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"A LOT with Audra" is the podcast for women juggling big dreams and full lives. Each episode, host, Audra Dinell, Midwestern wife, mom and neurodivergent multi-six figure entrepreneur encourages women to embrace their many roles holistically by living a values-based life with confidence and joy. Through candid discussions, practical strategies and inspiring stories, this podcast is your guide to designing and achieving success without losing yourself in the process.
Ep49
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Reflecting on 2025
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[00:00:00]
Audra Dinell: Hey, there we are winding down the end of 2025. I always love this time of year. I feel so reflective and cozy and yes, sometimes crazy with all of the holidays and planning for the new year and dreaming, but. This really is one of my absolute favorite times of year to just look back. It's so easy. It's built in.
So that's what we're gonna do today.
Introduction to 10 Things I Loved in 2025
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Audra Dinell: I wanna share 10 things I loved in 2025, and I'm gonna break them down into a couple of categories. Some of these things [00:01:00] I've talked about over this year of podcasting. Some are new. I've got a section of tools I wanna share with you. I'll share some work things that I loved mostly like rhythms and stuff like that that might be helpful for you as you consider what works best for you in the new year, and also some personal things I'm excited to share, just kind of some personal shifts over the year.
So, like many of you, my year went a little differently than I thought it would. I am thinking back to Audra in January of 2025 and the hopes and dreams and ambitions and the route I had laid out for myself. And I'm just sending her so much love because life, life as it does, and it ended up being just a beautiful.
Year different than I expected, and that led me to find some of the things that I love more on that later. [00:02:00] Okay. List of 10 things. Here we go.
Values Bridge Tool by Suzy Welch
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Audra Dinell: The first thing that I loved in 2025 is the Values Bridge Tool by Suzy Welch. So I've been a Suzy Welch fan for many years. Her book 10, 10 10 is all about.
Making decisions and thinking through the filter of how will this serve me or how will I feel about this decision in 10 years, 10 months and 10 minutes. I remember reading that on a vacation in Hawaii, and that's how you know you are a personal development lover if you're reading a personal development book on vacation.
But she has come out with a brand new book this year to support a tool that she. Invented. She is now a university professor, in addition to a researcher writer, and her tool is called the Values Bridge, and we're gonna link it [00:03:00] in the show notes, but I have started to incorporate this into the work we do at the Thread.
So in the past, I've been a huge fan of Brene Brown's values assessment in her book, dare to Lead. It's simple, it's accessible. This tool is a little bit different. It is accessible. It's free to everyone. It's an online platform, and the words are different than, what Brene Brown shares, Brene Brown share some really straightforward words as you are thinking through What do I really value in life?
Her words are like, courage, faith, family. Whereas this values bridge tool shed a different light and it actually taught me some new words that. Into language. Something that I 100% have felt in my life, but really didn't know how big of a value it was. Okay, so [00:04:00] this tool, the values bridge. You take the assessment and the first part of it is about your ideal life, like your dream life.
This is what, how I would answer if I was living my best life. And then you take a pause, and then you take the assessment and answer it from, this is how it is actually showing up in my life right now. And so in addition to this tool listing out the values that you have. Self-selected.
It also lists out the gap in between where you are in living out your value how far away or how close you are to it. So this tool told me about the word eudemonia. What is eudemonia? Eudemonia is the value that reflects your answer to this question. And the question is, how much do I want my life to be organized around experiences that bring me pleasure and joy?
So for some, [00:05:00] the feelings that come with fun and happiness are something to be scheduled later. After work is done, the goals are reached, the responsibilities are met. For others, the pursuit of enjoyment is the point, the whole point, the reason to get up in the morning, and the guiding force behind their choices around work, family, and life.
I love this tool, not only because I, I love tools like this. I mean, we just know this, but I love it because it is more in depth. It doesn't leave all the work to you. It gives you what you are saying are your values. Now, there's only 16 that it'll spin out for you. And so like anything, I take these tools with a grain of salt.
