“Live with intention.
Walk to the edge.
Listen Hard.
Practice wellness.
Play with abandon.
Laugh.
Choose with no regret.
Appreciate your friends.
Continue to learn.
Do what you love.
Live as if this is all there is.”
~Mary Anne Radmacher
The New Year is a wonderful time to re-evaluate our priorities and set new intentions. As I shared in my blog last week, I love to pause and acknowledge my growth and accomplishments from the past year before visioning how I want to grow in the New Year. I am deeply inspired hearing others recognize their strengths, growth, and most important lessons learned during the past year and have been asking all of my clients to share their wisdom and insights during the last month.
I believe that acknowledging ourselves is a powerful fertilizer for the intentions we set for the New Year.
Wayne Dyer said, “Our intention creates our reality.” The start of a New Year offers a wonderful opportunity to add new nurturing habits into our lives or reinforce our intentions to deepen our self-nurturing practices.
I find that setting intentions is a much more empowering practice than making resolutions.
You see most people end up breaking their resolutions within the first week and rarely create the sustainable change they are looking for by resolving to… I recently read a statistic that only 8% of people keep their New Year’s resolutions, which leaves the rest of us feeling guilty, frustrated with ourselves, and having more reasons to believe we are not good enough.
Instead, the process of setting intentions creates a supportive and encouraging environment for us to cultivate the qualities we wish to manifest in the New Year. Creating new nurturing habits grounded in how we want to feel and the qualities we need to cultivate lasting change can transform our experience of the New Year to build confidence and belief in ourselves.
If we want to be vibrantly healthy in the coming year, what intentions would be helpful in consistently making healthy choices?
If we want to improve our relationships, would setting intentions of love, patience, compassion and understanding support our goals?
If we desire to be kinder and more compassionate to ourselves this New Year, what intentions would be needed to support this aspiration?
Identifying the intentions we wish to cultivate in the coming year will not only help us sustain new healthy habits, but the process will support us in deeply nurturing ourselves.
Setting intentions itself then becomes an act of self-nurturing, supporting us in nourishing, cherishing and encouraging own growth and potential.
What growth and accomplishments do you acknowledge about yourself from the past year?
What intentions will you cultivate in the New Year?
What nurturing practices will support you in living with intention in the New Year?
My growth from this past year has been self-compassion and my intentions for the New Year are vibrant health, joyful experience and deepened expression of my purpose! I would love for you to share your growth and intentions below so we can inspire and encourage each other to live with intention in the New Year!
May you be blessed this New Year with an abundance of peace, joy and meaning and continue to nurture peace in the world from the inside out!
Sending you so much peace, love and gratitude,
Kelley Grimes, M.S.W.
Counselor, Author & Speaker
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I agree, setting intentions is much more powerful that resolutions. I love setting intentions and following them up with powerful and nurturing rituals.
Thank you so much Rachel and I love your idea of following intention up with powerful rituals like the one you shared this week in your blog! I love that our vision of creating an intentional life is so aligned and I really appreciate your comment!
I love setting aside time for review and mapping out parts of the year to come. I’ve had to delay the process a bit this year so am grateful for all the input before I start. Thanks for a lovely post.
What a nurturing practice to set aside time to review and map out parts of the year to come Andrea! Thank you so much for your comment and I wish you peace, joy and vibrant health in the New Year!
As always, inspiring! Giggling and appreciating this when I read it, “I believe that acknowledging ourselves is a powerful fertilizer for the intentions we set for the New Year.” Seeing you and yours blessed with all of your heart’s desires coming true in FULL BLOOM with all that fertilizer, Kelley. xo
Thank you so much Lore! I love you seeing me and mine in full bloom in the coming year! I am so grateful for your support and friendship.
I truly believe our intentions – thought, feeling and actions create what shows up in our outer life. Cheers to ‘intentions’ in 2018!
I love the empowering aspect to intention setting and am excited to continue to live with intention in 2018! Thank you so much for your comment Debra!
Thank you, and I hope you are blessed, as well, in 2018! I enjoyed this post and especially when you wrote: “My growth from this past year has been self-compassion and my intentions for the New Year are vibrant health, joyful experience and deepened expression of my purpose! I would love for you to share your growth and intentions below so we can inspire and encourage each other to live with intention in the New Year!” I can always use inspiration and enouragement as I continue to grow my writing and spiritual business. My personal intent is to recover completely from some major illnesses that set me back in 2017. I love proving doctors wrong!!!
Thank you so much Josephine for your comment and sharing your intention for 2018! May you recover completely to vibrant health and grow in your writing and spiritual practice! I am grateful for you!
Dr. Wayne has been one of my most important teachers and I learned about setting intentions from him. I try to set an intention each morning for the day ahead and while it may not work out every day, it certainly puts me on the right path.
Thank you so much for your comment Barb! Wayne Dyer’s wisdom lives on in so many of us and I like you set an intention each morning usually before leaving my bed. I love how nurturing that small practice can be throughout my day.
I love this quote, Kelley: “I believe that acknowledging ourselves is a powerful fertilizer for the intentions we set for the New Year.”
I agree wholeheartedly. Setting intentions, versus resolutions, deepens our commitment to Self and motivates our dedication to fulfilling desired outcomes.
Happy New Year, Kelley.
I love that we are on the same page with deepening our commitment to Self and encouraging and loving ourselves in the process. I wish you a very happy New Year as well Cindy and am very grateful for your comment!
During my life I have been spiritual. Over the past 6 months I have become even more open and comfortable sharing my knowledge and views. I am extremely close with the angles and the spirit/spiritual world. I don’t make resolutions for the new year. What I do is continue on my journey and I make promises to myself throughout the year. Over this past year I have been working on setting my intentions in a more thoughtful way. Thank you for your blog and the quote at the beginning. It deeply resonated with me.
Thank you so much for sharing Heather. I love that you make promises to yourself. That is so powerful and a profoundly nurturing act, especially when you follow through with those promises. I love that quote as well and intend to embody it’s inspiration in the New Year. I really appreciate your comment!
Setting intentions is so different than what I’m use to doing. Every year, I write down my S.M.A.R.T. goals, mostly successfully. I track my goals so I can evaluate throughout the year and at the end of the year. Then I can use that information for setting next years goal, if I’m planning to continue working on it. So, setting intentions is something new to me and I’ll give some thought to it. I do want to stay open to new ideas as I age. Thanks for sharing about it.
I love to use smart goals as well and really appreciate how you use them to guide your life. I think of intentions as the energy behind the goals I working on and the daily motivation to continue on my path. Thank you so much for your comment Deborah!