"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.
Ep02
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audra-_2_01-05-2025_142738: [00:00:00] Happy 2025! Okay, you listened to the first episode in 2025, actually, but this is the first time I'm actually recording in 2025, and I'm so excited to be here. It's our first Snow day of the year. It's a Sunday, and my husband has taken my kids to sled down the local hill that everyone goes to in my neighborhood when it's snowy.
Earlier, we were outside delivering cinnamon rolls to neighbors and having a snowball fight and playing with our puppy. It's her first time seeing snow. We made [00:01:00] homemade cinnamon rolls this morning and my husband made chicken noodle soup this afternoon and coffee's been flowing nonstop. In fact, I have a cup here and a fresh new Christmas cup.
Don't you love fresh mugs for Christmas? I do. And I am excited to talk today about the process I use this year to plan my 2025. And I want to start off by saying, if you're a person right now who gets really, really overwhelmed with all of the New Year's resolution goals, I invite you to step away from this episode.
I want to just let you know that I have so been there too, where I have heard so many people's planning processes, and I'm just like, overwhelmed, feeling like I can't do it right. And I've just had those years where I was inundated by people talking about this.
And the thing is, this is actually a topic I love. I have always been a goal oriented [00:02:00] person. And even I, a goal oriented person who loves this time of year, who loves a fresh start, who loves planning and goal setting. I have been through seasons in my life where I am so overwhelmed by this topic. And by everyone's take on how they do it that I just cannot.
So if you're there this year, you are not alone. I have been there, but if you're a person this year, here's where I've also been. Let me say this. I've also been the person who has totally soaked up December and had no capacity to think about my new year until January like smacked me in the face. And I have let that be okay.
I have let the whole month of January be a month where I am just marinating in what I want for the new year. And I even remember telling a friend last year, I just took the whole month of January and I just enjoyed the goodness of the month and the holiday season, you know, the door [00:03:00] being closed on the holiday season.
And I just enjoyed the goodness of using January to like, hold me is what I said. I just used January to hold me and to let me just enjoy a month of slowly planning And goal setting and dreaming and reflecting. So I have been both of those places. I've been a place where I'm so overwhelmed by goals.
I've been in a place where I've just needed the whole month of January to have a slow start. Most of the time I am where I am now, where. I absolutely love the holidays. I start my goal setting process in the middle of the holidays, but I don't rush it. And I feel ready and focused and clear on where I'm going come January.
Having been a person who has been doing goal setting and calendar reviews and a bunch of different things to prepare for a new year, like I used to be the planner queen. I'm [00:04:00] thinking I lived in Fort Collins, Colorado in 2012. And I, I remember I had some friends who would text me, you know, every winter and say, okay, what planner are you doing this year?
Because I love planners. When I lived in Honolulu, Hawaii, I set my. alarm clock for like a 2 a. m. wake up so that I could buy a specific planner when it launched, you know, at a normal time East Coast, right? So that is normally who I am and who I've been. And I just feel like over the years, I'm 38 now, but I really started getting into goal setting probably in my mid 20s, I started this process that I have now in my mid twenties and I've refined it and I tweak it every year and I allow myself the flexibility that I need to make it new and fresh to me every year.
Anyways, all of this being said, I would love to share the process that I have come to and that I use this year to plan what I hope and believe is going to be a really, really beautiful 2025. [00:05:00] So, Let's get started.
The first thing that I did this year, step number one is I took a couple of days to review 2024. Now I am a person on the Clifton StrengthsFinders who my number one strength always, always, forever, and always has been futuristic. And I say that because I've taken the Clifton StrengthsFinders assessment multiple times over the last 15 years.
And I'm always futuristic first. So what that means is I'm a person who is always looking forward to next, new. My brain, I've taken an aptitude test that just shares that my brain lives somewhere in the future. So I have to work really hard to be present first of all. And for me, reflecting back sucks.
I just don't like it. I don't really like looking in the past very much. I know we can excavate a lot of lessons from the past, and so [00:06:00] I see the value of it. It's just something that I tend to brush over and do quickly because I'm so forward focused. However, this year, I will say my kids are six and eight, not six.
I have a five year old and an eight year old, almost six. This was the first year where they're both in elementary school, and so they both have a Christmas break. And so from literally the Friday before Christmas until now The Sunday after New Year's, I have been home with my kids. And so this whole process I have been able to do in just the little pockets of time that I've been able to seclude myself and really, find some focus.
