and see if I can be a more well-rounded, better-educated person with more experiences at the end of it. I want it to make me into someone who doesn’t put things off for another day (which tends to result in them not getting done ever). If I manage that, this is a success, even if I don’t complete a single category on this list.

I want to do it all, but if I can’t, I’m not going to be unhappy with myself. I will only be unhappy with myself if I don’t even try.

You’ll notice I haven’t put traditional New Year’s guilt goals in there (lose 20 kilos, for example). This list is about making me better and happier through new experiences and good habits, not about guilt.

Project Better Life

My second project is to take control of my life again. Last year, my goals related to singular events that I wanted to achieve, and once achieved (or abandoned) I kind of just drifted along a bit. This year, my focus is broader.

What does reclaiming my life look like? Well, it involves the following:

  1. Using my time productively: instead of mindlessly scrolling the internets or watching something on Netflix I’ve seen a hundred times before, I’m going to use the time in furtherance of my other goals. That might mean reading one of the books from the above list, using my commute to listen to Audible or a new artists,, spending time with my husband, or going to a gym class. My time is valuable and could be used for so many good things. I don’t want to waste it any more.
  2. Follow the two-minute rule: if a task can be done in two minutes, do it. That means no more floordrobe, breakfasts prepped ahead of time, etc.
  3. Being consistent and persevering until I have good habits: I’m going to set myself tasks  and schedules(flexible and subject to illness) to see what sticks and what I can keep up with. For instance, I wake up earlier than my husband, so if I can get a load of laundry into the machine on Saturday mornings before he does, I’ll actually have my favourite undies clean and ready to go each week instead of having to resort to the Emergency Knickers (you know, the ones that aren’t that comfy and maybe give you a wedgie but you just can’t justify throwing them out so you shove them into the back of the drawer and wear them when the other ones aren’t available. I’m sure I’m not the only person with this sort of underpants division). Once things are automatic, they’ll be easier to keep up.
  4. Acting mindfully, deliberately, in pursuit of my long- and short-term goals, and in support of my mental and physical health. I want the choices of what I eat, what I use my time for, what I do at work, to be deliberate and take me in a specific direction. I am going to check back in with my goals regularly to make sure I stay on track.

The reason for this project is simple: endo – any chronic illness, really – robs you of control. I already know that when I have a habit, it is easier to keep it up when I’m lacking in spoons and just want to collapse. I know I sound like a self-help book right now, but I’m feeling positive. I want to ride this wave of energy through the first quarter of the new year and into new, good habits. Once I hit the quarter-year crisis, hopefully I’ll be fore-armed and be able to keep things up on a more long-term basis.

You’ll notice none of the above relate to my endometriosis specifically. You just can’t plan for or control chronic illness. All you can do is deal with it as it happens and keep your mental health strong.

Once again, I’m using my Leaders in Heels ‘Make It Happen‘ planner as a goal-setting tool. I’m not sponsored by LIH or anything; I just really love this planner. It has a great layout and devotes a heap of space to breaking your goals down and referring back to them.

What are your goals and plans, dear readers? What do you want to change this year, if anything? Do you set goals? Once again, please drop recommendations for new music in the comments – new adventures too! I’d also love to hear your thoughts on what you want to see in Bubbles in the Brain this year. Do you have questions about endo you want answered? Topics you wish I’d write about? Let me know.

 

Setting Goals

Published on by Bubbles in the Brain1 Comment

It can be really hard to set goals when you are chronically ill.  You never know if your illness will get in the way of you achieving them, so sometimes you wonder, “why even bother?”  It’s particularly hard at this time of year with all the instagramspirational quotes that start floating around, about how the only barrier is your mindset and all that nonsense.

I still think it is worth it, though.  Without goals, the year ahead can stretch away like the road across the Hay Plains on a hot day – empty, tedious, and exhausting.

Hay Plains - Highway
Image description: A road in the Hay Plains.  A plain tarmac road in very flat, dry country stretching off under a big blue sky.  A single “kangaroo crossing” sign.  https://travelista.club/guides/australia-the-hay-plains/

I find setting goals helps add something to the landscape.  It lets me feel accomplished when I achieve them and gives me something a little closer that endless horizon to rest my eyes on.

There’s a couple of tricks to it, though, in order to prevent you from feeling hopeless or overwhelmed.  Here are mine:-

1.  Use the S.M.A.R.T. method

If it is a big goal, like that favourite of new year resolutions, losing weight, don’t just have that general concept floating around.  The SMART method says that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.  In other words:-

