Life is Delicious- Midlife, Menopause, Mindset, Miracles, Gen X Women, Empty Nest, Retirement, Self Improvement

New Year...Happier YOU! Instead of resolutions, try this instead.

• Marnie Martin • Season 1 • Episode 4

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Step into 2025 with renewed energy and purpose as we explore the art of intentional living in the latest episode of Life is Delicious. Inspired by Sarah Ban Breathnach's "Simple Abundance," we discuss your personal journey towards authenticity and joy. Ditch those restrictive resolutions and join me in embracing gradual, positive changes for the new year. With compassion and curiosity, we reflect on the past year's successes and growth opportunities, setting the stage for a fulfilling year ahead. Together, we'll uncover the secrets to creating a life that truly nourishes your soul.

Discover the "Eight Pillars of a Happy Life" as a framework to assess and enhance your well-being across health, wealth, family, and more. Practical exercises like the "big rocks in a jar" metaphor help prioritize what truly matters, ensuring that key aspects of life come first. Learn how recording personal affirmations in your own voice can transform your intentions into reality, and explore the power of "creative excursions" for personal rejuvenation. Plus, I'm thrilled to introduce my guided journal, "Happy is Not an Accident," available on Amazon, filled with prompts to help you cultivate a balanced and intentional lifestyle. Let's embark on this journey together and make this year truly exceptional.

Resources

Simple Abundance- Sarah Ban Breathnach- Amazon
https://www.LifeisDelicious.ca
Happy Is Not An Accident- Amazon
Life Is Delicious Weekly and Monthly Planner- Amazon
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Speaker 1:

Hey, beautiful friends, it's Marni Martin and welcome to this episode of Life is Delicious. I'm a multi-passionate entrepreneur, bestselling author, foodie and voiceover artist, and I created the Life is Delicious podcast with one simple mission in mind to help you add more flavor to your life and to help you write your own recipe for a life that feeds your soul. I'm so glad you're here First, before we get started. I know that it is a great big, noisy world out there, and the fact that you have carved out a little bit of time for yourself to be here with me it is truly an honor. And if you're new here, welcome to the Life is Delicious family. Happy freaking New Year. Oh, my goodness, I can't believe it is already 2025. That is craziness. I want to start today's episode with an excerpt from a book that I absolutely love. It's called Simple Abundance by Sarah Bonbrethnack, and I have been carrying this book around with me for decades. Let's get started.

Speaker 1:

New Year's Day, a fresh start, a new chapter in life waiting to be written, new questions to be asked, embraced and loved, answers to be discovered and then lived in. This transformative year of delight and self-discovery. Today, carve out a quiet interlude for yourself in which to dream pen in hand. Only dreams give birth to change. What are your hopes for the future as you reflect on the years that have passed? Gradually, as you become the curator of your own contentment, you will learn to embrace the gentle yearnings of your heart. But this year, instead of resolutions, write down your most private aspirations, those longings you have kept tucked away until the time seems right. Trust that now is the time. Ask the questions. The simple abundance path brings confidence that the answers will come and we will discover, day by day, how to live them. Take a leap of faith and begin this wondrous new year by believing. Believe in yourself and believe that there is a loving source, a sower of dreams, just waiting to be asked to help you make your dreams come true. Isn't that awesome.

Speaker 1:

I must have been about 22 when I came across this book and I had just had my very first little mini human and I fell in love with this book. I'm not even sure who gave it to me, to be truthful, or if I bought it for myself. I don't remember that. It's a day book, so it starts with January 1, and every day there's these little mini essays that kind of walk you through being a woman in the world and how to carve your own path and excavate your own inner authenticity. I love this book so much that I think maybe I was 23 or 24 and I think I might have had my second child by then.

Speaker 1:

But I actually bought 10 copies of this book and I gave a copy to every one of my girlfriends for Mother's Day of this book and I gave a copy to every one of my girlfriends for Mother's Day. It touched me on a really deep cellular level and I knew, even like 30 some years ago, that excavating my authentic self was something that was going to be a part of my life forever, and that's kind of what led me here. So the cool thing is is, as I went through the next 30 years of my life, I deliberately would anytime I was anywhere near a used bookstore, I would go in and I would see if there was a copy of this book, and I always had at least one or two in my home so that if I happened to meet somebody that needed this message, I would give them a copy. It was timeless. Needed this message, I would give them a copy. It was timeless. 20 years later, 25 years later, I could still open any page of this book and, with a totally different space and stage of life where I was, this book seemed to know exactly what I needed to hear that day. So, sarah Bon Brethnak, one day I hope to have you on this podcast because you have inspired me in a deep and profound way.

