The Year of Trusting Myself

My 2025 intention, and how I uncover my word of the year.

Is it freezing where you are? I was wearing a t-shirt in Austin on Sunday, and when I woke up on Monday, it was 29 degrees. It’s wild, but I’m kinda loving the chance to be extremely cozy, make soup (my favorites are on page 18), burn candles, and spend evenings reading by the fire. I just started The Husband’s Secret, a thriller in the same vein as Big Little Lies, and so far it’s a fun, suspenseful read that feels just right for this week.

It was amazing to see so many of you on Zoom for my Vision Board Workshop on Saturday! Thanks to everyone who joined—it’s truly the most fun thing for me to get to see your faces, and I’m excited to do more meet-ups and workshops like that for our Substack community. I’ve got some ideas, but if there’s anything specific that you guys would love to hear about / discuss, send me a note.

During the first week of our 30-Day Reset, we’re walking through how to create and manifest a vision for your life. In Sunday’s post, we dove into my 4-step process for creating your vision. Today, I wanted to share my own intention for 2025 and go deeper into my process for discovering my guiding word for the year.

Each year, I choose one word that represents my overarching intention for the year ahead. If you’ve gone through my Vision Workbook, you’ll know that I also set specific goals for the different spaces of my life, but I like to have one centering word or mantra that sums up the overall vibe.

Previous year’s words / mantras have included:

• Less distraction, more engagement.

• Slow down, stop rushing.

• Raise your energy.

• Be here now.

• Have more fun.

• Simplify.

Once I’ve settled on my word for the year, I write it down and put it on my vision board so I can see it each morning, and repeat it when I need to get centered and refocused on my goals.

Often when I’m teaching a workshop, participants say that narrowing down their goals/resolutions/intentions to one word can feel intimidating—how do you know what it should be? So today, I’m sharing the process for how I settle on my word for the year, as well as the word I’ve chosen to represent 2025.

If you haven’t yet read Sunday’s post about how I create my vision for the year, you can read that one for the detailed process of how I set intentions for each of my life spaces. Today’s post builds off that—once I’ve envisioned my dream life and defined the actions I want to take this year, I start to look for themes. There’s almost always a word or idea that keeps coming up over and over across various aspects of my life.

The Reset: How to Create Your Vision and Build the Life of Your Dreams

I also stay attuned to messages that are speaking to me through life itself: conversations with others, books I read, podcasts I listen to, thoughts I have while driving or showering. God speaks to us in so many ways—we just have to be awake enough to listen.

My theme for 2025 is TRUST.