How Have The First Twelve Days Been For You?

Happy New Year to you!! I hope you saw in the year in a good way for you? For most of us what we would have normally done to mark the New Year went out the window. For some, it was creating new traditions and firsts.

We are in the brand-new year of 2021! 12 days in, and it feels different to me! Rather than how I would normally have started my year of chasing down a long list of goals and waving the banner of “New Year, New Me”, this year feels different. After the unpredictable year 2020, ( and I don’t know about you) I didn’t have anything the year threw up anywhere on my vision board. So, I decided this year to take a new approach. There is no “New Year, New Me”. I have come to a place with this concept; I see it as unhealthy and counterintuitive to what I wanted to achieve.

I realised that the concept of “New Year, New Me” almost seems to invalidate the person you were the year before. Let’s look at it this way, “New Year, New Me” feels like a rallying call to ditch us from the year before. Ditching everything we have done, everything we became, all of our lessons, all of our growing challenges that we accepted in the last year to become this new version of ourselves.

This “New Year, New Me” road leaves one feeling like you are starting again at ground zero. So, for 2021, with everything I experienced and growth I found in 2020, I did not want to be a new me. I want to continue building the woman I am becoming. I ditched the goal-setting concept the way I usually did it and took a simple approach.

 I started by asking myself whom do I want to be this year? What do I want to feel? What do I want to have at the end of this year? What is my intention for 2021?

So instead of the big list of goals, I started with my intentions. What are my intentions for this year?

When I sat with my questions, the answer that came up was about making it digestible and flexible. Breaking the year down into chunks. My intentions then flowed from there. For my first 90-day chunk of the year, my intentions are about expansion, connection, and playfulness. I then broke these ideas down further to look at where I wanted more expansion in my life. What type of connections I want to build this year and how to bring more playfulness to my life.

To get my intentions on the road, I had to look at what actions do I need to take daily. Then how to see what needs to be done and see when I have completed, I won’t bore you with the details of creating a Kanban board to help me to capture and track my daily actions ??. This goes back to my days as a project manager, but I digress.

 The second, I had to look at what do I have to let go of to have my intentions come to pass? I had to get clear and honest with myself about what BS stories I am still carrying around with me. That has no place in the life of the woman I am becoming. If you’re wondering what the BS stories are? These are the stories we tell, the stories we own that keep us spinning wheels and playing with our doubts and imposter stories. So, I am keeping it simple for this year, taking focus actions, killing the BS stories, to have my expansion, connections, and playfulness this year. So, what are you doing differently for 2021? I will love to know. How did you start your 2021? What has the first twelve days of the year been like for you?