Happy New Year 🥳

With the new year comes endless options for NEW YEAR, NEW YOU, am I right? It can feel a bit overwhelming, and then sometimes we might grab onto one particular ritual, get excited and then it falls apart. Things like setting new year's resolutions, starting a new fitness program, or if you’re like me, deciding you’re going to learn how to shuffle dance, realize it takes more work than you thought, then quit. 

For this first minisode of 2023, I thought I’d walk you through a simple ritual I did a few weeks ago for Winter Solstice, and it’s something you can do any time of the year! 

Listen in to follow along and do your own new year's ritual!  

Here’s to your BEST YEAR YET! 

Andrea 

Resources:
Coaching with Andrea

Right-click to download the episode.mp3

 

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SHOW TRANSCRIPT

Andrea  00:00

You're listening to Make Some Noise Podcast minisode number 499.

Welcome to Make Some Noise Podcast, your guide for strategies, tools and insight to empower yourself. I'm your host, Andrea Owen, global speaker, entrepreneur, life coach since 2007, and author of three books that have been translated into 18 languages and are available in 22 countries. Each week, I'll bring you a guest or a lesson that will help you maximize unshakable confidence, master resilience and make some noise in your life. You ready? Let's go.

Hi, everyone, welcome to another episode of the podcast, I am so glad that you're here. I am feeling a little bit under the weather. So my apologies in advance if my voice sounds weird, or if I'm, kind of can't, you know, complete a sentence and all of those things, which is hard for me, even when I'm just having a normal feeling great day. So I hope I don't have COVID again. Let's just hope for that. And I hope that today you are feeling amazing. And I hope that 2023, as always, I hope it's your best year yet. Remember when we said that in 2020? I probably said that, and we were sure in for it. But a few years have passed. And I hope that you're leaving behind some of the anxieties and some of the anguish that you may have been feeling over the last handful of years. And I wanted to come on here in his very first minisode of 2023 and talk to you about a very simple, New Year's ritual that I like to do, and this is this is best for those of you who might feel a little overwhelmed with all the different ‘new year new you’ rituals and things that you should be doing, etc, etc, etc. Or maybe those of you who love to do all of the things, you're like, bring it on, bring me all of the worksheets, all of the planners, all of the rituals I want to do at all. It's really for anyone.

And I was I was talking about this on my personal Facebook profile. You know, it's funny, it's like one of my, my daughter's mom, friends mom's commented on this. And she's like, I didn't know this was a thing. Okay. So you know, if you travel in these parts and buy these parts, I mean, the circles of personal development, you might see that a lot of people love to choose their word of the year. Just the one. I've tried this before. And I don't know if it's my ADHD, I don't know if it's just for my personality, or what. a) I have a hard time remembering what my word is. But b) it feels very confined. To focus on one word, I feel like I need to pick seven. And also change my mind on those seven throughout the year. But I posted this on Facebook, and my daughter's friend's mom was like, I've never even heard of this. And I'm like, oh yeah, there's people who don't know, who don't travel in new circles and don't know what kind of the popular thing to do is and that's one that I see the most probably have rituals to do. I love reading other people's words. I love seeing how excited people get in the process of picking the word of reflecting on the year before and how their word showed up for them, or didn't show up for them or whatever. The reflections. I love it. I love it. I'll bring it on. I love love, love it. However, it's just it's not for me. And I was posting just saying, hey, if you don't do it, or if you pick a word and you're gung ho on it, and then two weeks later, you forget, you know, like getting a gym membership and then you don't ever go back to the gym, don't beat yourself up over it. Let's just let it go. It's just maybe not for you. Maybe you're on team Andrea, and it's not for you. But that is definitely one way to do it. You pick a word, you know, it might be ignite or elevate or rest. I like that one or self-care. What are some other ones that I've read? Create pleasure is another one. And you can interpret it however you want. And then you can also pick and choose how you want to make that word relevant and support you throughout the year. So the possibilities are endless. That's another reason I really like it for other people.

But here's what I did. And if you haven't done any ritual yet, or if you're listening to this later in the year, it doesn't matter if it's not the new year. But I like to do this, whether it's a new year starting, or I actually did this on winter solstice. I believe it was December 21. And if you've been listening to my podcast for any length of time, you might know how much I love spring, when spring starts. That feels like the New Year to me, that's when I'll probably do this or something similar. Okay. It's very simple. You get two pieces of paper, and it doesn't matter what size they are just big enough for you to be able to write something, maybe a few sentences on it. Notebook paper works perfectly fine. And on one piece of paper, you're going to write the things that you are letting go of. Okay. This is like, personal development one on one, right, the things that you're letting go of.Maybe you are letting go of not betting on yourself. Maybe you're letting go of abandoning yourself. Maybe you're letting go of old beliefs about yourself. Maybe you're letting go of the notion that you have to do it all or that you have to do it right. Whatever it is, you sit with that for a little while. And even if it's just one thing, or maybe you have a list of 10 things, however it works for you. All right, so you write those things down or that thing down on the piece of paper. There are some experts, gurus, spiritual masters, if you will, who say that it's important to fold the piece of paper away from you when you're folding it up. Okay. So like you pick up the bottom, you fold it in half away from you. Because you're letting go of it. Yeah, if you want to get picky, I do do that. I fold it away for myself, because I'm slightly superstitious. Fold it away from yourself, fold it however many pieces you want. If you just want to fold it in half, that is perfectly fine. And you can either burn it safely, safely, burn it outside, I have a little like a cast iron cauldron type of thing. It's small to cute. I got it at a new age or you know storage where they sell crystals and stuff. Burn it in that or you can flush it down the toilet, you can you can get rid of it however you want. Even if you want to just rip it up into a lot of pieces and put it in the recycling, it's totally up to you. I like to burn it. I like to watch the flames and really imagine myself letting go of those things that I had written on that piece of paper.

