52: Reflections and Intentions

As we settle into this in-between space between Christmas and New Year’s, it’s the perfect time to pause, reflect, and realign. Today, we’ll dive into the practice of looking back at 2024—the wins, the challenges, and the lessons—and how it sets the stage for a purposeful and intentional 2025.

In this episode, I share:
🌟 The transformative power of reflecting on the past year.
🌟 A simple process to recap your 2024, including how to use your calendar, photos, and journal as tools for memory and gratitude.
🌟 My personal reflections from 2024: family milestones, hard moments, and unexpected lessons.
🌟 How reflection deepens clarity, builds gratitude, boosts confidence, and provides direction for the year ahead.
🌟 Tips for setting intentions that feel expansive, inspiring, and aligned with your true self.

A Few Highlights from My 2024:
💡 My youngest son’s senior wrestling journey and his humbling yet growth-filled second-place finish at State.
💡 Sending a missionary to Zimbabwe and navigating the emotions of farewell, home MTC, and visa delays.
💡 Personal milestones, including losing 30 pounds and embracing emotional growth through understanding my nervous system.
💡 Navigating challenges like my mom’s cancer diagnosis and stroke, and the beautiful support that surfaced from family and friends.
💡 Spiritual growth that deepened my testimony and allowed me to embrace the truth that my children have a Savior—and it’s not me.

Practical Tools You’ll Learn:
📝 The power of journaling for tracking growth, processing challenges, and celebrating wins.
🌱 How to identify patterns in your life to guide your approach to the new year.
🙏 Embracing gratitude as a tool for reframing hard moments and finding meaning in the mess.
✨ Writing letters of gratitude—to yourself, your missionary, or anyone who has impacted your journey.

Intentions for 2025:
As we look ahead, we’ll discuss setting intentions that feel aligned, inspiring, and expansive. Whether it’s focusing on personal health, deepening your spiritual practices, or exploring new possibilities (hello, “possibility walks”!), you’ll learn how to create goals that support long-term growth and joy.

This episode is all about creating a pause, honoring the year behind us, and welcoming the year ahead with open arms and a heart full of gratitude.

🎙 Listen in and take this reflective journey with me. Let’s make 2025 a year of intentional growth, meaningful experiences, and deep connection.

👉 Join the conversation: Share your reflections and intentions in my Facebook group!

