It’s that lovely time of the year again where I sit down and work through Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year workbook and meditate on my intentions for the new year. It is also the time I settle on my One Little Word for the year by going through her Find Your Word companion workbook. This is my little new year ritual. I find these tools extremely helpful to me. They get me in reflective zone and help me figure out my path for the year to come.
I will say that I struggled a lot with finding my word for 2020.
Prior to delving into the workbooks, I honestly had no idea what I wanted my word for 2020 to be. Nothing really spoke to me, and for awhile there I was simply going to continue with my 2019 word, Bloom. But I finally had some time to really reflect and fill out my workbooks and I must say, it is magical how my mindset can transform with a be of reflecting and honest soul searching.
My word for 2020 is Flourish.
I found it while looking up the definitions of two different words I was considering. It was serendipitous really. I was debating between the words Thrive and Evolve–they are quite similar and yet not–when I found Flourish. Flourish just seems like the better word. It combines both thrive and evolve, while also keeping with the bloom theme I began last year. For me, it just seems like the perfect word to follow Bloom. Because if I’m honest, I’m not ready to let go of that word just yet. I still have a lot of growing to do and a lot more unraveling. And yet, I want to evolve. I want to thrive. And with Flourish, I can do all of those things.
Flourish makes me feel grand and free. It embraces growth and change. It ultimately makes me feel bold. It’s just the right fit. So for this year, I want to Flourish. I want to Be Bold, Evolve and Thrive. I want to Inspire.
Be Bold
I want to be bold when I jump into doing new things. I’ve found that I often let fear hold me back, yet I’ve also come to understand that you must embrace that unknown in order to come out the other side evolved shiny and new. There’s a saying that goes if there’s something you want to do that scares you, chances are you should be doing that very thing. I’m definitely going to have to push myself and see if that’s true.
Evolve
I want to evolve my creativity and try some new things or new ways of doing the familiar. I find that I become stagnant or uninspired when I’m constantly doing the same sorts of things. So I naturally like to bounce around and try all the things. Yet, at the same time, I long to just stick with one thing. A bit of a contradiction aren’t I? But I feel like if I do stick with one thing, finding different ways to approach that one thing would help tremendously. And trying new things, particularly those that scare me, is something I want to attempt to do this year. And all signs point to yes. Plus this type of change will be good for my soul and ultimately with facing these fear, I can level up.
Thrive
With all of this change, I ultimately want to thrive. I believe a lot of success comes with having a positive mindset, so I really intend to work on mine this year. Working in my unraveling journal has helped immensely with understanding myself in a way that I’ve stopped being so hard on myself for being the way that I am. But I really would like to take this further. I’ve heard that daily gratitude journaling does wonders for maintaining a positive mindset, so I’m going to give it a go this year. I’m also thinking about creating my own set of affirmation cards to motivate and inspire me whenever I’m down. I feel like if I can create a habit of this, I’ll thrive in positivity.
Inspire
Lastly, I want to continue to create daily and inspire others to do the same and live their best creative lives. I recently launch my creative community, The Lovely Collective, which I hope to cultivate and turn into a space I love to be apart of. I also want to finally relaunch my revamp of my class Geoscrapping and launch my new class Daybook of Dreams, which is all about finding, collecting, and using the inspiration that’s all around us.
Some other things I’d like to explore this year are:
- keeping a Scraptherapy memory album
- gratitude journaling
- mixed media and drawing a la Jane Davenport/Tamara Laporte
- creative self portraiture (photography)
- healthy cooking
- more of the world