Hi, it’s Dr. Denise Taylor and I’m here at the wood and I wanted to talk to you about a review of the year. Now, generally you would do this at the six-month mark, but a bit like New Year’s resolutions you can do them at any time. And if we look back to the beginning of the year, we can think about what life was like, with the weather, our homes, our families, our work, however we’re developing ourselves and we may have had some plans and we may have had a lot of plans.

Maybe we’ve just not managed to do everything that we set out to do. I just wanted to let you know that’s okay.

Keep watching for the outtake at the end!

You know, sometimes we set ourselves stretch goals and these goals, they seem good at the time, but they’re just too much to do. And at other times, we don’t set a big enough goal and we could easily have done more if only we thought about it.

So, I’d like you to spend some time either today just after watching this or at some point in the future and just think back to the start of the year, March or whenever it happens to be, when you’d set yourself some goals, some targets, some plans for what it is that you wanted to do, and see how far have you come?

You know what’s gone well, what have you never got round to starting. Give yourself a big hug for all the things that have gone well, and don’t beat up yourself for the things that you didn’t do, because stuff will have happened. Things can affect us mentally, physically, psychologically, et cetera.

But we’re now where we are today and it’s summer, and I think given it’s summer, this is a good time to make some plans.

These are not resolutions. These are just some plans that you’d like to do and I’d like you to think about. You know, here we are in the summer, by the time we come to the autumn and the nights are drawing in what sorts of changes would you have liked to make? What is it that you would like to do?

I used to write poetry and I’d really like to get back into writing some poetry. I’ve got all this work stuff around the new book coming out, but it’s personal goals that are important to me. And I’ve been eating more healthy and I’ve been eating really dark chocolate rather than, dairy milk that I seem to have a sort of thing for and aero!

So, I’ve been eating more healthy, I’ve been drinking less alcohol and those are the things, the little tiny habits that I’m trying to introduce into my life. So, I’m swimming three times a week, and these are things that are easy to do. I’m going to make a change and it will make a nice difference.

The other thing is to make some time for me to read a book every day. I want to read novels rather than just reading academic papers.

So, the thoughts I want to share with you is, what is it that you’d like to be doing and achieving over the next three or six months so that when we head towards the winter, you can think, yay, I managed to do that. And they don’t always have to be things that are considered worthy.

It could be, you know, I want to laugh more, I want to have fun more, I want to spend more time dancing. What is it that you’d like to do? Oh, one of the things I’m, doing my best to do is to put going to my comedy class, as a priority. I don’t know if you know, but I do improv, and it’s great fun. I meet with people from a whole different range of backgrounds and ages to me, and that needs to be my priority, so not to schedule things that are going to get in the way.

Anyway, they’re just some ideas. It’s just another one of my, my little videos, seeing if anything I say appeals to you. And if it does, I would love to know. So, until next time, it’s Dr. Denise. Take care.