I take what I love from them and I, don't put all of my stock into any one thing, so this comes up. In our thread cohort workshops, we do [00:06:00] a lot of work with the women who come to our community to help them stand in who they are, stand in their purpose, figure that out. And values is a huge part of that. In fact, I'm reading a book and doing some studying into the world of emotional agility. And emotional agility. In this book by Susan David, she talks about values are a huge part of being able to be emotionally agile. A value is something that you can use. It helps you to place your feet in the right direction as you journey through your unique life, no matter where life leads you. So the reason I love this tool so much is because.
In a year, that shifted me in ways I wasn't necessarily expecting specifically in business. I really had to do some values work and I really had to think about. What is it that I really want? I've been in business for five years. I was going in this direction, [00:07:00] you know, what's next? Am I on the right path?
And doing this work helped me have a lens to look at that through. I recorded a podcast about how, for me, my vocation. It's very important that I'm excited about what I'm doing and I feel passion is a word we could use, but I just feel like excitement and purpose when I am showing up vocationally. Some of the feedback I got from that episode is that that could potentially be.
Entitlement and I take that feedback and then I found this tool and realized, oh no, no, no, no, that's not, that's not the heart of what I was sharing. And that was actually kind of surprising to me to hear because I never even really worried that it could appear like that. That just shows me how much something like pneumonia matters to me.
It is such a strong value for me. [00:08:00] I. Want to set my life up in a way where I enjoy it. I have to enjoy my days. Now, am I going to enjoy every part of my day or every day, all day? Of course not. There are hard things we have to do. Life is life, but I'm not the sufferer in silence. Type or a type that will get the work done and then have the fun later.
Like work has to be fun for me. So I love this tool. I have heard several other women in my community use this tool through me sharing it with them. And they have had really great takeaways. So I'm gonna put that out there. That is one of the things I have absolutely loved in 2025. Okay, second thing.
Food Sensitivity Testing
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Audra Dinell: Is food sensitivity testing. I talked about this on a recent episode. I worked with an educator on my food sensitivity testing, and we're gonna link his email. His name is Wes Moody. We're gonna link his [00:09:00] email in the show notes, but I had been talking to him about this and had a friend. Take a food sensitivity test and I just thought, you know, I don't really think I have any food sensitivities.
I don't know why I would take this test, but in learning more, I realized that it was something I wanted to do and it really has been a game changer for me. Really, it's just one simple thing that I have to cut out of my diet, and it has made a huge difference in how I feel, in how much I actually. Way in really just the energy and the, the puffiness, the inflammation in my body, and I have just been raving about it.
Anyone who has asked what's been going on, I've been telling them about it. It's something that I finally did in 2025, and I love, love, love. I just love having this information. It has been so helpful for me in feeling good as I [00:10:00] round out my thirties. Okay, number three.
How We Feel App
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Audra Dinell: Third thing that I love this year in 2025 is this app, and this app is called How We Feel.
Again, we'll link it in the show notes. What I love about it is it prompts me twice a day. To check in. How am I feeling this afternoon? I can also self check in anytime I'm thinking about it. But what I really love is once you tap a check in, it gives you four boxes to pick from. It has you pick from feeling high energy, unpleasant, high energy, pleasant, low energy, unpleasant or low energy, pleasant.
Okay, so right now I'm feeling high energy, pleasant. I'm gonna click on that circle. It pops up. All of these different emotions to describe something I might be feeling if I'm feeling high energy, pleasant. So it takes it from general into much more specific. And what I really love as a [00:11:00] person who is her late thirties, trying to figure out more work on emotions and how.
That affects our life and plays into our decisions. I don't have enough words still to describe what I am feeling. I was at a entrepreneurial retreat a couple of weeks ago and shared something and the coach asked how I felt about that, and I was like, I don't know. I don't have the words. So what I love about this app is once you pick a box.
And you see the, gosh, I'm guessing like two dozen, three dozen different emotions that they give you in that specific box that you've picked. High energy, pleasant, you can then tap on. An emotion and let's tap on joyful. And joyful. It tells you the definition, feeling pleasure, and in high spirits maybe that's not exactly it productive.
