What Is Your Theme For This Year?

Following on from Rhianna’s “No Resolutions 2015” post yesterday, I wanted to share my own thoughts about the New Year, which funnily enough are very much along the same lines as Rhi! (which we only realised after we both started writing very similar blog posts!) Being a brand new year, it is a wonderful time to take a moment to reflect on the past year and to set some new goals and directions. Resolutions are funny things though – the goals that people tend to set very early on in a new year are often promptly forgotten about or broken within the first month. That’s not really the way to achieve anything worthwhile!

This year I’ve decided to not set any New Year’s Resolutions, but I do have a theme that I would like to see playing out in my life over the next twelve months. For me, rather than setting any new goals for myself (of which I have a million ongoing ones all the time anyway), I like to think in terms of having a ‘theme’ for the year that influences the choices I make on an overall level.

Last year was the year that I aimed to bring more balance into my life, and in many ways I did achieve that. I still feel that I was busier than I wanted to be, but keeping the theme of balance top of mind, allowed me to keep reinforcing choices that reflected the direction I wanted to head. Those choices then started to become habits and in this way the ‘theme’ became a way of living, rather than a ‘goal’ I achieved.

Coming into 2015, I took some time to ponder what I would like to experience this year, and what theme I would like to incorporate into my life. Balance is certainly going to be something I continue to develop – especially as my big, book-writing project comes to an end – but I felt it was important to bring another idea into the mix. So after lots of thought, I realised that one area that I would like to improve, is in the organisation of my home and my life. Even though many would assume I am a very organised person because I get a lot done, I don’t feel that I’m on top of things the way I would like to be. For me, being organised, streamlined and decluttered lowers stress. It means that I don’t feel the pressure of having jobs “hanging over my head” – and for me that is freedom. Others may not feel that way at all, but over the last few years I’ve had a sense of unfinished business sitting in the background of my mind, and that is something I would like to eliminate.

Dr John Demartini, one of my very favourite authors and speakers, discusses the fact that growth occurs out of order. That each step forward whether it be in business or in your personal life, requires a mastery of that level, before moving ahead. I feel like I am on the cusp of that right now. That once the book is finally launched, I can take some time to make more order in my life, that will then liberate me to create the next steps forward. So it’s nothing too major, but just a sense of streamlining everything in my life to allow a sense of freedom that I don’t have right now.

This will entail everything from de-cluttering my home and cleaning out drawers and cupboards, cleaning up my computer files and streamlining business processes, sorting out things like photos and creating albums or scrapbooks out of the important ones, cleaning out my storage shed (OMG! I still have boxes in there from when I moved house in 2006!), getting my filing and paperwork in order etc. So I’m not setting a to-do list of deadlines for completing these tasks, but I am keeping the theme of streamlining my life during 2015 in my mind as something that I will accomplish over the year. By embracing this concept, I will see opportunities to sort and streamline every day, as I go about my normal activities, and in this way, it will evolve naturally.

That is my idea for this year – if you had a theme for this year, what would it be?

Leisa