Speaker 1:

So this episode is really about starting your new year with intention, clarity and joy, and I have about 10, 11 ideas. Some of them are more of an exercise and some of them are just concepts. I like to look at the new year as kind of that line in the sand, that clean slate, and I like to kind of unpack the new year with not really the resolution side of things. I personally find that resolutions tend to focus on taking away, cutting back restriction. Resolutions tend to focus on taking away, cutting back restriction and often focus more on the negative behaviors that we've done in the past, so like quitting smoking or drinking too much, or maybe we need to lose some weight, and I'm not saying that that's a bad thing, I'm just saying that sometimes a gentler approach can be better. So everybody has their different ways of stepping into the new year and I just like to give you a couple of ideas and maybe, if even one or two of these resonate with you and it changes the way you feel about the year, then that is awesome.

Speaker 1:

I'd like to think that we can maybe approach January as our transition month into our new behaviors, with some slow, gradual changes that maybe we can learn to implement and actually have them stick. So the first thing we're going to do is exercise one, which is what I like to call a year in review, and this exercise is not at all about beating yourself up about things you didn't get to, things you did wrong. It's not like that at all. I want all of these exercises to be approached with a sense of curiosity and a sense of what could I do better? That's the whole point. We want to evaluate what we did last year that was really awesome, that worked, whether we stuck to our plan for where we wanted to go, and then maybe looking at the things that we fell short on. But instead of looking at from a place of you know, oh, I'm such a loser or I didn't get that right, and it's imperative to be kind to ourselves and to be able to think about what actually makes us happy, I think a lot of people never stop to actually even ask themselves that question. So let's start with the year in review.

Speaker 1:

Again, this might take you 10 or 15 minutes, maybe a little bit longer, but just get a piece of paper and a pen and write that 2024. And you can even take this a step further. If there are some things that you're frustrated about or didn't work well for you, you can write like a love letter to last year and say all the things you want to let go of that just didn't work and you want a new start on. And you can even take that and burn it in a fireplace or in a fire pit and just let that energy go. That's the whole point of this exercise.

Speaker 1:

Here's another exercise that you can do any time of the year. You'd certainly don't have to do it at the new year, but it seems kind of timely. So I thought I would bring it up and I like to call this the reverse bucket list. So this isn't like looking forward into the future and going, wow, what do I want to do that I haven't accomplished yet. The reverse bucket list is about looking back at you in your 20s and your 30s and your 40s and your 50s. I don't know where you're at in your life span right now, but looking at the things you absolutely crushed, the things you got right, challenges that you've overcome, the things that you navigated through that were hard, and how you've changed as a human being because you went through those hard things, this is an amazing exercise in gratitude. It's looking back at who you were and who you've become, and how you've navigated challenges that you didn't even think you were capable of. That is something that will give you fuel and grace as you navigate hard things in the future, and it's just a lovely benchmark to put on at the end of the year or at the beginning of a new year, where you can really look at how far you've actually come. And again, you can do this reverse bucket list more than one time. It's a super powerful tool.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I love to do is have a look at what I like to call the eight pillars of a happy life. So this exercise is it's pretty simple, but you start with the eight major areas of your life. We're looking at health, wealth, family, friends, purpose, mind, body and spirit. So all eight of those I'd like you to just write down on a piece of paper and beside that, put a little blank space, and what I would like you to do is to rate yourself from 1 to 10. 1 being as little as possible, 10 being the best, of course and just figure out right now, here, today, where are you in every area of your life? You might surprise yourself, actually. I mean, maybe your health is at a 5 and maybe your wealth is at a 9. Maybe your family is at a four and you would like it to be at a nine. Whatever that is for you, it's just important to sit down, and this is the line in the sand. This is where I am today. This is how I feel about every area of my life today. And then, on the next sheet of paper, I would love you to put those same categories down, and we're going to write one to three things that we could do to improve our score in each area. And what's really great about this exercise is there's some things that will actually bleed into more than one category. So maybe you want to take up yoga. Well, maybe that's going to be in your mind category and your body category. You know, maybe you want to spend more time outside. Maybe that's for your spirit and maybe that's also for your mind. So there's lots and lots of different ways to slice this and there's no way to get it wrong. It's really all about you. It's very personal. So take your time with this and just kind of figure out where you're at. Think of those things that we've just written down as our big rocks.