Okay. It tells me [00:12:00] productive feels like I'm accomplishing my tasks and achieving my goals. So there are more cool things in that app, but I have also been raving about it this year because. As a parent, as I'm trying to get my kids to talk about their feelings, and we're all trying to name our feelings, it's not good enough to have happy, sad, mad, frustrated, tired, excited, anxious, like there's so much more there.
And gosh, words matter and when we can use them to share how we're feeling, it is just such a different release. It is information for us. It is data, it helps us feel. Understood. Ugh, I can't wait. We're gonna do a podcast series on emotional agility in 2026. But this tool has been really, really cool.
And [00:13:00] helpful to me, and even my kids like it. They'll ask to check in and it's fun to help them walk through, you know, they'll just use my phone and we won't go through the whole check-in process because I want it to track, you know, my data and not theirs per se, but. We'll go through and they'll click on emotions and they'll be like, no, not that one.
Quite, not that one. Quite, oh yes, this one. This is how I feel. So it's been a really fun tool for my family to use. Okay.
Focus Lab Experience
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Audra Dinell: Last tool I wanna share that I love from 2025 is this Focus Lab my husband and I did in October with Liz Fork and Bohannon. It just made my life, y'all. It was. Such a gift. We celebrated our 15 year wedding anniversary, and he had turned 40 last year.
I turned 40 next year, and so it was just a time where we were like, you know what? We wanna just be with someone in this intentional [00:14:00] container and review and reflect and learn about each other, which we actually did. We've been together 25 years and married 15, and I learned new things about Corey, which was just such a gift in itself.
But we also wanted to vision and make some decisions and really get focused on what do we want the next decade of our life to look like? I've talked about it before. It was just so impactful. Again, we're gonna link it. We're gonna link all these things, but that was a tool that, I mean, hands down, best part of my year.
That was just such a gift. So amazing. Okay, we're gonna move on to a little bit of a different section, and I'm gonna talk about three things that I loved in 2025 as it pertains specifically to work. Okay. So this is gonna be total thing number five, and that [00:15:00] is.
Downshifting Work
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Audra Dinell: Downshifting. So this summer we'll link the episode.
I downshifted my work to about 30% of what I normally do. What that meant was I had to get really good at batching, batching content creation, batching podcasting, batching meetings, batching sales efforts, and I really fell in love with batching. Unfortunately, I have not found a way to replicate that summer schedule in.
The fall just yet, but I have high hopes for 2026. I loved being really like all in during work weeks and then being able to use my brain and creativity and energy elsewhere during non-work weeks. So I just feel like I really reset my rhythm and the work that I did felt like the essential work. I am not sure if you've read the book, essentialism by Gragg McOwen.
I'm in the [00:16:00] middle of it now, but it felt like working this way for me helped me determine what is essential and really focus on that. So I have gotten away from. That post summer, but am aiming to figure out how I can integrate that back into my work world in 2026 outside of just the summer season. Now, my team has always been really good at taking spring break off Thanksgiving week, a couple weeks at Christmas.
So we protect, like especially that holiday season. So that's not new. I learned that from the ad agency world. It seemed to be standard when I worked there, but taking that from two weeks at the end of the year to summer was a big leap, and it just paid off dividends in terms of my ability to be connected to my life and my family and my husband, my kids, and be present and be with friends [00:17:00] and just.
Shift it felt like I shifted my nervous system. I took a deep breath and discovered batching. So that's the thing I love from 2025.
Letting Go of Good for Great
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Audra Dinell: All right, number six in business This year I got to let go of some good things. To focus on what I hope to be the great things. So I think this is one of the hardest things to do when there's a lot of good swirling around in your world.
Like this is where I get in trouble, where it's like too many yeses where I wanna maximize every opportunity and I genuinely wanna say yes to these things. But this year I. Had the opportunity to make some tough decisions and just say, that's something that was good and I enjoyed it and I'm letting it go.
What that means [00:18:00] is I have more capacity if I keep it, to make space for the things that I really wanna give my efforts to in hopes that I can make them great. This is kind of a new world for me, and I'm. I feel like I've got little shaky baby legs doing it, but I really hope, especially next year as I enter into my forties, I turn 40 in the spring.