Now, when I was not a mother and I was working in the ad agency world, we would get off the last two weeks of the year, Christmas week, New Year's week. And I would take time and just have total focus and be able to like plan my new year. But now I don't have that while my business does also shut down, during Christmas and New Year's week.
And then even the few days that [00:07:00] the kids are out of school on the, front and back end of that. I have to fit things into little pockets of time. And that's a skill that I feel like as a new mom, man, oof, I just did not. I did not get, I was so overwhelmed by, like I wanted my focus time, but now, that I'm a, have been a mom for eight years and I've got two little elementary school kids and they, they are on break.
You know, they are with me. That's what we've chosen. I've had to learn how to do this and now I feel like I do it really well and I give myself grace. Some days I do it really, like a shit show, to be honest, but I feel confident in my ability to, find pockets of time for myself in the midst of motherhood.
And that's just an encouragement if you are a new mama listening to this. So here's what I did. Step one, step one is. I sat down and you know, I had my coffee. The first time I did this was early morning before my kids woke up and I went back through my calendar and I pulled open my journal that I journal in, all [00:08:00] year.
In fact, this one journal that I've had has been the last two years. And I opened a page and just did like 2024 reflection. And so what I did is I scrolled through my calendar and I started to look at what happened in 2024 that I could see from my calendar. What big things happened for my business, in my kids worlds.
What trips did we take? And I did it quarter by quarter because I didn't want to get overwhelmed. So this process probably took me two full days looking, getting pockets of time, each day, but I opened my calendar and I looked back starting January through March and I just jotted down, Hey, what happened in that timeframe that I want to remember?
And then what I also did is I went back through my journal. Looked at those pockets of time. So quarterly, I looked at both my calendar and my journal and I recorded not only what I could actually tell had happened by my calendar, but what I was feeling, thinking like what was going on internally. And man, this was a beautiful process.
I [00:09:00] haven't done both in the past years. This is a new for me this year, but typically I'll just go back in my calendar and, and look at what has happened. I'll do a calendar review. That's a John Maxwell thing. If you're interested in doing a super deep dive into your calendar, I know he has one. And I also heard about it on the Rachel Hollis podcast.
She has adopted his, calendar audit, but for me combining what I saw on my calendar and what I wrote in my journal, oh my gosh, that was so good. And I just feel like I could clearly, clearly see themes that were happening in my year. Another thing that I do to help me record. The little things throughout the year that might not show up in my calendar and might not show up in my journal is Every week at the end of the week my planner.
I use a full focus planner right now. It's from the Hyatt company I've used it for the last three years. It's a quarterly planner It has a space for me to record my three to five wins for [00:10:00] the week And so I didn't go back and look at those I think maybe if I would have you know, A lot of myself, even more time that could have been interesting too, to fill in the gaps.
But for me this year, this was enough looking at my calendar quarterly and matching that with what I wrote in my journal quarterly. And the themes that came up were just so clear and so beautiful. And honestly, it gave me a real conviction about what I want my 2025 to be and really helped me define my word of the year.
Okay. So that's step two. Step one was I reviewed 2024 via calendar calendar. and Journal Combo quarterly. Step two was I decided on a word of the year. And so I've been doing this practice, gosh, since I was a young professional, mid twenties, so also about 15 years. I had the opportunity to hear John Gordon speak on stage at a conference I went to in my mid twenties in Chicago.
And this is where he introduced the word of the year to me. And I thought, Oh, how genius. Back then I was definitely a resolutions [00:11:00] type person and really just. Trying to refine my goal setting skills
and so having an overlay word of the year, is exciting. Now, 15 years in, I use my word of the year to help filter decisions I need to make about my yeses and nos. I use a word of the year to just sort of help guide me when I feel like I have too much on my plate. What do I actually want and need this year based on my word of the year?
So I guess that's another filter, but I also kind of look at it. Look at that as an overlay. So back in probably the fall, I was reading Essentialism by Greg McCowan and he used this phrase in the book called Less But Better. I don't know if that's what it was called, but he was just talking about the concept of having less in your life, but the things that you do have in your life are better.
Another way to say this would be quality versus quantity. So that, phrase had been rolling around in my mind all. Quarter, the [00:12:00] last quarter of 2024, but it wasn't until I went back on my journal and my calendar and I knew I had this like yearning for not necessarily less in 2025 because I definitely had years of less and simplicity, but more just like stewardship.
