♬“It’s the most stressful time of the year” ♬

When I was a kid, Christmas really was the most wonderful time of the year.

Then I grew up, and now I know why it was so wonderful for us kids — because the adults in our lives were stressing-the-heck-out trying to make it so.

You’re probably feeling it too.

Family obligations. Gift shopping. Social events. Scrambling to get all your business done before you’ll be out for a few days. Accommodating schedule changes from your colleagues. Plus the substantial end-of-year work that’s standard procedure for most community-driven organizations.

In the midst of all that, I hope you’re making time to think about the two major classifications of every task you might undertake:

Obligations and aspirations

• Obligations are those things we feel we must do, or risk disappointing people who matter to us.

• Aspirations are those things we want to achieve, even though nobody’s expecting it.

We probably all know they’re both valuable and important.

We’re just not usually very good at thinking about them at the same time.

Ironically, most of us spend lots of time in December thinking about obligations, and as soon as New Year’s day is in sight, we start thinking about our aspirations.

In case you haven’t noticed, stressing out for a month over our obligations is not exactly the best warm-up for taking care of our aspirations.

Here’s the thing:

When’s the best time to think about our obligations? Every day.

And the best time to think about our aspirations? You guessed it: every day.

Sure, you “have to” take care of your obligations. But if you don’t also take care of your aspirations, who will?

All the best,
A.