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.

PS—There’s still one day left to enter to win a Vision Board Kit. Details to enter are here (scroll to the very bottom!) if you missed it. Okay, let’s dive in.

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.

This year is about trusting myself and knowing that my life is unfolding exactly as it’s supposed to even when I can’t see it. I’m choosing to leave behind the fear of other’s perceptions of me. And I’m listening to my inner voice, instead of searching for answers from “experts.” This call to trust myself has been a shift I’ve felt since turning 40 in May, and the year ahead is about leaning further in, trusting the process, and knowing that every experience is preparing me for what’s next.

So how did I land on this word, out of all the options bouncing around in my mind? Well, as I spent time journaling about my intentions, I kept noticing this throughline of listening to my inner voice and following what lights me up, instead of defining my life by others’ metrics of success.

But I also kept seeing and hearing this message in my day-to-day life—screenshots from Pinterest, saves from my podcasts, highlights in books. Here are a few of the references that spoke to me (that I wanted to share with you anyway, so feels like as good a time as any):

🎧 How to finally stop caring what others think about you.

My big unlock from this podcast episode: when I spend my energy worrying about how someone else may react, I hand over my power to them. I'm letting their reaction or judgment control what I choose to do.

📔 A quote I wrote down in my journal from this interview:

“The opposite of anxiety is not calm, it’s trust. When you are so sure that it’s going to happen, you feel confident that you can go and do anything.”

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📷 In my Instagram saves:

Sources: Garance Doré, @cozyvu, Yung Pueblo, Helen Marie

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What are you noticing?

There’s a phenomenon that fascinates me called the frequency illusion. It’s when something you recently experienced suddenly seems to appear more frequently in your environment. When I was pregnant, I suddenly started seeing pregnant people everywhere. It's not that these things actually occur more often, but rather that your brain is now attuned to notice them because it flags them as relevant.

So, what are you noticing? It may be pointing you in the direction of your own word for 2025.

And if you’re still stumped, try simply asking yourself these questions:

• What are you welcoming in this year?

• What are you releasing?

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Your turn—What’s your word for 2025? Tell me in the comments—I’m curious to know, and I believe that when you’re vulnerable enough to put your dreams out there, you’re inviting others to support you. It’s the first step to bringing those dreams to life.

Get excited for Sunday—we’re kicking off Food & Nutrition in our 30-Day RESET with Mia Rigden, one of my favorite nutritionists on the internet. She’ll be sharing her wisdom on healthy eating for the new year, as well as a meal plan and recipes to help you kick it off right.