Thank you for an incredible 2024, and I’ll see you next year! 💛

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Transcript

0:29

Hello and welcome to the podcast. So I hope everybody had a wonderful holidays and I wanted to talk today about kind of the in between Christmas and new year's. And I use that time for. Kind of a pause to reflect and. Kind of recap my 20, 24 and then set some intentions for 2025. So I find that this is very beneficial. It helps increase my clarity. I do this in a few ways. I go back and I look at my year's calendar, the things that I attended and went to, I also look at photos. That just helps me jog my memory. All the way back to January. It helps me increase my gratitude of even when things are hard. It. It helps promote like, Soft and small wins and also big wins. And it helps build like a positive perspective. It also helps build confidence so that I can see where I've navigated. Some difficult situations. And it really helps boost the confidence going forward. And then the last thing reflection does is now I find very helpful is it helps me. With the direction that I'm going for the next year. So it helps me just let start to, you know, start out, looking backwards and then start looking forwards. And what do I want to do? So I want to start with sharing just a few things from my 2024. And. Share a few of the wins that I had or. Kind of the recaps. My youngest son. Was a senior in high school and he took second at state at wrestling. And he had been a state champ. His prior three years. And so taking second, it was humbling, but it was also a growing time for both of us, because I knew that there was things beyond wrestling. And sometimes when you're in the middle of sports, it doesn't feel like it. So that was like a growth thing. My husband's a custom saddle maker and he made me accustomed saddle and I had no idea. How comfortable accustomed saddle would be. So that was like really incredible for me. I do a lot of cross country skiing and I had a new friend. That joined our, my little adventure group. And it was great. We had a ton of fun. My son got his mission called Zimbabwe. My other son is still serving in the St. Louis, Missouri mission. In 2020. 2024. I lost 30 pounds. I learned that. Nervous. Emotional eating is a nervous system response. It's freeze. I am learning how to be friend, my nervous system. And collect data on my nervous system. My mom was diagnosed with cancer while she was traveling up to Washington and I was able to fly up and support her and my dad and my sister. I had my cousin that I hadn't seen since my grandma's funeral. She showed up at the hotel. With tons of supplies to help us. And then I also had a friend that I hadn't seen since high school that brought us dinner while we were there, which is just an incredible reflection of like people that come in and out of your life. And then they make the short appearance back in your life. It was just really incredible. The weekend of my son's farewell, my mom had a stroke. Let's see, my son also started home MTC. Then he went to the Cincinnati Ohio for mission for a month. Waiting for his visa. And then he went on to Zimbabwe. I learned that my nervous system can only handle so much stress and strain. And when my capacity is depleted. That I need to be very mindful of what I consume. So I deleted Facebook from my phone during the election. I also learned that my kids have a savior and it's not me. So, those are just a few of the things I have. Some others, I posted all of them on my Facebook group. My favorite book from 24, 20 24 is come as you are by Samuel Norton. My second favorite book is the comfort crisis by Michael Easter. And my favorite movie of the year was free state of Jones with Matthew McConaughey. So, those are just some of my personal. Reflections. And this really helps me just kind of keep top of mind awareness of some of the things that I, you know, grew in some areas that I grew in. And then when you're making your list, Make sure that you include your wins big or small. I've seen a lot of people post on, you know, every, at the end of every year. Thank goodness. This year is over. Thank goodness. This year is over. But even though there was some hard things that happen in 2024 to, to me, to my mom you know, sending a missionary off, those are tough and exciting moments. But there really. Awesome ways to be able to grow and be able to, you know, Kind of see some of those. Big wins. And I, another tool that I use for. For documenting some of this stuff is I journal. And you don't have to journal very long, but I try to journal most days and I don't every day. I've just kind of given myself grace that I can journal as I need to and want to, but I probably journal every two to three days for sure. And as part of my morning routine, but that also is another way of looking back and seeing, you know, kind of where you've made some progress and where things have. Improved. And it also helps you process challenges. So like I mentioned, my mom. I was diagnosed with cancer and then she had a stroke. And how did, how was I able to handle those things? And those as they were challenging, there was also all these really pieces of gratitude. Like the people that showed up. And helped. The doctors, some of the people that health care professionals that helped my mom. They were some incredible kind people that were shown to us. Also people in our community just very, very kind. And that really helped. Me be able to reflect through that challenge. That there was still some very good things that came through it. Another thing we can do is you can start to identify patterns. So I have started to identify and map my nervous system and got to know my nervous system. So one of the things that I realized during 2024, during some of these things, Is that when I am angry and if I go walking. I cannot, it doesn't bring my anger down it intensifies. So I was able to identify that pattern. And that was a pattern that I did not know. I had. And so that was very, very helpful. Another thing is you can start to notice patterns of like feeling overwhelmed, what was happening. What helped you calm down? What helped. You get your nervous system back to kind of that calm center. And that can really help with your awareness and it can guide you into your approach for 2025. And also embracing the gratitude. What are you the most grateful for in 2024? So some of the things that