YES.

I have found myself thinking for nearly two months now about resolutions versus goals versus planning as it relates to the year we are now almost 1/12th of the way through. As 2014 drew to a close and 2015 dawned, I've intended over and over again to sit down with my usual tools, my favorites being Chris Guillebeau's year-in-review process, Lara Casey's Power Sheets,  and Susannah Conway's Unravelling the Year Ahead, and hash out my hopes, dreams, and plans for the coming year.

But somehow it simply hasn't happened.

I'm feeling resistant to the process this year. Not because I don't have goals or plans, but because I feel so utterly and completely wide open. Maybe broken open is a better way to phrase it. With the launching of this new brand, the shift that has been whispering and dancing somewhere at the edges of my life over the past year or two actually began in earnest. A shift that has some to do with business, but mostly to do with myself…my perceptions of who I am, what success looks like, where my real values lie, and how I want this life I'm living to look. I've somehow suddenly become unshackled and more grounded all at once and with that has come an intoxicating sense of freedom and possibility.

Possibility. And potential. Mixed with a renewed and centered sense of capability, a confidence in my ability to draw on the resources at my disposal and meet new and thrilling and unnerving challenges as they arise. It's terrifying and exhilarating and I feel able to own it in a way that I never have before. So I feel a real resistance to trying to map out a bunch of big goals for the coming year…it just feels limiting, like I'm tethering my future to only my past experiences, to what my diminutive past has trained me to expect. And it just doesn't feel broad enough. Instead, I seem to simply come back over and over to a single word (which is sort of the point of Susannah Conway's Unravelling anyway, right?).

Yes. YES. YES.

Yes to everything. Yes to meeting friends for a drink and some long-overdue catching up. Yes to an opportunity that feels a little over my head. Yes to spontaneously getting up from my computer to spend the afternoon among the trees. Yes to solo travel and getting uncomfortable. Yes to the chaos that can sometimes be a part of saying yes. Yes to the occasional failure and yes to getting back up. Yes to thick skin and criticism. Yes to warm embraces and simply saying thank you when someone offers a kind word of encouragement. Yes to being with whatever arises, whether wonderful or woeful or worrisome. Yes to laughing so hard I cry and yes to from-the-gut sobs.

Yes.

YES.

YES.

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What are your goals for this year? Do you have a "word"? 

A few gratuitous images from my 2014, just for fun...