New Year, New Me? Creating Goals & Resolutions for the New Year
Welcome to Season 1, Episode 1 of Mindfully Yours! I am so happy you are here.
Happy New Year! This is the perfect time to reflect on the past year and set new goals for the upcoming year. Make this year the best one yet by creating achievable goals and taking steps to make them a reality. Here's to a new year and a new you!
On this solo episode, I discuss reflecting on your year, before creating New Year's resolutions and goals. I explain how to look at your accomplishments with gratitude and give yourself grace for the things that are still a work in progress.
Episode 1 Transcripts
Speaker 1 00:00:03 Hey y'all. Welcome to Mindfully Yours. I'm your host Ajah, and on this show we talk about all things mindfulness, wellness, loving ourselves, and the journey to showing up authentically as who we are in this crazy world. This podcast is a safe space where we can vibe and chill and chat for a minute about real stuff to help you heal, grow, and evolve into the person you are meant to be in this life. Thank you for being here, and I hope y'all can feel all the love and hugs. I am sending you away. Welcome to mindfully yours. Let's go ahead and get into it. Welcome to season one, episode one of mindfully yours on this podcast. We'll be dropping weekly every Monday, but today is a really special day because it's New Year's and it's the first day of 2023. So I figured we kickstart the year with my first episode.
Speaker 1 00:01:15 So here we are again. Welcome. I'm so grateful that you're here. In today's episode, we will be talking about our New Year's goals. It's only appropriate because it's the new year, y'all. Those resolutions and the craze of the new year, new me concept when it comes to the new year and those resolutions, there always seems to be a mad dash to create goals and resolutions and just start completely fresh. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, but all of a sudden we forget all about those goals that we had from the previous year and we completely wipe them out. All of a sudden, it's like those goals were completely erased and we start fresh, brand new. We start clinging to these new goals and resolutions to be better, healthier, wiser, smarter, go to the gym more frequently, juice every week. And after a few weeks, what I find with these goals is that they start to kind of fall by the wayside.
Speaker 1 00:02:20 January, we're jam packed with all these new goals. You've seen more people in the gym, people are juicing, fasting, doing all that, but by February it's not quite what we envision for ourselves. So I beg to question, why is it that we are so programmed to reset and start fresh once the moment the new year begins? It's almost as if social media encourages this urgency. And I know if y'all have been on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, you see all of these things where people are already starting their their goals. They've already made a list of what their goals are gonna be like. And so it almost creates a sense of, well, maybe I'm not moving quick enough into the new year. Maybe I need to start creating that list of goals before you even jump the gun and allow social media to create that sense of urgency and push you to create those goals.
Speaker 1 00:03:24 One, just take a moment to respect and honor the space that you're in because one, the space that you're in is beautiful and it's all part of the journey. So remember that. Take that moment before you get to creating that list to reflect, reevaluate, and look back at your year in totality. Look at 2022 from a lens of what was it like from January to now? What have I accomplished? What goals are still left unfinished? What areas can I express gratitude in? What areas, what I like to focus more on as I step into this new year? And as you're reflecting and you're reevaluating where you were this year in 2022, honor yourself and give yourself grace. Be kind and gentle with yourself. So often we beat ourselves up for what is left unfinished, the goals we didn't accomplish. And we're very, very critical. I mean, I know that I am pretty critical of myself when I don't get to the point where I've accomplished all those goals I've set for myself.
Speaker 1 00:04:41 But I encourage you to look at it from a lens of kindness and gentleness. Respond to yourself in the same way you would respond to a friend with gentleness, which nurturing love. So treat yourself like the best friend that you are to yourself and be kind as you're taking this time to reflect and works for me as I'm looking at my year in totality, break it down into the months. Don't overwhelm yourself. Go from month to month and just look at January. I did so much in January for me. I started my M S W program and that was a huge accomplishment for me. And then go to February, what happened in February and then so on and so forth. Looking at it from the month to month perspective, writing down each thing that you find in each month, and then by the time that you're done writing out all the things from each month that you accomplished and what you're grateful for, give yourself a big hug.
Speaker 1 00:05:40 Just looking at it. You've accomplished enough, you've done enough, you've tried your best and that is enough. Look at it in that lens. Again, when you're looking through all of these things, remember that your pace is your own. It's not anyone else's. It's your divine pace. Go at your own pace. So you're probably wondering as you are like, okay, Aja, I've reflected, I've reevaluated. I see where I am and I'm ready to map out what I want my 2023 to look like. You're gonna want to bring that vision into fruition. What's really popular right now is vision boarding. And you'll see the vision boarding workshops that everyone, um, a lot of people do create. And I love that because it brings community together. And what's powerful about community is they'll hold you accountable. So these things that are partners in your journey, and I think that's just beautiful to have myself.
Speaker 1 00:06:40 I've created vision boards before and I've utilized the Canva platform and put it on my computer or I've created the vision boards and I've put it on my phone. What I found that works for me is the one where it's physically in front of my face. So I have a board. Um, if you've been on my Instagram, you've probably seen it in some of my videos where it's right above my mirror and my bed actually faces it so that I can wake up, look at it every day. And it was a vision board I created a few years ago, but it still is something that applies to me. And I say that with gentleness and kindness with myself cuz I could easily beat myself up for it being the same. But I'm not upset behind that because I look at that vision board and I realize there's so many things on that vision board that I have accomplished or that I'm working towards and I'm putting effort towards.
Speaker 1 00:07:33 So it continues to encourage me because I know that I've accomplished so much off of it. But as I move towards 2023 and creating what I want that to look like, I've been easing more into creating a word as a theme for the year. I feel like creating a word or coming up with an intention for what theme I would like that year to be has something that I've found is more powerful for me. Cuz I've utilized it daily. I always come up with one word of how I want my day to be, whether that's peace, whether that's gentleness, whether that's, I don't know, , it could be so many different things for me. For 2023, I chose the word ease. And I chose it because I found that over the past few years I spent a lot of time forcing myself to fit in a box of what I thought my life was meant to look like.
Speaker 1 00:08:29 And when I chose the word ease, it was my way of saying 2023 is not a year that I'm focusing or forcing things to fit in that box. I'm putting the effort in towards my goals, but I'm allowing myself to have the space to allow things to come to me as they should. I want things to flow. I want things to be aligned fully with me. Me, I'm not forcing anything that's not meant for me to fit inside of what I want my life to look like. So when I put my word together for this year, I really wanted it to be something that was calm and in alignment with where I was heading. Um, and just pushing myself to really take the hands off the wheel and allow things to just be and be present in that and love that so much. So as you're going through your 2023 goal list, you're reflecting on your previous year and you're preparing for this new one, I encourage you to be gentle, be kind, honor yourself for where you are in this moment and time, and take every moment as an opportunity to learn and grow.
Speaker 1 00:09:46 I encourage you to think, how will I hold myself accountable? Accountability and a plan are what's gonna help you bring that vision into fruition. Without a plan, ain't nothing gonna happen, sis, I read this quote the other day, that consistency is the one way, one true way to get what you desire out of this life. And I felt that so much because it's true. When you start to remain consistent towards your goals and your plan, you start to see things up here. So ask yourself that question, how am I gonna hold myself accountable for these goals? What is my plan to attacking these goals going to look like? That's our show for this week. Thank you for listening to Mindful Leos. You can find all the resources and links from this episode in the show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, which I know that you did drop a rating and review. Let the people know how much you enjoyed it. And then go ahead and follow us on Instagram at Soul Sista Botanica. We'll see y'all next time. Peace.