And then you get your other piece of paper and you write down what you want. For this new year, for this new season, for this new chapter in your life, whatever it is. Maybe you want to have patience for whatever the next step is in your life. You can I love keeping it vague like that. I love keeping it open, because then I don't feel tied to very specific things. So specific might sound like that you want to make X amount of dollars in quarter one from your Etsy shop or something like that. That's very specific. So I might translate that and say something like, I want to make exactly the amount of money that it is that I need for a European vacation and I'm open to however, that money comes into my life. Because you might get an inheritance. The IRS might call and say hey, we owe you money. You just never know where the where the money is coming from. All right. You might want to find the right expert or medical doctor for these physical ailments that have been bothering you over the last handful of months. Maybe you want to call into your life the courage to take action on the steps that you know that you need to take. Maybe you are wanting to call in the next success in your career. So you see how I kind of keep it open ended? Like however it wants to come into my life. That's how I do it. And I've also put the date on it. And when I'm done writing all of these things down… Oh, and I forgot to mention the way that I write them down and preface it. I say something like ‘on this powerful New Year's Day or on this powerful day I am calling in, dot dot dot’. When I did this on winter solstice I said something like ‘on this powerful Winter Solstice day, I am welcoming x, y & z’. I am inviting, you know, millions of people to read my next book or whatever it is. So when you're done with that, you fold it, guess what towards yourself, fold it towards yourself. And there are different ways that you can do things that you can do with this piece of paper. I like to put it under my pillow for one night and then put it somewhere. I usually like slip it in between books or something like that. I like finding them years later, that's why I put the date on it. You can hang it up somewhere, if you want, you can laminate it, you could make it into a poster, you can tattoo it on your body, really whatever it is that you want. But again, fold it towards yourself however many times that you want. I like to sleep with it under my pillow for one night. Quick tip on that, slip it in your pillowcase because I've had it happen before where it fell back behind my bed and that was just discouraging. I was like is the universe trying to tell me something? It's just like, nope, out of your reach. It's kind of sad. So slip it into your pillowcase underneath. It's an easy way to keep it from sliding all over the place. And then do with it as you want.

So again, that's just a simple, New Year's ritual that you can do. If nothing else, it brings you clarity on what it is that you want in your life because as I've said so many times here on the show, we can get stuck, me to, get stuck focusing on the things that we don't want, focusing on the problems complaining about the circumstances in our life that we don't like that we don't want. And that, you know, feels like shit. So this is a way to get us thinking about and focusing on the things that we do want. It's not to you know, it's isn't toxic positivity, just pretend like the other things don't exist, but it's an exercise, you know, we're creating those new neural pathways to create thoughts that focus on the things that we do want. Things that are coming into our life, that we want to welcome in with open arms that are positive, that bring us joy, and that you deserve. All right. I'm so glad that you're here. I'm so glad that you have finished this podcast episode with me. And if you're thinking about taking action on some of the things in your life that you've been thinking about as you've been listening to this, and maybe you want some extra support, hit me up at AndreaOwen.com/coaching and you can read about different ways to work with me and fill out an application and see if we're a great fit.

All right, everyone. Thank you so much. We are finishing up the Women's Health theme and headed into the recovery theme. And I just want to say really quick about that. I am positioning these interviews, to not just talk about recovery for recovery’s sake. In terms of people with addictions, yes, we will touch on that for sure. But I wanted to make sure that everyone is welcome into these conversations and we're all recovering from something. And the people that I'm bringing on are going to be talking about their everyday life. Like how they manage their negative thoughts, how they manage, not falling into behaviors that do not serve them. So I really hope you stick around for that theme coming up. And remember, it's our life's journey to make ourselves better humans and our life's responsibility to make the world a better place. Bye for now.

Hey, did you know there's free secret podcast episodes waiting for you that are not part of my regular podcast feed? Yes. AndreaOwen.com/free, and you just sign up. You get a link sent to you. It's very secret. It's like a secret club. We don't have a secret handshake. Don't worry about that. But it's these motivating podcast episodes that I made for you. They're under 20 minutes each. There's three of them there for wherever you are in your life. So head on over there and grab them. They range from really supporting you and seeing you where you are and being compassionate all the way to giving you a giant kicking your ass and telling you how amazing and gorgeous and phenomenal you are. So AndreaOwen.com/free and get your hands on that free podcast feed.