The beginning of the year can be such a beautiful time. I like to think of it as wiping off a white board that has tons of writing and scribbles on it from the year before. I am an Enneagram 3 The Achiever (If you aren’t familiar with Enneagram or what to find out your Enneagram click here) which means I enjoy always striving for achievements and setting goals.

There is one thing I do at the beginning of the year that I have been doing for the last couple years that I am going to share on this post. I am not a big vision board person because I am not a visual learner, so that doesn’t work for me super well. My #1 love language is Words of Affirmation (Obviously I love personality tests, Ha! If you don’t know yours, click here to find out). Since I am an achiever with words of affirmation as my main love language, words really speak to me.

For the past couple years, I have created a mantra for the year and chose a word to focus on. I have both my mantra on my letter board and look at it every day with my word below it. I like to do this because I connect words with so many things. For example, the word strong… I think of fitness, I think of trying harder, I think of doing hard things, I think of pushing myself, I think of strength helping me get where I want to go….  Words really speak to me.

Last year my mantra was, “The only person who can stop you is you” and my word was focus. I chose the word focus for a few reasons. For one, focus is a weakness of mine. I am easily distracted, infatuated with new ideas, or on my cellphone scrolling instead of doing what I should be. My hairstylist mentioned to me back in 2019 that a lot of her success and happiness is because she knows how to focus which is hard in a world of constant distractions. I decided I should take her advice and really find out what focus could do for me. I definitely still got distracted in 2020, but I was always coming back to the word focus and will be coming back to remind myself to focus in 2021 as well. To help myself focus, I just tell myself to focus and stop doing whatever it is that I am distracting myself with. It sounds so simple, but it worked. It’s not necessary to overcomplicate things.

As for my mantra, I wanted to challenge my beliefs of limitations and stop getting in my own way. I have been working on the practice of self-awareness and monitoring my thoughts for the past 3 years or so. What I noticed is that I had a tendency to underestimate my abilities whether it was in fitness, how early I could wake up, or how much I could truly get done in a day.

Was I always successful? Absolutely not, but did it help me improve and grow?… You bet it did. If you are looking for something new to try in 2021, I hope this gave you some ideas. I would love to know if you choose a word or mantra!

As for 2021, I haven’t fully decided on a mantra or word yet, but I will post it on Instagram when I do.

As always, thank you for reading!

Xo,

Madison