I really, really hope that this is something that stays for me. I really, really hope that I can be strong enough and clear enough to say no to good things. In focus of what I think could be great, whether that be relationships or projects or hobbies. You know, I am someone who just loves life and wants to do all the things that I'm interested in.
So [00:19:00] many things, and there was a really a point in the spring where I started to grieve. Because I realized there are so many lives that I wanna live that I'm not gonna be able to. And as a person who really likes to stay more in the big dreaming space, like that was hard for me to be like, oh, okay, I'm probably not gonna get to live out this dream or this dream or those 100 dreams.
So what dreams, what goals, what really matters to me, and am I strong enough to let go of good things, even sexy things. Things that the world tells you are exciting and what makes you successful and the world gives you compensation for, and attention for and you know, whatever, whatever else is out there like the world just really [00:20:00] rewards you.
In numerous ways, but being able to say, oh, that does look good, but it's not my unique. Great. Hmm. So this year I did that and reflecting on the year. It's just really something I, really wanna keep moving forward. Okay. Number seven thing I loved in 2025, this is gonna be another business thing.
Podcasting Joy
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Audra Dinell: I loved podcasting, you guys, this is so fun when I get days where I can just talk to people and create episodes and strategize. And talk podcasting with my producer and Kristen on my team who supports this work. Those are some of my favorite, favorite days. So all that being said, I'm happy to announce the podcast is going to keep going through 2026.
Yay. This was a year long experiment. I committed to one year [00:21:00] and. I love it and we're kind of honing it in and figuring out directions and I'm excited. I really love when I try something and it goes well and they like it and they have fun with it.
And you know, I'm a type of person who, I just like to do it, to take the action and then I'll make it better later. And a lot of people don't do that. A lot of people really want, the big plan before they start. And gosh, I see so much value in that and that feels way less messy to me. But I know for me, starting is just the key.
Starting, starting messy, doing a thing. So. One of the top 10 things I have loved in 2025 is this podcast. Thank you seriously, so much for anyone who has listened, shared, subscribed, all those things. We have, I think about 500 downloads a month at this point, [00:22:00] and that's probably super crazy. Small numbers to so many, but to me it's encouraging and it's like, wow, I can't.
I can't believe it. That's really cool. I wanna keep going, so thank you for being here. Okay, last three. These are all personal things. Number eight.
Family of Readers
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Audra Dinell: I have a family full of Raiders. Both of my kids are Raiders now, and I'm so happy. It just feels like the biggest.
Thing that I am proud, maybe not the biggest thing I'm proud of, but like a thing that I'm proud, grateful, like just so thankful for as a mom. You know, I don't even know if I envisioned this, but when we're all at a coffee shop reading together or in a car and people are reading or. At night and we're wrapping up or in the morning, like my kids bring books everywhere and I'm so grateful for that.
[00:23:00] Oh, it is one of my favorite things about being a mom. Also, my reading has totally upped this year. I think I'm in the middle of book 38 right now. By the time this podcast comes out, I'm recording in November pre-Thanksgiving by the time this podcast comes out. I am confident I am gonna have 40 books under my belt this year,
it has just been such a great escape for me too. Dive into a book I've always loved reading. This year has just been my best reading year ever, and I've read a ton of really great fiction books. I'm sure I'll post on my substack at the end of the year, the books I've read and my favorites. But there have even been times where it's like.
I'm struggling to fall asleep at night and I look up and it's been 30 minutes and I'm like, you know what? Fine, I'm just gonna go downstairs and read. And having that outlet, and especially specifically having that outlet, that has nothing to do with productivity or business. Just reading for pure fun.
And yes, I'm tracking it. So it does have a productive element to it, I [00:24:00] will say. But. I am just reading the books I wanna read for fun. I've read very few development books this year. I've read mostly fiction and it has been, oh, one of my favorite things. Okay, last two. Number nine.
New Friendships with Staying Power
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Audra Dinell: I have made some new friendships this year that have some staying power, and what I mean by that is I.