  • Don’t make your goals too vague.  If you can’t say what success will look like, how will you know when you’ve achieved it?  A generally vague goal, like, “be a better person” is only going to be useful if you can qualify exactly what you mean by that.  Being specific about your steps to achieving that goal is also really useful.  For instance, one of my goals this year is to finish reading the Old Testament.  I have set out specific milestones of when exactly I want to finish each book, and how much I need to read each day to achieve that.
  • To quote lifestyle website YourCoach, “Measurable goals means that you identify exactly what it is you will see, hear and feel when you reach your goal.”  In other words, what will success look like?  Sometimes it’s really obvious – I’ll know when I’ve reached my goal of qualifying as a SCUBA diver when I get my qualification.  In others, it’s a little harder.  For example, I’ll know that I’ve reached my goal of improving my Arabic when I can read any word, even if I can’t translate it, and have a basic conversation about specific subjects.
  • Attainable is the most important one for spoonies.  If you can’t walk 1km without pain, don’t set your sights on climbing Mt Everest this year.  Kosciuszko is probably out of reach too.  I’m not saying you shouldn’t aim high, but aiming high should also be within reality.  “Improve my fitness” and setting smaller, more defined goals might be a more successful choice.  If you set the bar way too high and consistently fail to reach it, your goals will feel like a burden rather than a motivation, and you’ll feel like a failure.  That’s not the point of having goals.
  • Relevant is the “why” for your goal.  Why do you want to achieve the thing?  I want to speak Arabic because I love learning new languages and it’s a handy one to have.  I want to learn to SCUBA dive because I tried it once and it was amazing and I want to be able to do it regularly and safely.  I want to finish the Old Testament because it is important to me to know the Bible so I can better understand my own faith.  I also think goals shouldn’t be too burdensome.  If you are dragging your way through a Goodreads classic reading list because you feel like you have to in order to be a better person but you actually hate classic literature, then drop it.  Find a goal that you won’t hate.  I love classic literature but reading it won’t make you a better person, particularly if you hate every second of it.
  • The original timeliness aspect of SMART planning suggests deadlines, because motivate people into action.  That’s good if those deadlines are going to be achievable, but for spoonies I feel like timelines might be better than deadlines.  It is really hard for us to commit to things with 100% certainty, and deadlines are no different.  Timelines are more suggestions than hard and fast “it must be done by now or else”.  We need still need timeframes for motivation and to make our goals realistic, but we also need flexibility.

On that note…

2.  Be flexible

If you don’t achieve your goal within the specified timeframe, it is not the end of the world (unless your goal is to save the world and there’s some sort of ticking clock I don’t know about, in which case, please don’t be flexible).  I’ve set what I think are realistic goals.  Ideally, I’d like to qualify as a diver by early March, but I may have yet more unforeseen medical expenses or bouts of unpaid sick leave which mean I simply can’t do it financially.  If it can’t happen then, that’s fine.  I can learn to be a mermaid some other time.  Our lives are made up of constant compromises, and sometimes even our big goals have to take a back seat.  That’s totally ok, and you shouldn’t feel like a failure or berate yourself if that happens.  Timeframes may change.  An entire goal may become impossible.  Chances are, it’s not your fault.

That being said…

3.  Hold yourself accountable

This is one of those hard ones where you have to strike a balance between not letting your illness become an excuse not to do something you actually could do, and forgiving yourself when it prevents you from doing something you wanted to.  If you are having a good day, use it (but don’t overdo it).  If you are having a bad day, do what you can but don’t force yourself past your own limits.  Allow yourself time to rest and recover, but don’t let it turn into laziness and slacking off.  Of course, this needs to be set by your standards and your body, not society’s standards in general.  They may think time you need for recovery is slacking off.  It is not.  Don’t buy into that.

So, those are my top three.  I also want to share the planner I’m using this year, because it is absolutely great for goal setting.  I realised I was running out of time, energy and motivation to keep up with a bullet journal and I needed to sacrifice the flexibility it offered me in favour of something pre-planned.  For Christmas my parents gave me this beautiful set from Leaders in Heels.

Make It Happen Bundle
Image Description: a pink notebook with “Nevertheless, She Persisted” on the front, a dark blue note book with, “Think Big, Dream Bigger, Set Goals, Make it Happen – Daily Planner” on the front, and a lilac note book with “Make It Happen – The Leaders in Heels Planner” on the front.  

Whilst it is a little heavy on inspirational quotes and a very shallow, marketable form of  feminism, it does have all the functions I need.  The weekly planner in particular has a big focus on goal-setting using the SMART method, with room for three primary goals (a sensible number, I think).  It has annual, quarterly and monthly reviews, which really encourage reflection and accountability.  The daily planner also has three daily goals.  So far, I’ve had a very productive year.  Normally I flounder a lot when I’m off work because I have no schedule, no clear goals and no accountability.  Sitting down at the beginning of the day and writing down what I want to achieve gives me focus and drive, and it is sooooo satisfying when I achieve all the things on my list.  The third book is just a notebook so I can still do bullet journalling things like make a lot of lists.  9.5/10.  I take half a point off because the weekly planner smooshes Saturday and Sunday together, which I hate.

 

What are your goals for this year?  Do you have plans on how to achieve them?  Will you be rewarding yourself if you get there?  Let me know in the comments.  I also invite my readers to keep me accountable on my goals and nag me throughout the year about achieving them.