I'm the most grateful for is. My my son was able to get his visa and get to Zimbabwe. I was really grateful for that. It was grateful that he. Graduated from high school. I was grateful that my other son is still serving and he's healthy and he's doing okay. Think about relationships. Think about faith. I really grew my testimony this year. It completely transformed and it is very rooted and oriented in Christ. And 2024 was pivotal for that. And so it was a very personal moment for me. Also being able to recognize that my kids have a savior and it's not me. And that's okay. And that was just a very, very. Strong moment for me. And also it was a very freeing moment. Because all of a sudden, I didn't have to hustle. So hard with my adult kids. I could actually just have the faith that God has this and that he knows them. And I don't have to. You know, try and be this. Parenting mother that really isn't parenting anymore because they're all adults. Also then just maybe. Write a letter of gratitude to your past self, or you can write a letter of gratitude to your missionary for. You know, the things that you've learned and how you've grown with. What they have been going through and how they've experienced their mission. And. Make sure you make a note of how you have experienced their mission and some of the gratitude. And any time I find things that are really difficult. It's always really helpful to find some gratitude in it. So I have a relationship in one of my family members. That's actually quite strained and it has continued to be strained. For the last few months. And I was thinking about it the other day. And one of the things that came up was like, I'm really grateful. Four. The conversations I've been able to have because of that strain. With my husband, it's PA it's brought me closer to him. In a very, very holistic way. And I feel like my marriage has benefited because. I've been very, very authentic and vulnerable and been able to talk to him. And share with him. Some of those deep feelings. And so it's really so, so even though there's some strain in one area, It's also, I have some very deep gratitude. For what's happened and what's transpired because there's other areas of my life. That have strengthened and become better. So then after you recap and kind of go through your 20, 24, and I just picked this year 24. Of my top things that, and I shared them. On my personal Facebook page. But. And next year I'll probably do 25 because it's 20, 25. And then I, I taken a pause after doing all of that and I start setting my intentions for 2025. Now. There's a lot of different ways that you can set intentions for a new year. So you can ask yourself, how do I want to grow? What do I want to focus on my missionary or myself? And you can really start to focus on how you want to transpire. So, one thing that I did for 2024 is I set the intention that I was going to take the full year. To lose. 30 pounds and I did. And I basically completed that in about October. And then it was like, let me get into maintenance mode here. But I gave myself a full year because I didn't want to rush. I I'm, I'm trying really hard to get out of this instant gratification. We want things. And instantly I want, I want things that are going to last that are longterm. And so it's a matter of being very intentional over a lot of months, not a lot of weeks. So creating some consistency. I've mentioned before that I love morning routines. So I've. I've got a really good morning routine that I've done for 2024. And I'm going to continue doing that. Same morning routine with a few tweaks, because I'm all about improving and making little shifts that maybe feel. A little bit better for the upcoming year. It served me well in 2024. So what do I want to do in 2025? So one of the things in 2025 that I want to increase is walking. I heard this concept from a coach that I follow. Her name is Lindsay dot slough. And she talks about possibility walks. And I love the idea and I've done a few of them, but I w I want in 20, 25 to be able to do some possibility walks, like what is possible. Because this year, I turned 50. And I remember a release society president that I had in my early thirties. And she talked about. She got up. One one morning, she woke up and she was 50 and she was like, oh my goodness, I've got to get busy. I've got a lot of things to do and I'm running out of time. And that actually. That story kind of came back to me. And I've been thinking about that. Because I am 50, like what do I want the second half of my life to look like? And who knows how many years I have left and what do I want to have happen? And what do I want for 20, 25? And what do I want it to look like? I made tremendous spiritual growth in 2024. How do I want to continue that? In 2025? What do I, what do I want to spend more time doing and learning? In 20, 24, I felt like I really got. Deep into prayer. And being very intentional and not, you know, just kind of sputtering the same things out. I was very thoughtful about what I was saying. I'm very mindful and I brought my struggles. In prayer. And so I w I want to continue that practice, but I also want to learn and create more depth in 2025. Around my learning about Christ. So just think about what intentions. Kind of feel. Good to you that are kind of inspirational and not things that you want to club yourself with. Or, oh, I'm so I'm so bad at this. Like that's, that's definitely not what we want to do. We want to set intentions that feel expansive. And they feel good moving into 2025. And so. Definitely not things that you feel like you should be doing, but things that you really deep down inside, like kind of being pulled towards instead of trying to push yourself. Towards. All right, you guys. So just to recap, there's huge benefits of reflecting on the year. It really helps deepen your sense of gratitude and. It also helps with your memory. So I just would really like to invite you to take time. To reflect and to think about the things that you've learned, the things that you've gone through, some of the hard things, some of the things you've learned. During those hard things. And then maybe set some intentions for 20, 25 of how you want to move forward. And what you want to do. So that at the end of 2025, you have some interesting stories and things that you can share. All right, you guys, that's what I've got for you. And I will see you next week. In 2025. Bye. Bye.