Um, An Enneagram seven. I love people. I'm an extrovert. I am all things people. And so I meet new, cool, exciting people all the time and I really love it. What I noticed at some point was I didn't have a good cadence with many people outside of my team. So. Some of my friendships are starting to develop a type of cadence where it's like we get together monthly, or you know, we [00:25:00] connect in this way and it's set up and it's on a regular basis.
I have so much work I wanna do here because I'm learning more about social health and feeling lonely at times, despite being surrounded by amazing, amazing women. So you can probably expect more on this in 2026, but I am thinking of, you know, two or three women in my life who I've let down my guard with.
I've showed them some vulnerable, scary parts to me, and we have a certain cadence and I'm excited to see where that goes in the next couple of years. I listened to Liz Bohannon podcast plucking up. Quite a bit, you know, I'm a super fan now, I feel like, but she has some really great content on social health and community and her thoughts have just been really helpful in helping me, like stand up this part of my life in [00:26:00] a different way this year.
Okay, last thing. Woo. Number 10, 10 things I've loved in 2025.
Deciding to Stay in Our Home
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Audra Dinell: We have decided to stay in our current home. So at the beginning of the year, I had a big real estate focus. It was something we were interested in investing in and potentially moving from our home, which has a whole story behind it. I should definitely share it someday.
Into something with just a little bit more space and we live in the neighborhood we wanna stay in, you know, we're kind of particular about what we're looking for, but also not, we're open to a lot. It just has to have, you know, like three or four major things. A good backyard, bigger kitchen, more bathrooms.
I really think that was pretty much it. I [00:27:00] wanted it on a specific side of the neighborhood. S that one was negotiable. Okay. So we look around with our agent for several months and then I fall in love with this house, and it was the first one I walked in and I was like, oh my gosh, Cory, this is the one I think we should place an offer.
Like, I love it. am obsessed with it. And the market during that time of this year was such that we had time to sleep on it. And so, I told her, I was like, I don't know. I feel it. This one feels so right. Let us sleep on it and we'll get back to you. And when I slept on it and revisited it with fresh eyes in the morning, I realized that that home was the same square footage as my current home.
It was double the price. That we paid, it was double everything, right? Except [00:28:00] square footage, which just kind of blew my mind. I thought, oh my gosh, like would I really do that? Would I really, you know, move to this house that I'm like a hell yes in my body for when it is the same square footage? And so we decided that was just a great sign that we are gonna stay where we are and.
I will share the story of our house sometime. It was such a gift the way we found it. And it just doesn't feel like the time. And so that just felt really good. And so we're in the process of being more serious about remodeling our current home. We've done some, great things. We've replaced all the windows and painted the exterior and we've just done a lot, but we got.
Serious about, all right, let's make this place our place. And when the time is right. I don't even know when that will be. We might look again, but I'm really happy that in 2025 we decided to stay. [00:29:00]
Reflecting on Home and Values
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Audra Dinell: I feel like there is so much pressure in this world to have new, bigger, better, more all the time, and. Going back to values.
That's just when I get to my heart of hearts, that is just not me. And there's nothing wrong if that's you, but when I got down to it, for me, it was like, okay, it's the same square footage. It might have one more toilet than we currently do now, which would actually be very nice.
But it just feels so good to stay. We love our neighbors. We love walking the kids to school. There's so much we love about our little home. So that's my last thing I wanted to share. We decided to stay and bloom where we are planted, make it ours, all the things, and it feels just really good.
Intentional Living
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Audra Dinell: It feels really good and really [00:30:00] intentional.
I guess that's what's best. It feels really intentional. Ah.
Closing Thoughts and Reflections
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Audra Dinell: All right. I hope y'all had a beautiful year, full of purpose, full of learning, full of mess, full of failure and courage to try again and love. I know this isn't the last episode of the year, but it felt really good to reflect a little bit with you, so I appreciate you sticking in there.
I hope there was something today that was either a helpful tool that you can look into or something that you heard me share that maybe allowed you to consider shifting your perspective. As always, we'll be back next Monday and I can't wait to be with you again. [00:31:00]