What's in a day?

Happy New Year!

I hope the first hours of 2016 have been all you hoped for. In the event that they haven't, I want you to remember that today is as special as any other day. 

The collective intention to create goals and stick with them can be helpful and I'm a huge fan of taking stock of your life, but we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to change all of our bad habits the minute the clock strikes midnight. 

I use to make long lists of resolutions: 
- move more
- eat less
- clean more
- watch TV less
- focus more
- and on and on

Frankly, I'm still working on all of those - though TV should be joined by Facebook. (ugh.)

One of the things I've learned over the years is that there are certain things I do want to improve about myself, but rarely do those things show up on a checklist. Usually there's a lot of digging and poking around on the inside before I know what steps to take on the outside. 

Instead of creating lists of resolutions I'll almost certainly neglect and usually stress me out, I've adopted two practices to help me envision the year ahead and the way I want to feel.

Word of the Year:

I was introduced to the idea of proclaiming a word for the year a couple years back. In 2015, my word was open. There were a number of areas of my life that I'd closed off and armed my defenses to protect myself from hurt. This year, with open as my guide, I've tried new experiences and new ways of being. I have gained new friendships and risked losing some as well. I've explored more fully what it means to feel whole and have stayed open to the lessons I've needed to learn. 

This year, my word is UNSTOPPABLE. At first it wasn't, but a friend suggested it probably was when it turned out I had two unstoppables cut out for my vision board (see below). I'm seriously so excited to hold myself accountable to this word! I know for a fact that I'm usually the one standing in my own way so I feel so empowered by the prospect of asking myself:

What would unstoppable look like right now?
What would it feel like? 
What can I do in this moment to take an unstoppable action?

Want to pick a word to guide you for the year? Here are a couple tips:

1. Pay attention to how the word makes you feel. Is it alive with energy or heavy with obligation? ALWAYS OPT FOR ALIVENESS!
2. There are a thousand words entering our lived experience everyday. If one of them keeps showing up, it's worth exploring. 
3. Your word should challenge you toward growth. Be open to the fact that the Universe might have some lessons in store for you. I experienced my first lesson today when I was feeling a little blue and had to kick my butt out of the house and into nature to activate my unstoppable inertia.

Have you picked your word? I'd love to hear what it is in the comments below!

Vision Boards:

I love vision boarding! It's an opportunity to fall in love with your future and what could be better than that!

There are all kinds of tips out there for creating a vision board for your year or even for a specific project. Here are the one's that guide me:

1. Flip through magazines and other images with a focus on how you feel rather than what you think. Don't edit yourself in the pulling phase.
2. Once you feel full of images and words, you might decide to group them or look for overlapping ideas that you can eliminate. Or you might just get out your glue stick and start gluing- trusting that your true vision will reveal itself. 
3. Cut and glue until your heart feels content.

One Final Note:

You might have noticed some changes to my website. One of the ways I'm living out my unstoppable year is to proclaim my resilience with the tagline, The Resilient Soul. I've struggled to acknowledge how hard I've worked and how far I've come. The Resilient Soul is the bridge I've needed to capture where I've been and where I'm going. I am a resilient soul, and I'm called to be a source of light and guidance for all the other souls yet to believe in and proclaim their own resilience. I'll be announcing my free Facebook community The Resilient Soul Sanctuary in the coming weeks - I just need to do some fine tuning on the guidelines for this safe haven. 

Also, I've been working on some new e-courses through my online school, WaveMaker Academy. My FREE mini-course, The Soul Code, is available and if you sign now you'll get a discount code on future offerings.

Cheers to a bright and shiny 2016!