49. Your Year, Your Intentions - The Anti-Resolution Guide

Are you tired of setting resolutions every January, only to feel like a failure by February?
In this episode, I’m sharing why resolutions are so last year and how setting meaningful intentions can help you align with your values and embrace growth. From exploring the eight areas of life to uncovering your "why" and leaning into resistance, this episode will help you kickstart your 2025 with purpose and clarity.

You might want to listen if:

• You’re frustrated by resolutions that feel impossible to stick to.
• You want to set goals that align with your values and feel meaningful.
• You’re curious about the eight areas of life and how to balance them.
• You’re ready to reflect on 2024 and learn from what worked (and didn’t).
• You want practical tips to embrace growth and move through resistance.

 💡 Follow Along: Download my free workbook, Your Year, Your Intentions, to get the most out of this episode! It’s packed with prompts, exercises, and a replay of the support session where we broke this all down. Click here to grab it!

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DISCLAIMER: Speak Honest podcast content is informational, not professional or medical advice. Jenn is an ICF relationship coach, not a licensed therapist. Consult health professionals for specific concerns. Client opinions do not reflect Speak Honest’s stance. We aim for accuracy but are not liable for errors or outcomes fr...

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Speak Honest. I am your host and certified relationship coach, Jennifer Noble. It has been my passion for over a decade to help women like you heal what's been holding you back from having the relationships you deserve. Are you struggling with a relationship where you can't seem to voice your emotions, needs and boundaries without having it blow up in your face? Then you have found the right podcast, my friend. Get ready for practical tips, empowering truths, and honest conversations. Now let's dive in.  

Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Speak Honest. I am Jenn Noble, your go to relationship coach. And first and foremost, I just want to say HAPPY NEW YEAR! I want to know how is your 2025 going so far? Mine is going incredibly well. We have had an amazing break. Our Christmas was fantastic. We did matching PJs, which I really thought by now my 13 year old son would be so over the matching PJ phase, but he's the one that actually keeps asking for it and the rest of the family is like, no I'm done. Well, if he's asking for it, I'm going to keep getting us matching PJs, trust me. 

But it was so much fun. We also got to watch him play Fred Anderson in the Christmas Carol. He's about to start another play up, which is always a lot of work, but it's so much fun. I rested. I got a new video game. I got the new Mario Party, Jamboree. If anyone plays Mario Party, hit me up, let's play together on one of the boards. I think I really like the mall one, the mall board level. None of this makes any sense unless you have Mario Party, so let's move on. 

So anyways, on today's episode, I want to be talking all about setting intentions for 2025. This is going to be such a great episode, especially for those of you that are just ready to get your year started now. I don't know about you, but you know, setting resolutions has never really been something that's been a great thing for me. I tend to fail on them really fast and I beat myself up. So that's what I really wanted to talk about in this episode, was how can we set intentions?

But first, before we move on with the episode, I want to talk about where this came from. And if you're new here, this idea or this topic is from our Wednesday support session, our one from back from before the year, which was all about setting intentions for the new year and this support session was so amazing, so fantastic. I made this workbook for it that I went ahead and put it out there for as many people as possible to have. 

So if you are sitting there listening to this episode and you want to follow along in the workbook. Go scroll down to the show notes. On Apple podcast. You can just keep scrolling down. On Spotify, I think it's the same thing. There's going to be a link and you can download the workbook. And in the workbook, there's going to be a link to the replay of the support session. And so you can follow along completely with everything I talk about here on the podcast, as well as in the support session, you can hear the ladies ask their questions and you can get an idea for what our support sessions are like.

So our support sessions happen every Wednesday in our private Facebook community. It's a completely free Facebook group. You can join it anytime. The link is in the show notes. You can just search Speak Honest on Facebook and find it. But I host support sessions there where we dive into topics like attachment styles, communication, boundaries, self awareness, how to talk about what you need with your partner, you know, how to set boundaries with your mother, all topics are on the table.

And it's such a powerful way to stay on track and be supported throughout the year. So if you're not in the Facebook group yet, head over to the show notes to find the link for that. Grab the workbook and let's get started on today's episode.  

All right, so let's get into the episode and talk about setting meaningful intentions for 2025. So first I want to talk about why resolutions don't work. See, resolutions, they feel rigid and they can lead to shame if we don't achieve them. But intentions, they're flexible.  They're more about aligning with our values. So for instance, instead of saying, I need to lose 20 pounds, you might say, you know what? I want to feel stronger and be more energetic. Or instead of saying, I'm going to set a resolution to go running every single day.  Maybe it's just, you know what my intention is, I just want to move more. So my pain is a little less. Do you see the difference now between a resolution and an intention? And that's why oftentimes we can get ourselves in trouble when we try to set these all powerful resolutions of, I need to never drink alcohol again in January of 2025. 

You know, that's going to go out the window the first weekend you come back because that's not what bodies are built to do. Bodies are built to ebb and to flow. They're built to have their highs, and they're built to have their lows. It's about the journey, not about consistency. Consistency is a total just, it's horseshit. Nothing in life is consistent. Why do we ever think we should be consistent at running or consistent to going to the gym? A tree is not consistent. A tree has to flower, it has to lose its leaves, and then it has to die for a little bit until it comes back again. And that's just the same thing with us. We are allowed to ebb and to flow. 

