New Year’s Resolutions are an opportunity to get clear about how you can spend the next 365 days in ways that would make your 11 year old self proud, and your 83 year old self feel at peace with this year of a life well lived.

If this is your first real year of making a resolution, begin with resolving to live without shame. Evict your inner critic, and do not let them back in.

Until you live shame-free, any other resolution you make will be rooted in shame, never leading to the happiness it is “supposed to” bring about for you.

Try making a New Year’s Resolution BINGO card and play it all year.

Try drawing a visual image of what you want taking up space in your life this year, and how much space you want to allow for it. Landscape your life.

Get creative with your resolution. Imagine the life you want to live, and step unwaveringly into that reality with full faith and trust in the power of the possible.

My 2024 Resolution was:

To aggressively mind my own business.

Overall, I aggressively minded my own business much better than in previous years. Biggest challenge was getting clear about what is my business and what is not.

With ample room for improvement, I am healthier and less overwhelmed than at the end of 2023 or 2022.

I channeled my social media energy into constructive engagement through professional pages, rather than trolling. I built up an audience – and also, I grew to recognize that Facebook metrics for success are not well-aligned with my goal of being paid fairly for my work. I put more effort into LinkedIn, and more effort still into my website by the end of the year.

I wrote 7 chapters of an online novel I’m excited to continue writing as the spirit so moves me (and my need for paid job stability allows.)

I survived a tornado and indescribable financial, social, and daily home-life barriers resulting from that event and the subsequent recovery process.

I grew a garden.

I learned to sew and started making my own clothes.

I experienced major setbacks as a result of other people – like our Governor, legislators, & one really terrible building contractor – refusing to mind their own business as aggressively as I have been minding mine. This has left me unemployed at the present moment, and anxious about how I will pay my bills in 2025; with a severe number of home repairs yet incomplete and no workshop anymore with which to conduct those repairs.

However, I know I am skilled, intelligent, capable, resilient, and worthy of hire in many living wage-paying job roles. So, I’m just going to keep applying for work and trusting that God will open a beautiful door for me here very soon. I’m gonna keep growing new skills and working diligently to fix for myself what I need fixed.

My 2025 New Year’s Resolution is:

To ground myself here and now.

This means deepening my roots, rather than running away in the face of fear.

This means building stronger relationships, healthier communities, and kinder social organizations of which I am a part. I’ve taken on two new volunteer roles for this: One as a laborer for Habitat for Humanity; the other as an Intensive Support Mentor for a refugee resettlement organization.

I don’t mean to downplay anyone’s fear about the next four years – and also, if you’re white and are so afraid of the incoming Administration that you feel the urge to flee the country… maybe spend some time volunteering to help your neighbors who already fled their countries to come here seeking refuge.

At best, it will offer you some much-needed perspective. At worst, you’ll help someone thrive who has already survived far worse conditions than whatever you’re afraid of.

We have a lot to learn from our immigrant and refugee neighbors.

I’m not saying everything is sunshine and roses here, nor pretending a majority of Nobel Prize-winning economists and military generals didn’t warn us about what’s coming.

I’m saying the grass is greener where you water it.

The more of us who stay and commit our hearts and hands to positive, community-changing, systems-changing work here and now, the healthier and better our communities will be able to endure whatever the next four years hold. Unless you have a ton of money, you won’t be any better off living anywhere you don’t already have roots.

Here is always the best place, and now is always the best time, to settle our nervous systems and be the change we wish to see in the world.

Knowing this, I am deepening my roots and reaching for the sun in the face of the wild wind a-blowin’. Not just for my own strength and stability, but to create and offer meaningful shelter from that same wind affecting my uprooted neighbors.

In 2025, I intend to develop sustainable joy and balance in my career. This part of my resolution is comprised of SMART goals:
☆ Get PHR or SHRM-CP certified
☆ Graduate M.Ed. in December with 4.0.
☆ Acquire and sustain employment at a comfortable living wage while working fewer than 50 hours per week.

In 2025, I intend to settle my nervous system. This piece of my resolution also has SMART goals:
☆ EMDR & weekly therapy
☆ Spending quiet time being still and listening to Spirit without distraction
☆ Investing in home improvement projects that give me a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction in my work.

I also designed some personal SMART goals related to home & relationships which I choose not to share publicly. I encourage you to do this as well, if you’re exploring your own New Year’s Resolution options.

Whatever you do with intention, however unfamiliar or difficult, will be done better than everything you’ve been doing recklessly – no matter how well-practiced you are at sowing unintentional chaos in your own life.

Slow down. Imagine the life your 83 year old self will wish you had lived this year. Make a plan. Follow through.

Live that life.

Love your life.

You’ll get fruits from whichever thoughts you water each day.

Happy New Year, neighbor.