new years resolutions

MY 2025 YEAR END REVIEW

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Hey friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday I wanted to review my 2025 year with you. The end of the year is a great time to reflect and celebrate your successes, evaluate what you could do differently, and think about some habits you want to continue on into the new year. I always love using paper planners and this year my planner had a spot for keeping track of routines, values, and goals. So it was easy to evaluate how this year went for me. I loved this planner so much that I ended up purchasing the exact same planner for 2026.

One of the first pages in this planner is a spot to write out your values. There was also a list of common values you could circle to guide you for the year. In this section there was a “more” column and a “less” column. Under more I wrote: quietness, walking, reading, whole foods, and creativity. I was actually shocked at how effective it is to write down your values heading into a new year. I have been wanting to add the habit of reading into my routines for years and it wasn’t until this year that I was truly successful! At the end of the summer I added the routine of reading almost every evening, and that routine has continued! I also wanted to walk more this year and I started the habit of walking in the mornings this year. I have also generally been taking more walks throughout this year! I do feel like I could do a better job at quietness. As I mentioned last week, I am taking some time away from Instagram over the next couple of weeks to give myself more margin for quietness. I have been getting on every few days to answer DMs and I’m also working with a brand to create a Reel, but otherwise not scrolling or staying on for hours. 

The last two things were whole foods – which I decided to create a mostly ingredient pantry at the beginning of the year to achieve this. I would say I did okay in this regard. I definitely still purchase crackers and other packaged foods, but I do think creating the ingredient pantry has helped and moving into the new year I would like to continue to focus on this goal. Lastly was creativity, and I truly believe that doing the no buy year helped with making space for creativity. I did several home projects with DIYs and I also had to get creative at times to make what I had on hand work instead of purchasing something new.

In my “less” column I had sugar, social media, and shopping. I definitely was successful with less shopping! Doing the no buy year really curbed my shopping throughout the year. I feel like I could still work on the less sugar goal. I don’t eat a lot of refined sugar, but I do make desserts regularly for my family. I make them homemade and sweeten them with maple syrup or dates, but I want to cut back on eating desserts generally. And with social media I am off of Facebook and TikTok completely and even after just a few days off of Instagram I would like to implement strict rules for myself with regards to how long I can be on the app daily.

Another spot in the planner that was insightful to me is to look at was my top 5 goals for the year. Mine were: 1. Fix issues with the house, 2. Regular walking, 3. Continue daily Bible reading, 4. Continue workout routine, and 5. Read more! I would say I did an amazing job hitting these goals this year! I will say, we still have some issues we need to deal with regarding our home. I did get a new front door, which was on the list, but I still have a long list to get through which will have to roll over into next year. I would like to come up with a plan to get these things accomplished because it’s definitely something that I keep putting off! I really dislike research, which fixing home issues requires. Everything else on this list I feel very proud to say I achieved these goals! I look forward to filling out my plans for 2026 over the next week!

I would love to hear from you in the comments! Did you write down your goals for this year? Do you make resolutions? A vision board? A word for the year? How did you do on accomplishing your goals for this year? What goals or ideas do you have for the upcoming new year?

Here is the YouTube video I shared in conjunction with this blog post.

HABITS ARE HARD TO CHANGE

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Okay friends, for today’s Thoughtful Thursday post I wanted to talk about how challenging it can be to change habits. It is challenging to incorporate new healthy habits, and it’s also challenging to change the unhealthy habits. As we end out the year I know many of you are thinking about some changes you may want to make in the new year. The new year is a great time to evaluate behavior and think about what you may want to do differently moving into the new year.

I thought this is a good time of year to address this topic and share some thoughts with you. There are a few things I have been thinking about recently with regards to habits. First, I just want to acknowledge how difficult it is to incorporate new habits into your routines. I have been doing intermittent fasting for the past 3 or 4 years, and while this may be considered a healthy habit I decided I wanted to change things up and eat protein prior to my workout in order to gain muscle. Y’all I did this for maybe two weeks, but slowly reverted back to my old habit of not eating until noon – which is after my workout. Even though my previous habit wasn’t a bad habit it was still nevertheless challenging for me to incorporate a new habit. As we think about incorporating new habits moving into the new year we must acknowledge that it will be hard. If you are wanting to change a bad habit or add a healthy habit, it will likely be extra challenging! 

I think it’s important to first be aware of the internal struggle you will experience as you make changes. It can be difficult to make lots of changes at once, and I have noticed for myself I have more success if I just focus on one or two changes at a time. If you choose one thing to focus on per month in 2024, by the end of the year you will have changed 12 habits! 

Something else that can derail new habits is failure. It can be easy to give up when we have a day where we fail to meet the expectations we have set for ourselves, but I think we will have more success if we pick ourselves up and dust off and move forward the next day. It can be hard to accept that we won’t do things perfectly, but once we do we begin to see the change sticking over the long haul.

