Personal Progress Projects

It was right about this time last year that I was called to be the Young Women president in our ward. I had been serving in Young Women for almost a year before that in other ways and so I’d made vague attempts at doing some Personal Progress during that time, but I hadn’t really fully stepped up to it. Personal Progress is a wonderful program for young women, but it’s also great for women of all ages. As a leader we are encouraged to complete the whole program again. Which is great because it’s different from when I did it the first time around.

For many of the value experiences you are asked to read several scriptures and then discuss the topic with someone. For Family Home Evening each week, Brett and I take a walk around the neighborhood and talk. Often I’d bring up one of the topics from my value experiences and we’d talk about it and then I’d have him sign it off when we got home. Often he didn’t realize I was working on Personal Progress until that point, it just naturally worked its way into our conversations.

Selecting what projects I was going to do has also been fun. Personal Progress should not be something big and extra outside of your normal life. It should be part of what you are already doing. For my Faith project I made an effort to really pay attention during General Conference, take good notes, and then I followed it up by reading the Conference report in the Ensign when it arrived, noticing, as I always do, that the messages that touch me when I hear them spoken are often different than what stands out when I read them. I do that for every General Conference, but because it was one of my projects I ended up getting the reading done a lot faster than I normally do.

Knowledge is one of the values and that one is definitely a part of my life right now. The projects are supposed to require effort and take at least 10 hours. For my Knowledge project I decided I was going to propose my dissertation. That project required a lot of faith as well. And when I wrote down how many hours it took I wrote “too many.”

One of the suggestions for Divine Nature is to use a skill you have, or learn a new skill, and make something to decorate your home. Which is just the incentive I need to finish up some of the quilted wall hangings I’ve had all the supplies to make for a long time now. My other incentive is that we have the perfect spot by our front door to hang a quilt. Again, it’s something I needed/wanted to do anyway, Personal Progress is just helping push me to get it done.

Choice & Accountability has another suggestion that is definitely something I want to work on:

Choose to be more orderly in your home by completing a cleaning or organizing project. Record in your journal how doing this helped you in other areas of your life.

One look at the closet in one of our spare bedrooms will tell you that’s definitely something I need to work on. And as soon as that dissertation is not just proposed but defended, I’m going to get right to it.

Right now I’m making my way through a version of an Individual Worth project though. I’m doing a variation on this suggestion:

Compile your personal or family history using journal entries, pictures, and important papers.

Brett and I met online. A major portion of our courtship is in emails and instant messages. It is an amazing record of how the two of us got together. And it isn’t in one place right now. So for my project I am compiling and formatting all of them so we can print them in book form. Sunday I worked for a couple of hours and got all the emails from the fourth month we knew each other formatted. That means I have just 56 more months to go before volume 1 of our emails is ready to go. We laughed as I read back parts of it. These electronic communications are the journal we wrote together of how we got together, certainly an important part of our family history.

Personal Progress is giving me a great incentive to get some things done in my life that I needed to do anyway, and helping me think about gospel topics in ways I have not done before or to depths I have not explored before.

Update: See this post for my last two project ideas.