And so, step number two in this process of setting intentions is exploring the eight areas of life. Now, if this is new to you, let me go ahead and explain what these are. So the eight areas of life comes from Dr. John Demartini, and he has seven areas of life. But I like to add recreational because I think fun and rest is incredibly, incredibly important to our lives and we don't talk about it enough. 

So let me walk you through the eight categories. And this is all in the workbook, which again, you can grab in the show notes. We have recreational, vocational, mental, physical, relational, social, financial, and spiritual. Now, you can rewind this and write this all down. You can grab it in the show notes, you can grab the workbook. I explain what each and every one are in there. But the idea here is that we want to be balancing our intentions in all eight areas of life. See, in my own life, I realized I was neglecting my recreational life. You know, just fun for the sake of fun or not resting because I had you know, quote unquote, earned it, but because I just deserved it. 

So I started adding in more game nights with my family. I started scheduling in playing more Mario Party with my husband on the couch on a Saturday evening. I don't need to be working all the time. I don't need to be going to yoga on a Saturday night. Sometimes I just need to enjoy and be. And it's the same thing with all eight areas. Maybe for you, you know, you rocked it in the vocational area of your life this year. Your career is on point. You got that raise. But maybe the mental area of your life, you know, where you learn and you enjoy reading a book or you better yourself in other ways mentally, maybe that fell a little bit. And that's why it's so important to set intentions in all eight areas. 

So as we're setting these intentions in all eight areas, it's important to define Why we're setting them.  Ssee, a client of mine wanted to organize her house, but when we dug deeper into why she wanted to organize, she kind of realized it was because she was afraid that the people coming over to her house were judging her and they were saying things about her or it was making her feel all this certain way that if anyone comes to her house, they're going to think she's a slob or she's hoarding stuff or that maybe she's not worthy to be a friend.

And when we really dug into that, we realized, wait a second. She doesn't want to organize her house necessarily, right? She's just trying to fix herself in a way to be more worthy. So, why do you think this resolution has failed for her every other single year? It's because it's not coming from a deeply connected place. Her why wasn't matching up with what her resolution was. So what she wanted to do was match that up. So we helped her align her goals and her intentions with what she really wanted in her heart space, which was feeling more worthy. And the coolest part about this was when we got her to a place of feeling more worthy and seeing that she doesn't need to clean her house in order to let friends and family come over. And that was a really fun experiment of, you know, allowing friends to come over and just leaving everything exactly the way it was. So that way she could teach herself that she is safe with the mess. As soon as that started happening, she was able to find her motivation to start cleaning her house. 

Now, I'm not saying that that, you know, was our end goal. I still think that she could have had a messy house and that'd be totally fine. But we needed to figure out her why. What's your why? Let me know in the Facebook group. Why are you setting the intentions that you're setting?  

And then, I love doing this. I want us to reflect on 2024 so, you know, we have figured out the eight areas of life we have defined our why we have understood why we want to do it and now we're going to reflect on 2024 this comes a little bit after and I find this really helps because now we want to just take a moment to think about what energized us last year or what drained us?

Who was the person that we wanted to talk to all the time? Who was the person who Oh, we do not want to talk to again and maybe we need to start setting some boundaries with that person. I know we all have someone like that in mind right now. I want us to learn and see that it's okay to learn from our mistakes, right?

It's even okay to learn from our successes. It's about looking and reflecting on the past year to see, okay, where do I want to go in 2025? And once we've done that, once we've reflected on the past year, we can really start to see that when we have resistance come up to our resolutions and our intentions, that's a good thing. Discomfort leads to growth. 

In one of my support sessions, a member shared how she was feeling resistance to saying no to a friend visiting. But once she leaned into it, she realized that she needed that time to focus on her own priorities. And it ended up being a huge lesson. Breakthrough for her but see that resistance as she was like, okay I'm gonna i'm gonna go out there i'm gonna have more friendships and then as soon as she said that someone You wanted to come over and she realized well not that friend and so she felt resistance But then she started judging herself.

She started seeing like I said, I wanted friends and now look at me pushing them away again It's like wait, wait, wait, let's back up. Let's not judge. Let's not feel guilt about this. Let's get curious I love saying this get curious not Furious Let's look at where the resistance is coming from. And the resistance is that this friend tends to take a lot from her when she comes over. So we set boundaries and that is beautiful. It's in the resistance where we learn what's really important to us. So now if this sounds like the kind of work you want to do, I want you to grab my free workbook: Your year, Your Intentions. It's a step by step guide to setting meaningful intentions for 2025. I'm going to link it in the show notes and it also includes access to the replay of our recent support session.  

So today we talked about moving away from resolutions and focusing on intentions. Exploring all eight areas of life and connecting our why and reflecting on last year and leaning into the resistance that comes from our resolutions. So I want you all, if this resonated with you, I want you all to go grab that workbook. Join us in our Facebook community and start telling us what you want your 2025 to look like. I am so excited for all of us this year. I just think this is going to be the year of the woman finding her voice and finally learning how to speak up for herself, and I would be honored to help you along the way.  Go grab the workbook, watch the replay, come into the Facebook group, and I will see you at our next support session until next time, take care.  

As we wrap up today's conversation, always remember that healing is a journey, not a destination, and it is an honor to be a part of your healing journey. If you want to dig deeper into the topics we covered today, be sure to head over to our show notes where you can find all of the valuable information mentioned in today's episode, right there. And please remember to rate, review and subscribe. If you enjoyed today's podcast, your feedback means the world to us and helps others discover our podcast.  Until next time, remember to speak up and Speak Honest.