I hope this finds you well and looking forward to the promise of a new year. Whether you make new year goals, resolutions, commitments, or claim a word for your new year, intentions do help focus actions for realizing more of what we seek in life and love.
My 2025 word for my business is “relationship” which is exercising our power with people and events versus reacting to the people and events in our life. Be it a relationship with a loved one, personal or work family, or the mother lode of all relationships-the relationship with oneself, relationship engages our power whereas reacting engages our fear and is a loss of power.
The relationship you have with yourself is reflected by how you allow people to treat you, how you dole out consequences to bad behavior-or not- or even whether you trust in life. The relationship you have with yourself is the foundation of how you craft the other relationships in your life, personal and professional. And when you don’t treat yourself well, when you don’t honor what is true for you, it’s not such a stretch to put up with others not caring for or honoring you as well.
Unless a person intentionally works to change the beliefs they formed in their childhood-a time when exercising their power was curtailed-they will continue to engage life with a limited exercising of their power. This leads to imbalances of power in their relationships, either through continuing to not exercise their power or the polarity of compensating for believing they have no power. Thus the bullied child becomes the adult who bullies or the nice girl feels like a door mat as an adult.
This doesn’t mean that outside yourself is irrelevant, for your experiences in relationships are great feedback for what is working with your exercising of power and what is not. Especially relationships where you notice you are blaming or feeling like a victim. These are relationships giving you useful feedback for deciphering patterns and beliefs in play for then being able to engage different choices. Not every relationship or situation can be made better as it takes both “sides” working towards the same goal to create a healthy and vital relationship/situation. But you can become clear what is yours, make it better, and then have more clarity as to whether to stay or move on from the relationship or situation..
It’s work to be in relationship as it requires being honest with oneself and learning to communicate with ownership of what is true for you. Our current dominant paradigm of power is control over others, with winners and losers in consequence. Relationship is power with a person or situation and offers learning, intimacy, and accountability.
I invite you to take up the promise of a new year with some sort of intentionality, for as many studies have shown, setting goals and aligning one’s choices with said goals, creates more likelihood of realizing the goals. Humans are wired to engage challenges for making things better and why I hold challenges as life’s guidance for where to make changes for a life better. If you’d like some thoughts and suggests on a challenge you are starting this new year with, consider scheduling a Clarity Session with me. It’s a no-cost 45 minute phone call in which you share what is challenging you and I share some thoughts on how you can make it better. No pressure, simply an opportunity to talk about where you are feeling stuck and my suggests for how to start getting unstuck.