If you are reading this, you’ve made it into a squeaky-clean, brand-spankin' new year. Congratulations!
I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. They just never interested me. But if you’ve been reading my newsletters for very long, you’ll remember that at this time of year I do break the seal on my new journal/planner, do a self card reading, pick a word for the year, and make my annual plan. . . except. . .
This year, though, I got through the first part of the list, but when I came to the end, everything went plaid. I had pre-thought out my year’s plan, probably had a few preconceived notions, and... no. I got stopped abruptly and unexpectedly by one simple sentence in my planner.
As I've lauded many times before, I adore Nicole Cody’s "Journeymaker" planner. As she guides the reader in creating a project and a plan for the new year, she asks, "How will you feel when you complete this project?" And that’s what stopped me. This, even before I started putting the plan into real words (and images. . . I always add images).
You would think it would have been easy—think out a plan, write it down on paper. Done. Yet, even after I’d filled a whole page with words, I woke up in the middle of the night realizing I’d never answered the posed question.
I got up the next morning, wrote another whole page of words, then, later that day, I realized, duh, I’d done it again!
Dangit!
Why was I avoiding that question? And, what did that have to do with my supposed year’s plan?
I started out again and, once again, wrote down some fluff and muff. You’ve seen the proverbial writer with all the wads of paper on the floor. It was kind of like that, except I’d written in the journal, filled all the given space, and had gone on to use large sticky note pages to add the excess. I now had this big clump of extra paper stuck in there, no plan, and no further forward toward the guided path provided.
What was going on?
It took me several days to work through it, finally breaking through to an answer.
I’d come to realize the so-called "plan" I thought I had imagined for 2026 had flown to the moon and wasn’t coming back. I hadn’t given up wanting to accomplish this goal or that, but rather, I more deeply realized I needed to step back, re-evaluate who I wanted to be by the end of the year, and where I wanted to go with it after. More importantly, why it all mattered—and that wasn’t something I could accomplish by writing a book, finishing a craft project, or going on a luxury trip.
Being the author of several books on showing the way to a better life, I knew what I had to do. A good friend and fellow writer once put it this way. . . "Sometimes I need to read my own damn book."
Ah, yes, that.
Okay, Step One: Follow the guidance in my Marvelous Messages from Your Body book.
I often advise clients who feel stuck or have lost their way to begin by listening to the signals offered by their physical body. I knew that would be the perfect starting point.
Good. I recorded my first step on my January action list. (Again, all a part of the path laid out by the journal.)
Then I realized, well, wait a minute, I think I need to go deeper. I need to make some further assessments. I wrote down in my January action steps to also make an assessment of my health in general. Perfect. I had a semblance of a plan. . . or did I?
Another night lying awake, and I came to the conclusion I wanted to make a journey of it. In a sense, I signed myself up for my own "Marvelous Messages from Your Life" program. (At least, I can get in for free!)
[For the record, this program doesn’t actually exist. I made it up as a way to describe my journey while writing this all out in my journal. It’s one of those "figure it out as you go," kind of things.]
Then (again in the middle of the night—I seem to get my best ideas there and in the shower)—I remembered I had some other assessments in a book I'd drafted over two and a half years ago (but had not yet finished): Marvelous Messages from Your Heart.
What good is a self-assessment, I thought, if I didn’t take into account what my heart desired, what my soul craved, and what it was calling me to do? This is at the core of all I teach. I had to do it!
So, while digging through my old files to find that draft, I coincidentally (yeah, sure it was a coincidence) remembered my old discbound journal.
For a time, pre-COVID, pre-anxiety, pre-2020, I had designed my own daily / monthly / quarterly journal pages. I’d kept them in one of those discbound journals. (Named such because instead of a ring binder, it uses round discs to hold the turnable pages together).
In those days, I’d diligently print them out, punch them for the discs, and fill them in daily. I frequently re-designed them to fit my ever-changing needs, so I had a lot of different variations. As part of that, I had also created some self-assessment forms.
Ah! Another part of my haphazard plan was coming to fruition!
By the time I had finished going through all those files, I’d added a few more ideas to my self-assessment. Then the idea occurred to me, why not add a financial component as well?
I didn’t plan to create a vision board of expensive cars, mansions with swimming pools, piles of diamond rings, and exotic trips. No, as I’d learned years ago in a little book called Your Money or Your Life, you start with where you’re at. Write down what you're spending—in detail—and where your spending has gotten you thus far.
Originally published in 1993, the Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez book is now sorely out of date. However, their money assessment guide and the concept of downsizing and simplifying your life still works. Or in other words, give up the more expensive things to lower your expenses, with the understanding that you'll have more time and money to enjoy life more. At times, my husband and I have embraced this concept, but we've by no means been perfect at it.
You may be thinking, Jamie, doing all those self-assessment pages sounds like a lot of work. And I suppose, especially since I’m also creating the pages to fill in as I go along, it will be a significant task. Yet, it’s something I’m passionate about and compelled to do, which makes it rewarding and fulfilling. It’s also because that kind of deep dive, self-discovery, internal work is what got me to where I am today. So my self-assessments will give me a clear view of where I am starting my journey and help me to clarify where I want my Marvelous Messages journey to take me in 2026 and beyond.
In numerology, 2026 is a "one" year. (2+0+2+6=10/ 1) You’ll find lots of articles about this on the web, so I won’t go into detail here other than to say, just like the heralding of the new year, ONE is the herald of a new era. So we have the new month in a new year in a year that also announces new beginnings. One podcaster indicated that we are entering into a time where people are asking themselves, "What is this all for?" She claims we are waking up to the idea that we want more out of life than the daily rat race and the feeling of burnout many of us now face. This ONE is like sunlight streaming through dark storm clouds. Some will see it as hope, while others will see it as a new direction.
And I think that's why I want to do this deep dive. I've felt a coming shift for quite a while. Maybe you have felt it too. It's not about a crossroads, you know, do I take this road or that? It's more than that. It's like the corporate CEO who leaves his job for the country life, or like a YouTuber we recently watched who left nursing after COVID to become a chainsaw artist. (And she's very talented at it!) It's the laying down and letting go of how things are, and deciding to go forward into how you want things to be.
I don’t know how many trips around the sun you’ve made, but for me, the new year is a great celebration for making it yet one more turn. Having faced my share of early exits and survived, my celebrations of the incoming new year are more about still being here than deciding I need to lose ten pounds, give up a bad habit, or join a gym. So this year, I hope to walk this journey I’ve self-devised from the Marvelous Messages in my life and see where it will take me. Will I open new doors and find tremendous pleasure? Or will the idea end up with others as a dust collector on a corner of my desk? Only time will tell.
The only thing left to ask is, how do you want to feel in 2026? What is tugging at your heart? Where do you want to be at the next New Year’s Eve ball drop? What actions will you take to get there?
Feel free to drop me a line and let me know.
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