Changing your habits is never an easy task, even if those changes are forced upon you. Ask someone who is fighting an illness or disease and has to drastically change their eating habits. It is 100% a mental game. 

How many New Year’s resolutions have you made and not followed through on? Or maybe you’ve committed to cleaning more frequently around your house after a particularly grueling round of spring cleaning… only to fall back in your dust-when-company-is-coming ways just a few short weeks later.

Recently, I looked around my apartment with utter shock at the amount of gidgets, gadgets, knick-knacks, pairs of shoes, you-name-it laying around our 1,000-ish square foot, 1 bedroom/1 den apartment. Shirts I haven’t worn in over a year still hang in my closet. Pots and pans and kitchen tools I probably forgot how to use are taking up limited cabinet space. Books I’ll never read. Bottles of lotion and nail polish.

My initial reaction was annoyance. Look at all the money I had wasted buying (or asking for) things I didn’t need. At the time, the slightly pinkier pink nail polish brought me happiness. Now I just wanted to throw it out – the color didn’t work with my skin tone anyway. I imagined living in a tiny house set in the woods with a finite list of belongings. But then I glanced around at all the items I held onto for sentimental value and realized downsizing that much wasn’t really my style, either.

As I get closer to turning 30, I am making a conscience effort to become the woman I want to be – a checklist of how I want to be in my personal relationships, my career, my everyday life. Not that there’s anything wrong with me now, but I don’t see myself as a woman who watches TV more than reads books (even though at the moment I know more about ‘The Real Housewives’ than Shakespeare). Preparing to become a parent (we’re not really trying, but I know it’s not too far into the future) has also made me look at the choices I’ve made and those I need to make very differently.

#2: Limit TV watching to 1 hour each weekday. #5: Eat clean. #9: Find a signature scent. And now, #12: Edit belongings and change shopping habits. I had added another item to my transformational checklist.

Luckily, two back-to-back work trips prevented me from irrationally throwing out my non-necessities as a quick-solve for #12. As I was walking around in Boston during the beginning of my second event, I had the opportunity to walk through the Boston Public Garden. Although it was well into October, only a few trees had started to turn from green to red or gold – one in particular caught my eye. It was half red and half green. In the middle of its transformation.

Fall is a season of change and I am in a season of change myself. It’s okay that I don’t have it all figured out – I can be partly red and partly green and still okay with my progress. Change isn’t easy but it’s the one part of life that is constant. As long as I keep a positive and realistic outlook on what I am working toward, I think that will help make me the woman I want to be.