Speaker 1:

I don't know if you've ever heard this story, but it's kind of a famous, I think it's a professor in a university and he did this exercise with his students where he had these two inch rocks and a really big jar on his desk and he put all of these big rocks into his jar, right to the very top, and he said to his class he said, is this jar full? And they said, well, yeah, it's full. Then he pulled out a cup full of pebbles that were smaller, more like gravel, and he poured them into the jar and shook the jar and all of the little pebbles kind of went in between where the big rocks are. And he said, now, is my jar full? And they said, well, yeah, now it's full for sure. And then he came up with a cup full of sand and he poured that in over top of the pebbles and over top of the rocks. And all of a sudden the jar was even more full and they were so surprised. And so he said now is the jar full? And they said well, I don't think it could get any fuller. Yes, it's full. And then he pulled out a cup of water and he poured it into the jar and it went in between the sand and the pebbles and the rocks.

Speaker 1:

And the metaphor for this is that the big jar is your life. So if he had done it the other way around and put the sand in first, there would have been no room for the big rocks. If you'd put the water in first, or the pebbles, there would have been no room for the big rocks. So those big rocks are the things you just identified were important to you in every area of your life. What matters to you this year, that you want to spend your time on, that you want to give your energy to that you want to be intentional about. Those are your big rocks. So we want to be really sure to put our big rocks into our jar first, because if we spend all of our time on all of these little unimportant details, we run out of time to work on the things that really matter. I hope you'll play with this. It's really actually quite fun and actually sometimes it's a little bit surprising. You don't even realize that something is super important to you until you sit down and reflect and have a look at these things and then you go, wow, like I didn't know that mattered so much to me. But it actually does, and it allows you to be more intentional with the way you start off your year. Okay, so just to recap so far we've done our year in review, we've done our reverse bucket list and then we've written down our eight pillars of a happy life and the things that matter most to us, and then we have put our big rocks into the jar.

Speaker 1:

So now this next exercise is actually kind of fun as well. It's called a little less and a little more, or 1% less, 1% more, however you want to look at it, and this one, we're going to actually do the same thing. We're going to get a big piece of paper and we're going to draw a line right down the middle, and on the left hand side we're going to put a little less and on the right hand side a little more. So this is where we actually get to examine our behaviors and the things that may be just little tiny tweaks that we want to change. So I'll give you some examples. So maybe we want to do a little less alcohol and a little more water. Maybe we want to do a little less sitting and a little more movement. Maybe we want to do a little less sugar and a little more self-care. Maybe we want to do a little less swearing and a little bit more singing. Maybe it's just a little less worrying and a little more gratitude. Maybe it's a little less takeout food and a little more home-cooked meals. You see where I'm going with this.

Speaker 1:

There's so many ways that we can add to this. Maybe it's a little bit less mindless scrolling and a little more solitude. You could go on for days with this. Maybe it's a little less smoking. You know doesn't mean you necessarily are going to quit today, but maybe a little less smoking would still be a good thing for your health. Maybe a little bit more fresh air, more walking, maybe a little less screen time and a little bit more sleep that is a big one. I think that's something we could probably all use.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, for you, you can put in whatever it is that you need. Maybe it's a little more time with your family or a little less work and a little bit more play. Just have fun with this. It can be a really fun exercise. And then just you know you can't do it all. So pick a few things, pick maybe three top things that you really want to be intentional about, and then put them into your notes on your phone and look at them regularly so you can remind yourself that you just need to do a little bit less and a little bit more. And it's kind of amazing, when you think about doing something consistently every single day, how much impact it can have on your life. I mean, look at your dental care. You wouldn't save all of your dental care up until Sunday and then brush your teeth for a half an hour. That would be ridiculous. But when you take care of your dental health every single day, it has a massive impact over the course of your life, right? So here's a fun exercise that my girlfriend just reminded me about, actually, which I think is super fun.

Speaker 1:

So you get yourself a jar, not for your big rocks, but put it on your desk. Something pretty, maybe it's a vase, maybe it's a box that you love, whatever that is and get yourself some beautiful pieces of paper or some sticky notes and once a week, write down something amazing that happened to you, something that lit you up, that made you grateful, something that surprised you or something you overcame, that was awesome. Write it down on a piece of paper and put it into the jar and next year, on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day, I should say, pull out the jar and enjoy looking at all of the small wins you had through the entire year. It can be a super powerful gratitude exercise that'll set next year up with some pretty awesome feelings.

