I'd still just ditch the idea of any sort of little illustration next to it personally, right now it's arrows and a light thing extremely dated style and not very fresh, using arrows as a suggestion of motivation and repeat and success and whatever is just very hammy and overused. The only strong use of an arrow that springs to mind is in the FedEx logo really.
And anything more complex in style than what you're trying is probably beyond what you can learn quickly.
The issue with doing anything in paint is that you're losing the ability to keep it flexible as a format :/
Colourwise yes, perhaps blues, yellows oranges. Red and black comes across as quite hostile to me.
I don't really know how good any of the free open source image editing programs are but I'd suggest you try them out, as they're all bound to be better than using paint and word.