Another thing that is important to acknowledge is that even if you have stuck with a good or healthy habit for a long period of time, it doesn’t mean that it is easy to stick to. There will be days that you don’t feel like following through. I have been someone who avidly works out since I was in middle school, but I can promise you there are some days when I am not feeling it and I want to skip the workout. It is on those days that the habit drives the behavior more than my feelings. Just because we have a habit doesn’t mean that it will always be easy to stick to it!

I do want to address that there are some habits that become an addiction and you might need to seek professional help if you are not having luck changing those habits on your own. Addiction can come in many forms these days. So many people think of substance abuse, but we can be addicted to our phones, social media, shopping, food, and more! Sometimes we need to get help from a professional to get out of these unhealthy cycles. I’m mentioning this briefly to acknowledge it, but I know that there is no simple solution to these sorts of unhealthy habits. But I did want to mention it.

I hope this post encouraged or inspired you today! I would love for you to check out my YouTube channel if you haven’t already done so! I will link the video below that I made in conjunction with this post!

How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions

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We are just a few weeks into the new year. This is usually the time people begin to drop off on their New Year’s resolutions. It can be challenging to make life-long changes overnight. People often set goals at the new year: to lose weight, to eat healthy, to get organized, to name a few. Often, people use the new year as an incentive to muster up enough willpower to make the changes they want to make. But somewhere mid January or early February, the willpower isn’t enough and slowly the goals that had been set begin to go by the wayside.

To make lasting changes, I propose that instead of setting goals or making resolutions, you should focus on your habits. When we practice small, repetitive actions day in and day out, this can more effectively lead us to our goals. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against goal setting or making resolutions. That process is fun and exciting because we get to imagine and dream what life could be like. Resolutions are future oriented – making it easier for us to come up with lofty goals, because it is our future self that will have to have the follow through! One of my favorite sayings from the tv show, How I Met Your Mother, that I like to use when I’m procrastinating is “I’ll let future Joy worry about that.” And that’s exactly what we are doing – creating perhaps unattainable goals, and hoping our future selves will have follow through. This is often why year after year nothing actually changes.

I would like to share with you 6 things you can do in order to actually attain your goals.

{ONE} Put it on your to-do list. Habits happen by making something a part of your routine. Whatever you want to achieve, put it on your to-do list and then don’t make excuses and just do it! You want to exercise three times a week? Schedule it in. You want to spend more time with friends? Plan a standing weekly or monthly get together and have it on your calendar. You want to drink more water? Put timers on your phone to remind you to fill up. Want to get organized? Put it on your calendar each week to spend time purging and organizing a space in your home. Over time, these practices just become part of who you are.

{TWO} Choose the “basic solution” over the “quick fix.” Often times, along with resolutions, people buy in to “quick fix” solutions. Whether it’s a special herbal tea, a protein shake, or vitamins and supplements, these things can’t replace what will truly make a lasting change. Making it worse, marketers play into this desire we have to find a quick fix. These quick fix solutions nor our will power can replace making changes in our habits. If we focus on basic solutions and make those a part of our habits, we are more likely to succeed. A basic solution to the goal to “get healthy” might be to get 7-8 hours of sleep at night, to drink 8 glasses of water a day, to exercise a certain number of times per week, instead of taking pills or drinking teas or shakes.. We all know, there are really no shortcuts. People want some magical or secret solution, but the truth is that change happens through small, repetitive actions everyday. 

{THREE} Let your habit connect to a priority in your life. If we want change, we must make these stepping stones to our goal a priority. If you value exercise, friendships, health, organization, then your habits must follow. The good thing about a priority leading your habit and not a goal leading it, is that you can change the habit if it’s not working for you. With a goal, if you “fail” once you feel like you have to start all over and this can be daunting. Say you make it a goal to exercise three times per week. Well, in February you get sick, and it derails this goal. At this point it could be easy to just give up. Habits are easier to “start over.” If exercise is a habit, then when you miss a week of it because of illness, you start over next week! You don’t have this feeling of guilt when you “failed.” Goals are great platforms to make changes in your life, but priorities ultimately dictate our behavior.

{FOUR} Reward yourself. It’s important to have small rewards along the way. This reinforces the behavior. Whether it’s external rewards – like having a soda or beer on Friday night after drinking your 8 glasses of water each day that week, or internal rewards – acknowledging how good you feel after a workout to remind yourself that it’s worth it!

{FIVE} Create an environment or systems to help you succeed. Often times we fail because we don’t have the needed systems in place to foster success. In the example of wanting to drink more water – buy a new water bottle, or have a water bottle out and ready to fill up in the morning, or set timers throughout the day to remind you. Visual cues will remind you to do what you set out to do.

{SIX} Don’t expect perfection. As I mentioned previously, it can be hard to keep chugging along after failure. If you miss a day of exercise, or eat a cheeseburger instead of a salad one day, THAT’S OKAY… start over the next day. It’s difficult to perfectly stick to good habits. Illness, travel, and special celebrations can get in the way of keeping our routines. It’s important to just keep moving forward with your habit.

I hope this encourages you that you CAN succeed in your resolutions this year. Focus on habits instead of goals. Habits are DAILY DECISIONS that can help you achieve your goals!