Speaker 1:

A few years back I started to do this exercise probably about five, and this one I like to call rules of the road and the reason I came up with this exercise is because for most of my life I have been a chronic people pleaser, and it took me till a few years ago to really realize that not only was people pleasing not serving me, but it actually wasn't serving others either, because I was over giving, I was depleted, I wasn't happy, I was resentful. So that piece of my life I had to really start to work on and once I actually began to set healthy boundaries in place. This is when I implemented the rules of the road. And this is the rules of the road according to me, not according to my mom or my spouse or my children or my boss. It's the rules of the road according to me, and these are just little sentences, little mantras, little reminders of what matters and how we stay grounded in our authenticity and who we want to show up as in the world. So I'll give you an example of the ones that I had, I think, last year. So this is my last year list.

Speaker 1:

Number one was what other people think of me is none of my business. Number two is it's better to get forgiveness than permission. Number three is never leave fun to find fun. That's one of my favorites. Number four is everything is always working out for me. Number five be impeccable with my word. Number six I teach people how to treat me. Number seven there's always room at my table for good humans. Number eight I live in a benevolent universe. Number nine I am a spiritual being having a human experience. Number 10, moderation is the order of the day. Number 11, my body's natural state is that of health and well-being. Number 12, movement is freedom and health is wealth, and I threw in a baker's dozen and I'm going to definitely take this one into my new year and it is.

Speaker 1:

If it's not a hell yes, it's a no or a not right now. I needed that for sure last year and it's really helped me to clarify the things that I want to participate in, instead of having that knee jerk reaction of hey, can you help me with this? Sure, hey, would you do this for me? Sure, I mean, I was very good at being a yes woman for many, many years, and it's not that I don't say yes to things now, but I just give myself the opportunity to reflect on whether I can do it happily for someone, and that has served me very well. So, definitely, going on my 2025 rules of the road list, the next one is actually one of my favorites.

Speaker 1:

I actually implemented this last year and it has been a game changer for me, and, of course, I'm behind the microphone a lot and I have recording gear and all the things, but what this one is is to record your new life affirmation in your own voice, and what I mean by this is is I want you to write down an entire vision of what you want this year to look like. You've already gotten some clarity on the things that are most important to you In positive speak. I want you to talk about it like it's already happened and all the things that you're striving to have happen, that they've happened easily for you and how great it was that it showed up for you, and it's a really powerful, powerful exercise, and when you record it in your own voice, you don't have to have fancy equipment to do this. You can certainly do it on the voice memo app on your iPhone. I don't have an Android so I'm not sure, but I'm sure they have an equivalent there as well. There's so much amazing technology today that it's not a difficult thing to do, but it's a really powerful experience.

Speaker 1:

And what I did last year is I actually put a reminder on my phone at 9 am, noon, 3 pm, 6 pm and 9 pm. Now I'm not going to sit here and tell you for sure that I actually listened to my affirmation five times a day, but I tried to get two or three. Sometimes I wasn't able to stop and just switch gears, which is fine, but it's a really great reminder to just stop, take five minutes, and I now get up and actually go get a glass of water, because water is something I'm really working on this year. So now, when my little alarm goes off, I get up, actually go get a glass of water, because water is something I'm really working on this year. So now, when my little alarm goes off, I get up, I get a glass of water and I listen to my recording of what I want my year to look like and I really allow myself to feel how good it feels to believe that that's possible for me, or that that's already happened. It is amazing how that can transform you and help you to call in the things that matter most to you.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so I know this is a lot of stuff to take in. So, to recap, we did the year in review, we did the reverse bucket list, then we did the eight pillars of a happy life, which is mind, body, spirit, health, wealth, family, friends and purpose. And then, once we did those and gave ourselves a little score from one to 10, we sat down and figured out one to three things in each area of that part of our life that we want to work on this year, and then we put our big rocks into the jar, and then we talked about a little more and a little less, and then we got to the rules of the road, and that is something you can implement for yourself if it feels like a fit. So, going back to the book, I spoke about simple abundance and Sarah Bon Brethnak one of the things that she also talks about in that book, which I implemented early, early on in my life and I've kind of actually gotten away from it, I would say, over the last few years because I've been caring for elderly parents and there's been other things going on. But I'm going to put it back in this year and it's called the creative excursion.