And so that ended up being the word of the year that I picked after looking through my journal and just seeing, I'll tell you some themes that came up for me. One theme that came up for me was just. The consumption of social media for me, I wouldn't say it was a problem, but it was definitely something that I continue to write in my journal about like going through the social media scroll brings, just a dizziness and a comparison and, sort of like a non contentment, you know, just like I have been given so much in this life, like so many of us have. And I just. Could see clearly through my journal entries that [00:13:00] I wasn't being as grateful and as content with The beautiful gifts I've been given. So it was just so clear to me through that process that my word of the year, even though I had been rolling around on less but better for many months, thinking that was going to be my phrase for the year, it just hit me that it was like, no, that's not it.
It's stewardship for me. I aim to steward these gifts that I have been given. Well, that is in so many areas, gifts that I have been given. Who I am, gifts that I have been given with my family, gifts that I've been given in my business and my relationships, my friendships, money, you know, the money that's coming and just stewarding that very well.
So we talked about step one. Step two is define a word for the year. What word do you want to be the overlay that you see things through? What word can you use as a filter? And then I practice visualization. So this is step three. I love visualization. It is [00:14:00] such a powerful tool to me, always has been.
This year, what I did is I went on a walk and I used a guided meditation to help me visualize. where I wanted to be in December of 2025. So if I'm thinking about my word of the year, I just thought, Like on this walk and through this guided meditation, I was walking my dog. It was a beautiful day, you know, Christmas break, right?
Actually Christmas was over by this point. So I did the journaling and the reflecting before, and then I picked my word of the year. And then I went on this visualization walk and I thought about all these different areas of my life. I thought about, okay, when I'm doing this walk again at the end of December, 2025, like what do I want to have accomplished?
Because those are sort of like easy to name, right? I, want to save this amount of money. I want to do these amount of deals. Like it's easy to sort of like visualize what you want to accomplish, I think. But also I thought about, [00:15:00] you know, what hobbies do I want to cultivate this year? This Christmas and this really last quarter, I got really into cooking, which is so exciting for me because I am not the cook in my family.
And it just felt like this creative effort that I got to share with people and people actually really liked what I cooked. I mean, I cooked everything from recipes. Mostly I used the Magnolia Holiday Magazine, but it felt exciting that I got to create something and use those creative juices to then share with others, my loved ones, and that they actually enjoyed.
Listen, I'll paint a card every now and then too. But when I give that, it's like, Hey, I painted you this card in addition to this other gift. And they're like, Oh, that's so thoughtful. I mean, they're not going to keep the card probably. It's not good artwork. So anyways, cooking this year was so fun.
Anyways, back to my visualization walk. So I'm visualizing, what I want for like my marriage, for my motherhood. What do I want for my business? What do I want for my friendships? You know, what do I want for my health? And so I just really. [00:16:00] I meditated on this walk and just thought. And for me, what I think is so powerful about visualization is that it brings me this feeling.
It brings me these sort of fuzzy images and I make the joke that my fuzzy images all look like Nancy Meyers movies because who doesn't love a good Nancy Meyers movie? If you don't know, Nancy Meyers, created The Holiday, the Parent Trap. Father of the Bride, Something's Gotta Give, just like some really good movies where I always love like the heroine and her home.
Anyways. So I did the visualization. The next thing that I did was create a vision board. And so I've done vision boards in the past where I've used old magazines. I'll just save my magazines throughout the year. I am a magazine lover and I subscribe to three magazines right now. Regularly right now, the magazines I subscribe to are.
Magnolia Journal, Midwest Living, and something about simple, real simple. And I [00:17:00] just save them up over the year and I get out a big piece of paper and I cut, cut images out. Just whatever comes to me. I don't necessarily go look for a thing that I, am seeking. But when I use the magazines, I just, pick out what, what really calls to me.
This year, however, I use Pinterest. Brand new. Well, I don't know if it's brand new, but brand new to me tool. They have a collage tool and I think it's actually easier to use than Canva. I've used Canva sometimes in the past for vision boards, but this year I went ahead and used Pinterest and I loved it. I had so much fun.
I did actually search out what I was looking for this year. So I have a stack of books on my Pinterest, collage that I use for my vision board. I have a mom kissing a son. I've got a woman jumping off the dock into the lake. I've got a beautiful home. I've got, different images that I wanted to help describe this year.
