Creating 2020 Vision: How to Get Clear, Set Goals and Create a Life You Love

When you have 2020 vision, you have clarity, direction, purpose and this creates a strong focused mindset. If you are ready to see what you want clearly and prepare yourself to remain motivated, inspired and truly live your vision, stay tuned all throughout this year! We are going to get motivated and stay motivated with a constant search for and connection to clarity.

This post today will walk you through three basic steps to create 2020 vision for your year ahead—the year 2020! First you will use clarity questions to dive deep within yourself and get super clear on where you’ve come from through reflecting on this past year. Then you will set specific goals to set you up to move towards what you want. Lastly you will create a life you love through consistent action and maintaining a determined mindset. Ready to get started? Here we go!

Step One: How to Get Clear

Clarity requires self-reflection. Inner reflection can be painful, or at least uncomfortable…so we tend to either avoid it through procrastination, busyness or through plain old denial. If you can reframe the process of self-reflection from painful or uncomfortable to a process of getting super clear on what hasn’t worked so far, so that you can make adjustments and create a plan for change, you might actually enjoy the process!

Getting clear is not about regret, self-deprecation, self-punishment or anything else that feels negative. Self-reflection and getting super clear in order to allow yourself to problem solve and use those solutions to move forward in a way that creates feelings of empowerment and deep self-awareness. Take time with these self-reflection questions to dive deep and GET CLEAR! Get out your journal, set your ego and fear aside and gain the clarity through self-reflection that you can learn and grow from to make 2020 your most purpose driven and powerful year yet.

1.    What was the most memorable part of this past year? Why?

2.    What is the biggest lesson you learned this past year? How can you apply that lesson to the year ahead?

3.    In what ways have you changed over this past year? Are you satisfied with that change, why or why not?

4.    If you did not create the change you desire in the past year, why? What held you back?

5.    What were your biggest distractions in this past year? How can you adjust those in the year ahead?

6. What did you prioritize over the past year? Did you prioritize yourself and your personal goals?

7.    When you reflect on this past year, what are you most grateful for?

8.    What is one area of your life that you’d most like to improve upon in the year ahead?

9. How will you ensure that you make these improvements that you desire?

10. What are the challenges that may present themselves as you attempt to create these improvements?

Spend time reflecting on your answers and then move into the next step.

Step Two: Setting Goals

When you set goals, you want them to be measurable, doable and desirable. If you can measure your progress you will know when you’ve achieved your goal. When your goal is doable, it will be something that you can fit into your current schedule and lifestyle without any major disruption. And the big kicker is, your goal has to be desirable—meaning you have to actually want it. When you know what you want (goal) and begin to create a plan for making it happen (doable) you can remain focused on why you want it (desirable) to ensure that you make it happen.

The biggest element of follow through is creating small action steps. When you have the baby steps outlined that will lead you to the bigger outcome of achieving your goal, you can get there. This leads us to step three!

Step Three: Create a Life You Love Through Consistent Action and a Determined Mindset

Taking action consistently is how you will ensure that you meet your goals and live out your vision for your life. Without a plan to take action it will most likely remain a dream, a fantasy, a simple wish. With a plan that you commit to taking action on consistently, your vision will fall into place with time. When you have a determined mindset that you have to do these action steps daily, you can do these action steps, that you WILL do these action steps NO MATTER WHAT, you will make it happen.

I know this is all easy to talk about however putting the plan together and creating consistent action is not always so simple...Over the next ten blogs, I’ll be outlining TEN steps to help create the change you desire over time and through a series of supportive suggestions that will help you create a life that you love. When it comes to living your vision, it is ultimately YOU that has to make the choice and the daily consistent work to make it happen. The 10-steps will offer the support to help get you where you want to go and continue to create clear vision for 2020!

I hope these three steps are helpful in your search for greatness this year. If you struggle to stay motivated feel free to reach out, having support is an essential element to growth!

#MondayMotivation

So here we are, another new Monday, another new week. Are you ready? Monday’s are such a great day to reflect and reevaluate where you are along your personal path to living the life you desire. When you think about: what are you giving your energy to today, what comes up for you? Monday’s are the perfect day to take a moment and reflect on your vision, your goals for your life and your plan to make it happen.

When you have a clear vision of what you want and goals to support your vision, you have a roadmap to create a life that you love. When you create a daily/weekly/monthly PLAN OF ACTION you create consistent opportunities to MAKE IT HAPPEN! This is where it can get a little tricky… putting the goals into a plan of action and then following that plan consistently. We all struggle with follow through at times because, well, life is busy—and sometimes….we just don’t feel like it.

This is where getting a little extra motivation on a Monday can come in handy! No matter what your personal vision and goals are, taking action is what allows them to come into fruition. When you evaluate where you are giving away your energy, using your energy and draining your energy, you can evaluate where you can create alignment with your goals. Having a solid plan-of-action creates a better scenario to get-it-done.

Mindset is the bridge between having a plan and then making your plan a reality within your life. Having a mindset of action, a mindset of believing that what you want is not only possible but completely attainable, makes all the difference. Creating a mindset that you deserve to reach your goals and elevate your life to the level you desire to live it is essential. If your goals are health and wellness related, having a mindset that you choose to follow through because you choose your long-term health goals and wellbeing over a momentary setback or desire will keep you in an empowered space rather than in a deprivation space.