Speaker 1:

And the creative excursion is just, it can be an hour if that's all you have in your life, but ideally it would be maybe an afternoon that you can set aside for yourself. Maybe it's a Saturday morning, maybe it's a Sunday night and you allow yourself to have a spa night. The creative excursion can be anything you want it to be. Ideally it's a couple of hours at least, of time that you carve out for just yourself, to just recharge your batteries, to go somewhere maybe you've never gone before to do something. Maybe you've never done before. It's really about curiosity and shifting gears from, say, work or caring for family or the other responsibilities that we have and just carving out a little bit of time for just you. And that can be anything. It could be lighting a candle in a room that you love and reading a good book. It could be, like, I say, having a spa night with your favorite bath. It could be going to thrift shops for the afternoon and just being curious about what you might find. Maybe you go to the beach in the afternoon.

Speaker 1:

One of the things I did a few years back which I loved is I got up extra early and I drove out to the beach near our home on the lake and I would just plop my chair in the sand by the water and stick my feet in the water and bring a cup of coffee, a good book, and I would sit there for a good hour or two before anybody ever showed up. And sometimes it was like, wow, I have this whole place to myself. It was amazing and it just allowed me to really reconnect with myself and get centered again and grounded, and so that's the whole purpose of the creative excursion, and I'm so grateful that I read about that in Sarah's book so many years ago. So if you get the opportunity to implement that into your life this year, I promise it is a game changer and will make you just feel so much more connected to yourself. I love it and I hope you'll try it too. So if some of this information is resonating with you and you've enjoyed today's episode, I have created a journal called Happy is Not an Accident and it's available. I just released it on Amazon just before Christmas. There's a lot of these similar exercises in the book, but it's basically a guided journal, has a lot of awesome prompts to help you get massive clarity about where you're going, not necessarily just this year, but in life in general. It's just a great companion to kind of follow through on a lot of these exercises that we talked about today. So if that's something that you know speaks to you, I hope you'll check it out. Happy is not an accident it's up on Amazon now and I also wanted to let you know because it is the new year.

Speaker 1:

I am a crazy paper girl. I need to write things down. I know that's really super old school, but I have planners I guess calendars that I keep all of my activities on. I keep my the amount of money I'm making. I write down every appointment, I keep track of passwords and financial goals and all kinds of things, and so it's something that I have done for years. In fact, I actually take these planners and I tuck them away with my taxes, because it's like I know at any given moment, if I could open one of those journals, I can tell you exactly where I was, what I was doing, what I was working on, what goals I was, you know, tackling, and so I keep them because it's such a great reminder. And so I've created one called the Life is Delicious Weekly and Monthly Planner.

Speaker 1:

There's a lot of these similar exercises. In the beginning of the planner it starts off with the year in review all kinds of awesome prompts to get you set up for the new year, and it has lots of blank pages at the back of the book as well. And then the rest of the planner is set up as a week at a glance and a month at a glance, and at the beginning of every month it gives you the opportunity there's a couple of pages for setting intentions for what you want to get out of this month, and then at the end of the month. There's actually a page to do an evaluation of whether you are on track or if you need to do something different. So it's a really powerful tool. Again, I created it for myself. I'm actually in a little bit of withdrawal right now because I don't have a planner. So this was just put up and should be available on Amazon by the end of this week, so somewhere around the 10th or 11th of January, and if you are one of those people who likes to write things down and see your week at a glance and know what you have going on, I hope you'll check it out. And I'm going to leave you with this. I've followed Wayne Dyer for most of my life and I remember seeing him on a seminar and he had interviewed a friend of his called Portia Nelson and she told him a story about how she had been gone to this seminar and they said we want you to write the story of your life. This is what she wrote.

Speaker 1:

Chapter one I walk down the street and I see a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in. I am lost and helpless. It isn't my fault and it takes forever to get out. Chapter two I walk down the same street and I see there's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don't see it. I fall in again. I can't believe I'm in the same place. It isn't my fault and it still takes a long time to get out.

Speaker 1:

Chapter 3. I walk down the same street street and there's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. My eyes are open. I fall in again. It's a habit. I know where I am, it is my fault and I get out immediately. Chapter 4. I walk down the same street and there's a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there and I navigate my way around it. Chapter 5. I walk down a different street. What street will you walk down this year? I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you did, please share this with someone you love. And if you're not subscribed, make sure you hit that little bell icon to make sure that you are notified when the next episode comes out. In case no one has told you today, there is not one person on this planet that is exactly like you, and the world is a better place because you're here. So thank you for being here. Go make it the best year yet and I'll see you next time on. Life is Delicious.