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Happy New Year! I can officially welcome you into 2022 as we reopen our inboxes and to-do lists with all the good intentions of a (hopefully) re-energised brain and body.
At the end of last year, these emails talked a lot about goals and planning - surprisingly topics that I had no interest in a couple of years ago (boring, constraining, for other people!). I don't know about you but I am delighted to be starting this new year with some clearly defined goals and some good plans for how I'm going to achieve them.
However, I have also been thinking about something deeper. I have been thinking about how I want to BE this year; what I want for myself and for others. I've been thinking about WHY I want to achieve these goals. I have been thinking about my intentions for 2022. Want to join me?
My intentions for 2022 have crept up on me quite gradually. In reflecting on last year and on setting my goals, two overarching themes kept coming up.
One of them was a word that kept emerging when I asked myself the question "What do you want?". This word is ease. I want ease for myself; in my life and in my business. I want ease for my loved ones. And I want ease for other people. Ease has felt missing for a couple of years hasn't it? Perhaps some of us have never felt it.
The next thing I had to do was define ease. For me, it is connected with health, inner calm and a feeling of being in control. This definition really helped me to set goals about how I could create that for myself. So I have set some great goals for the year around fitness, wellbeing, creativity, self-care and boundaries. I plan to give my ease a mark out of 10 every month, see what's worked well and what needs improving (I'm determined that dry January will not go the way of last year when lockdown gave me a great excuse to reopen the wine!).
Creating ease for others is about spending time with my family and friends, supporting them when they need it and sharing my own experiences with them - and with others! If I can spread the ease to a few people this year then I will be very happy. But I also know that I need it in myself first.
The second theme that has bubbled up for me is an environmental one. I have always been interested in protecting the environment and have a great awe and love for nature. I do OK with recycling, buying local and a few other environmentally friendly practices. But I don't think I'm doing enough - particularly around food consumption.
So I have set some goals for this - planning to eat much less meat, grow more veggies, shop even more locally, re-use packaging, buy organic. Actually setting goals around some of this stuff felt a bit odd until I connected it with the broader intention of having a positive impact on the environment. Again, I will review what I'm doing each month and improve where I can.
So what are your intentions for this year? I've created a few reflective questions that will help you to get some clarity on this. Try to let go of any self-judgement when you answer these questions - this is about what's right for you right now:
After you've answered these questions, see if you can come up with either 1 - 3 words or 1 - 2 sentences that will sum up your intentions for 2022. Put these words or sentences somewhere that you will see them every day (by your desk, on your fridge, in your phone).
Here is mine: "Create more ease. Be kind to the planet."
I'd love to hear your intentions for 2022 if you want to share.
Happy New Year!
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