Intentions, Goals and Word of the Year 2024
If you’d prefer to listen along, head to the audio of this blog post.
In my review of 2023 I said that this last year has felt like a prologue, like the set up of things yet to come to fruition. In 2024, I’d like answers to some of this year’s open-ended questions – where am I going to live, what is next for my career, what is the best form of my business for this season?
If 2023 was concluding the last chapter of my life, then 2024 is the turning over into the next one. Almost every aspect of my life is completely different now than it was a year ago, and at this point I have no idea what’s going to happen with all these new plot points and locations nor where the story is going to go. But then, as I was writing that sentence, I remembered: I’m the author. I decide what happens in this next chapter.
Intentions
Do less with more conviction
Working in my business in 2023 was hectic – as was working in my business in the previous two years, if I’m honest. I have jumped from idea to idea looking for the Thing that’s going to save me, rarely following all the way through and trying to do more stuff to cobble together enough of an income. I think that was the problem. So this year, my intention is not to do more and more things and have criss-crossing deadlines and half finished projects. I’m going to do less, but be all in on what I do. Be committed, focused, and follow through to the end.
Be open and willing
Everything good in 2023 came from breaking out of my narrow personal rules of success and being open and willing to try something completely new (like getting a job). Opportunities for my 2024 goals aren’t going to always come in the shape I expect, so I have to be open and willing to at least considering whatever comes my way. As I mentioned above, I can’t chase any one thing to be “it”, so I have to cast a wider net – and I’m excited about finding an abundant and fulfilling balance of elements.
Stop the over-thinking, improve the self-talk
What has become more of a problem this year is my over-thinking. My looking at everything from all the angles and deciding that maybe the easiest thing to do is nothing. My feeling responsible for everyone else’s total happiness and getting so anxious about it that I make an uncomfortable atmosphere. My feeling guilty about all these things and turning on myself in my self-talk. This year I want to work on letting this go and redirecting it.
Goals
Fix my back problems
One of the side effects of going from walking in the Welsh mountains every day to working a desk job is that my old back injury issues re-emerged more often and more painfully. With a new diagnosis from a new chiropractor I feel like I understand it more, and I am committed to getting it fixed so I can be free of pain and back worries by the end of 2024.
Make a good income
This year I need to be doing really financially abundant work instead of scraping by. I need to spread income sources, I need to be less emotive with my decision-making, I need to bring back the go-getting version of me that started Simple & Season in 2017.
Complete a proposal, get an agent and be published externally at least once
I’m quite sure that this has been on my annual list for a few years now. But this year feels different because I am already doing the work. Usually I put this on the list thinking “oh I’ll definitely do that” but I wasn’t pitching and entering and publishing work. This year I have been treating it as a slow marathon, I have an idea that feels tight yet expansive, I have several thousand words in a Google Doc, I have been pitching, I started the Substack. It feels more possible this year because I have started to actually do it.
Move to a more settled home life
In 2023 my week was split with half the week living at my parents, and the other half with my boyfriend. I was constantly either packing or unpacking, forgetting things in either house or struggling to make plans because of where I was going to be and when. I’d like to live in one place this year. The semi-nomadic life is not for me – this year I want to go home to one place and have a secure routine and build a community
Word of the Year 2024
Most years I have my next Word of the Year by about October. This year, I think testament to how much more busy I’ve been, it hadn’t crossed my mind at all. I came into December with no ideas whatsoever about how I wanted 2024 to be, how I wanted it to feel. Until, that is, I was writing an Instagram Story about the end of Finish With Confidence and used a particular word and just knew: that’s my word of 2024. It made instant sense, and summed up everything that had proven to be missing from 2023. So my word is: UNLEASH.
If 2024 is to be a culmination of the groundwork of 2023, I am going to have to unleash. I’m going to have to stop the little fears and what if’s dictating what I do, I’m going to have to stop thinking that small is all that’s possible for me, I’m going to have to show up, be a bit ballsy, bring back a little more measured ambition. I’m going to have to believe my brilliance and show it. I’m going to have to go all in and take chances and make things happen and be great. I’m going to have to unleash myself.
I’ve hidden my own light and cramped myself down with the overthinking, I’ve put myself in difficult positions and taken my work and financial life in a direction I didn’t want to go in simply because I was not going out there and grabbing things by the horns. I’ve spent so long dilly-dallying with the right business model structure when really I needed to unleash and step into my power.
So that’s the start of this next chapter. Unleashing the colour and brilliance and creativity and ideas, and steering where they take me.