To get motivated for Monday—and for the rest of the week—contemplate the following self-reflection questions and then either create (or recreate!) your plan of action for this week starting with TODAY!

Reflect on:

-How motivating is your vision? Do you need to reconnect with your personal WHY?

-What do you need to do to get back into action mode?

-What is ONE thing you can do today to reenergize your vision and your goals so you can begin to consistently take action in order to live your vision?

Now spend some time writing out your plan of action. Be as specific as possible. Share your plan with someone who will support your progress. Review your plan daily and know that this is NOT about perfection, this is about making steady progress over time. Use your mindset of determination to create focus. Visualize yourself taking action AND reaching your goals every single day. Now repeat. When you follow this consistently you will find that you are living your vision and elevating yourself to life YOU want to live!

If I Heal My Emotional Eating Will I Lose Weight?

One of the first questions that people ask me as we begin working together is: “will this process of making peace with food help me lose weight?” This is such a tough and loaded question! This question always makes me feel the frustration, disappointment and pain so many of us experience with our bodies.

The desire to lose weight has often plagued so many for so long and after trying countless diets, supplements, workouts, and other extreme measures, the weight never seems to stay off. When it begins to creep back on, most are met with many overwhelming and uncomfortable emotions such as fear, frustration, denial and even hopelessness. So, when I hear this question about weight loss, I know it comes from a place where you may not quite trust this process.

When you heal emotional eating, you are metaphorically healing yourself. The struggles with food really are not about the food. The struggles, control and fear related to food point to the challenge of managing your internal emotional world, not having your needs met, and feeling in some way inadequate or not good enough. When you address these underlying emotions that trigger cravings, overeating and even binge eating, it can be overwhelming, tiring and it’s just plain old draining. Many of us don’t even recognize how deep the roots run because it has been happening for soooo long.

The thing is, healing from those deepest roots takes dedicated time. This means that the weight loss that results with this type of work (a non-diet approach) well—it takes time. A mindful approach to making peace with food is not an overnight fix. This process is not a crash diet. This is not a one-size-fits-all plan. That is why the way I work always begins with visioning, goal setting and, at the core of the process and consistently throughout the process, mindfulness. And I know, I talk about vision and mindfulness A LOT. However these tools offer such a powerful difference in the ability to feel, understand and accept emotions. They offer a mind shift towards progress, not perfection. They offer guidance and direction from within rather than grasping from random external fleeting diets. With your vision and mindfulness as the driving force towards healing and change, we can then work with evidenced based practices to continue the growth and change. These practices include nutrition, movement, self-awareness, self-reflection, self-compassion and accountability that create real, lasting, sustainable change in mind and body.

Basically, working in a mindfulness and intuitive eating approach is flipping everything you ever thought, did or tried over and shaking it out—with intention. The work ends up creating space to feel like yourself, to become who you truly are meant to be. The hard work, focus and determination creates progress and an opening to accept all parts of yourself, all of your emotions and the whole of who you are and your life as it is unfolding.

The work with mindfulness to heal emotional eating moves you through any stuck and stagnant places and even will lift you out of back slide. The work is about addressing resistance, head on, and building resilience. Do you know how resilience builds? With hard-hard work. Resilience builds and generates itself with failure and mistakes and from shifting your perspective from “why bother?” to “I am worth this bother,” or “today I choose to bother.”

If you are ready to immerse yourself in this alternative approach, keep on reading! Freedom From Emotional Eating is an online group coaching experience that meets live weekly for twelve weeks. This course sets up the specific and valuable circumstances to create real, intentional, actual change. The processes you experience with this course are transformative and healing. Many of the modules are not easy, however they are SO worth the hard work. There are smooth transitions between the modules to keep your progress as linear as possible. Throughout the course, you have the constant support needed to create the change you desire, slowly and over time so that they are sustainable.

As you begin to integrate the changes, you have consistent support and coaching which frees your ability to transform your mindset so you can remain in action mode. Another big difference between healing emotional eating versus putting a band-aid on the symptoms is that it is a life-long journey. This process is a commitment to yourself. This process requires a sound commitment to change, and then to create the circumstances necessary for the changes to continue to evolve. Throughout the course you will add new layers of change upon change until you find you are truly living your vision for your life. You find yourself truly making peace with food. While you are creating the circumstances within your life to no longer eat when bored, sad, angry, anxious, happy, fearful, lonely or otherwise, the weight naturally comes off. However, once this course, it is no longer about the weight and more about freeing yourself of old wounds, old patterns and creating a new way of existing within your own life.

If you are ready for a different approach to heal your relationship with food, with your body and with yourself, join me and a supportive group of like-minded others going through the exact same process. Healing your relationship with food could occur one day, or this could be day one. Your choice. Your life. You get to decide when the time is right, right now. I hope you will consider joining me on this journey to healing and wholeness this spring. I look forward to walking with you along your personal path to making peace with food. If you are ready to take the start the journey, you can click here to learn more. If you’d like to be on the wait list for the next offering, reach out, I’d love to hear from you!