In December, I love setting aside time to dream about all the possibilities for the year ahead. The last couple of years I’ve participated in vision board workshops and spent time reflecting on the year that’s past as well as setting intentions and picking focus words for the coming months to keep me motivated.

One of the most powerful ways to start creating a vision for yourself is to experience a visualization meditation. There are many different kinds of visualizations you can try and I’ve got one you can try here.

I have a confession: December and all the “hoo-ha” leading up to Christmas and the holidays has never been my idea of fun. It’s the time of year when I’d love to hibernate or just go away somewhere until all the chaos and fuss is over.

This year, I’ve been doing a lot of journaling about my thoughts and feelings regarding Christmas and what it means to me, as well as making vision boards and planning for 2023. Journaling always gives me so much clarity.

Socially, I’ve always felt like a bit of a misfit, and Christmas in particular has been a challenge for me for as long as I can remember. I’ve never felt like I could truly be myself because of all the social expectations, and the older I get and the more women I talk to, I realize I’m not alone with these feelings.

Over the last few days my morning journaling practice has been focused on questions related to creating intentions for the holiday season. I’ve been writing about all the things I love about Christmas as well as all the things that I don’t love so much about the holidays. I’ve been considering questions such as:

What do you love about Christmas/the holidays?

What causes stress during the holidays?

What brings you joy at this time of year?

What drains you?

How do you want to feel during this holiday season?

How can you create that feeling?

Have you ever asked a friend, “How are you?”, and had the response (with a sigh), “Oh you know, same old stuff”, or something similar?

I hear that kind of response all the time. It’s a bored response and could indicate the person is in a rut of mundaneness. They’re lacking a feeling of joy in the ordinary.

How do you know if you’re stuck in a rut and, more importantly, what can you do to get out of it?

Do you struggle to solve problems or complete projects? Or, maybe you lack willpower to stay on track (i.e., with a daily habit such as healthy eating, etc.)?

The key to getting back on track and staying on the path towards your goals and dreams may lie in figuring out your why.

Not the surface why, but the BIG why.

Why do you REALLY want this?

Nobody I know likes to fail, yet most of us will experience failure on the path to achieving our dreams.

Failures are learning opportunities and if your dream is big, there will be many learning opportunities and you’re going to fail a few times on the way to achieving it. You may fail a lot. In fact, I’ve heard it said that the most successful people have failed many times.

Lately I’ve been feeling a little anxious about time. I’ve had a constant, nagging sensation that I have to hurry because time is running out. It’s an uncomfortable and unpleasant feeling that has had quite the opposite effect; instead of making me more focused and productive, it has slowed me down considerably and I’m far less creative.

So what did I do when this anxiety about time started happening? I sought out some coaching to figure out my thoughts and what was going on.

At the start of my master coach training earlier this year, my classmates and I attended a weekend retreat where we all made vision boards that are intended to help guide us as we go through the program.

The finished board sits in front of my desk where I can see it every day. At the top of my vision board are the words “Find More Calm” and those words have become a central part of my goals for the training and for my life.

How often do you trust your intuition? Intuition is defined as “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning”. It’s often a feeling in the body; most of us are familiar with that “gut” feeling when we just know that something is either really right for us or really wrong.

But how often do you actually “listen” to that intuitive information your body is sending you?

Intuition doesn’t happen in the logical part of the brain. It’s mostly a physiological response and it’s that part of your body/mind that is begging the logical part of your brain to listen.

I truly believe that mindset = magic.

Why? Because we can always change our thoughts and by changing our thoughts, everything changes in our world.

Your mindset is a set of beliefs that forms how you make sense of the world and what’s happening around you. It influences your thoughts, feelings, behaviours and actions.

In other words, your mindset creates your life.

Based on the cognitive behaviour therapy model, our circumstances, thoughts, emotions and behaviours all interact in a continuous loop to create how we experience the world. My mentor, Martha Beck, refers to this interaction as the four categories of human experience.