Plus I did pick some fun pictures of women that I was like, Ooh, I just, her energy that I can just see in this photo with what [00:18:00] she's wearing and how she's posing or whatever that, that just calls to me. So my fourth step was to create a vision board. Actually, that is step three. Reflect, word of the year.
Visualization. Vision board. Nevermind, it is step four. That's what I did for step four. Okay. And so then I kind of move on to a little bit more tactical because now I've done all this work about sort of like feeling and being and really high level. And now I want to take it down. So my middle point in taking this down is to just kind of like brain dump.
Like, here's all the things I want. So when I was on that visualization walk, Three things came to my mind of like, here's what I want for my parenthood next year. My goal is always to be deeply connected to my children. As my boys are getting older, it's also to raise good humans and independent, thriving adults.[00:19:00]
So three things came to my mind when I thought about parenting. And one was, I always aim to spend at least 10 minutes of focus time with each of the men and boys in my life. So my husband and my two sons, I always aim to give them at least 10 minutes of my undivided attention every day. That doesn't sound like much, but I learned this from a psychologist.
Early on in my parenthood journey, you know, when we were talking about playing with our kids and I was in this workshop that my church hosted in Honolulu and they brought this psychologist in and she was talking about, you know, your kids need playtime with you and they want playtime at their level, not at your level.
So I might want to talk and connect, but that's not the level. Maybe my six year old, my five year old, promise he's going to be six soon, but my five year old is at. Meeting him where he's at, you know, if he wants to read, if he wants me to play in his room with him, which I laugh because mostly me playing in his room with him involves me [00:20:00] sitting there watching him and then him basically telling me what to do because when I, you know, try and have some agency over what I'm doing with like the bugs or the Legos or the Magnet House or whatever, he ultimately rearranges it so that it's actually what he wants me to be doing.
Anyways. So I'll brain dump all the things that came to my mind because here is also what I've learned. I am a person, I have ADHD. And so one of the things about ADHD is you have an endless amount of ideas and there's literally no way you could ever execute on half of them. And so what I'll do is I'll take all the ideas that are swirling around my head at this point and dump them into a Google doc.
And then what I will do is pick my top 10. So I know out of all the things I want to do in a year, focusing on 10 even is going to be a challenge. What I'll do. So, okay, I'm going to go over the steps one more time because I'm a [00:21:00] little scattered, but it's the reflection process. One, two is the word of the year.
Three is the visualization. Four is creating the vision board. Five is brain dumping goals into a Google doc. Six is picking top 10, like actually turning my brain dump into actually 10 goals. Here's my final step. And this is the part that goes from like high level of like, Oh, feeling vision to like, okay, medium level.
What actually want to accomplish down to actually like, what am I going to get done? And that comes from a book called the 12 week year. And so I take These goals. And I think, okay, which ones am I actually going to be able to focus on and what can I do in the first quarter? So I break. My goals down and pick only three, max three.
I write out the how I go through the whole 12 week year [00:22:00] process. And that starts with, you know, a vision, which I I've already done that. So that's a little bit of a repeat, or I don't even have to do it at all. But then it has you break down, you know, what are the goals? Okay. What are the actual action steps that it's going to take to get there?
So like at the end of the quarter, what do you want this goal to be? And then what are the action steps that you're going to take to get there? And it's like every single week, because we have 13 weeks in a quarter. So it's like, if you want to save 15, 000 by the end of quarter one, that's 5, 000 a month.
Okay. What do you need to do to make that happen? Does that mean there's an automatic transfer coming in? From your monthly paycheck to your high yield savings account. So you actually break down the goals one by one out of the three goals. You break them down into like, what do I want to achieve?
And how am I going to do that? And some will have actual weekly steps. So let's say you wanted to, lose 10 pounds. I [00:23:00] hate using weight loss as an example, but I feel like it's so easy to wrap our minds around. What am I going to do? I'm going to start monitoring what I'm putting in my body first and foremost, so I can get a baseline.
I'm going to move my body 30 minutes a day. I'm going to focus on whole foods. Like those are all things that it's like you can put into weekly or daily cadences. I'm And then here's the part that I am getting better at, but I am not, naturally very good at, measuring the results. So the cool thing about the 12 week year was just talking about how we can accomplish so much in a quarter if we are focused.
and blocking out distractions. And we're focused on just a few things. And if we actually have an action plan of how we're going to do these things, but then what you have to do is you have to score yourself at the end of every week. Luckily for me, this system works really well with my full focus planner because they have some habit monitoring, little habit trackers in the full [00:24:00] focus planner.
And so that's what I've begun to do is start tracking week by week. How am I doing on my goals? And then at the end of the quarter, I actually have a scorecard and I can see, did I do them? Did I not? So here's an example. Last year, my word of the year was home and that meant several things to me. One of the things that it meant was that we were going to be doing some interior work on our home.
And I saved a lot of that until the last quarter of the year. I'm laughing because I did a lot of other more meaningful homework earlier in the year. But when it came to actually the interior work I wanted to do on the inside of our home, I saved a lot of it for the last quarter. And so I looked at it and I was like, Oh my gosh, okay.
I've got a lot that I want to do. What's realistic. But I had a scorecard that I knew, if I don't get this done by December 31st, then on my scorecard, it's going to be, not complete. I mean, there's only complete and not [00:25:00] complete for that type of project. So that has helped me. And, I'm a person who loves to live in the woo and the visualization and there's been years where I, that's all I could do.
I could just live there. I just didn't have the capacity to break it down and get tactical. There have been other years early on. In my goal setting journey where I was only tactical and I really didn't even know the why behind what I was doing. I was just marching and trying to achieve. I feel like I found a beautiful combination now of the big picture and breaking it down into details with accountability so that the things that I want will actually come to place.
And I'll leave you with a couple of extra thoughts on this and one is knowing my why behind [00:26:00] the goals that I want is always huge. So when I am doing that brain dump of all the things that are coming in my head, at the end of dumping what's in my head, I look and see like, okay, why do I want this? Like, why do I want to take, like, why is this so important to me?
I always have a financial goal and this year's financial goal, it's like, okay, well, why is that important to me? Well, I can see it's just one little piece of this legacy that I want to build. And it's one little, it's the next step. So that helps me when I'm, wanting to spend more money than I have budgeted.
Or I'm, I'm just getting distracted or unfocused or feeling like everything's a priority. Knowing that why of like, no Audra, this is why you want to do this thing because it's a part of the bigger picture, part of the bigger life that you want for yourself, that has helped me. So, I strongly recommend that when you're picking goals, like you know your why.
You know your, [00:27:00] your 80 year old why. Is this important to my 80 year old self? And if it is, why? And then the second tip I'd love to leave you with is get a person you can talk to about this. My husband and I love to talk goals. Well, I love to talk goals and my husband loves to listen. I think he does listen.
And he talks goals too, but I also have an accountability partner for my business. So her and I will meet up monthly and we'll just share our business goals. Honestly, even if they happen, they don't, they, they shift just knowing that I'm going to be meeting up with her monthly. And we're going to be talking about this big thing.
I said, I wanted to do that helps keep me focused because I can really struggle with focus at times. There's a book I read by Gary Keller called the one thing. And he is Gary Keller of Keller Williams, the real estate company. And it was such a good book. And if you haven't read it, I, I, I encourage you to read it.
I would say I've not [00:28:00] adopted his process as much as I could, but I've adopted it enough to help me focus more than I did in the past. And, having an accountability partner is huge and helping keep me focused on the one thing, you know, for business. As an example. So I hope this was helpful for you.
If you are a person who just like loves this space and loves to get new ideas, I hope you took a new idea or two. I give myself freedom to refine my process every year as needed, but I feel really happy about where I landed this year, combining things that I've done. Over the years in different ways.
If you're still here and you're a person who is waiting till January to dive in, Just take it. Take that month. No one says that you have to have everything pulled together by January 1st. And I think it feels so good to just use January to set your goals for the year. And if for some reason you're a person who [00:29:00] is overwhelmed by this stuff and has somehow made it to the end, Thank you. I didn't expect you to be here, but if you are, I just want to encourage you take one tiny thing. Everyone has their methods.
You can do it any way you want. There's no right way. There's no wrong way. It's so individual. And I guess that's one thing that I have given myself permission to do is permission to stay in my own lane. Permission to not do all the things, not buy all the courses, not set myself up for the perfect year, but just to try things out, see what feels good to me and keep the things that work and let go of the things that don't.
Wishing you a wonderful 2025. Thank you for being here. I'm going to be on weekly. And, I would love if you found any value in this episode, if you would share it with your friends, if you would subscribe. I almost said like and subscribe because my kids are kind of obsessed with YouTube and always end their [00:30:00] sentences with like and subscribe.
But if you would subscribe, that would be awesome. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Have a great 2025.