WHO WILL YOU BE IN 2025?
Welcome to the Small Jar Podcast, where we moms of teens find the power to step off the emotional rollercoaster between motherhood and the empty nest. I'm your host, Jennifer Collins. Episode number 135.
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Small Jar Podcast on this New Year's Eve or in the very early new year, if you are listening in 2025. I wanted to add an episode focused on who you will be in 2025 because it's become a bit of a small jar tradition. I mean, I think it's a tradition for almost all of us to think about the new year as a time of renewal and an opportunity to think about new goals and the way you want to approach your life in a different way.
As I've been doing this work of life coaching, what I've come to really appreciate is that as you master goals of mindset and your ability to access this higher level of intention in your life, you would think that that would then translate into having more goals and setting the bar higher for yourself. And in some ways, that's true. But on the other hand, I think what I've actually learned is that growth requires so much more compassion and self-awareness, really compassion for yourself, so much more than I ever appreciated growing up.
I think I, like most of us, operate under the assumption that we have to work harder in order to become the version of ourselves that we want to be, whether that's being the best version of ourselves as a mom or as the best version of ourselves just in any area of our life. And so we strive to work harder, do the right thing. And there's a lot of judgment in that, a lot of assessing how we're doing things wrong and what we want to fix about our lives.
This is actually the year that I become an official empty nester. My son is in the process of finishing his final college applications, and then we'll be waiting to find out where he ends up next fall. My boys have actually gone to an independent school where they've been since they were three and four years old.
I remember when we first brought him there, the school had a habit of talking about each class by their graduation year. So parents coming to the school right now are being told that their kids will graduate in 2040 or 2041, seems so far away. And I felt the same way when I brought my son to this school when he was three years old, and they told me he would graduate in 2025.
The year kind of seemed made up to me. And so 2025 has always sat in my mind as this pivotal year where my last baby would leave the nest. The meaning of that has become so much more profound for me as my first son has headed off to college and now as I prepare for my baby to leave.
And so for me, although I've been doing this work of deep self-discovery and mastering these tools of coaching for a number of years, I realized that this is the year where so many doors open up for me. As long as you have kids at home, I think you still have one foot in the door of feeling like you're potentially needed. Even though it's very clear my son doesn't need me on a regular basis, he even cooks for himself, and I want to be around for him.
We've gotten in the habit of sticking around more. I don't travel as much. In fact, when the boys were little, I used to go out a lot more.
Maybe it was just youth, but I think as my boys have gotten older, I've become so much more attached to being at home and just being available to be needed. And I recognize that as this year moves ahead, I'm not going to have that excuse anymore, that I'm going to have so much more time at my disposal to be with myself. And for some of us, that can be a really scary thing.
And maybe it's because of the work I've been doing for the past number of years, I'm just really excited about the possibilities for the future. Although I know my son will be leaving, I don't see that as the end of my role as a mom, or even as a stopping point in my ability to build connection with my boys. If anything, what I've seen with my oldest son is that our relationship has continued to evolve and grow in so many beautiful ways as he started to trust me again as a confidant and somebody with whom he can have meaningful conversations, that I can be a safe place for him.
And I'll be honest, that for me, it's taken a lot of intention to be able to be in that place where I've been able to receive my sons in a way that didn't need to fix them or didn't need to give them advice and tell them the right way. Believe me, I still have those instincts. But on the other hand, sinking into this beauty of just being in awe of their experience has been such a gift as a mom.
So we're on the brink of New Year's, and I thought it would be really fun to do something a little bit different. I'm a really big fan of celebrating how far we've come. Again, I think so often we approach these clean slate moments as an opportunity to talk about all of the ways that we need to fix ourselves or to grow.
Instead, I think it's so empowering to reflect on all of the ways that we have already grown and evolved in our life. Even if it's in small ways, small steps, can we give ourselves credit for how far we've come? I've had a practice of journaling every morning for quite a while. I think I started right before COVID.
In this journaling, I do my self-coaching. I give updates about what's going on in my life. It's just a place for me to deposit all of the things happening in my brain on a regular basis.
Kind of a cathartic moment to cleanse myself of all the junk happening in my brain. It's the way I start every single day. I wanted to go back and see how far back I could find journals where I had had reflections on New Year's Eve or New Year's Day about my resolutions for that year.
I actually went back all the way to 2019. I've got five years of New Year's celebrations and intentions to look back on. I thought I would share this with you as a way to not only reflect on one example of what progress looks like, but also to demonstrate how this self-coaching practice that I teach in my program and I talk about all the time on this podcast is a process of continuous evolution.
If you think about it that way, if you think about your own growth as something that is always in process, it's actually really fun to know that no matter where you are in your life, there is opportunity for growth. So let me start with 1999. So in 1999, I was apparently in Killington and proud of myself for showing up on the slopes.
My boys and my husband are really good skiers and I used to ski and I don't know if it's age or bad knees, but over time I have gotten so much less confident on the slopes. But on January 1st of 2020, right before the pandemic, I was really proud of myself for getting out there and doing my best on the slopes. So that was the good news.
So as I headed into 2020, one of my goals, which I've talked about a lot on this podcast, is that I wanted to change my relationship with alcohol for good. It had been an area of such shame and regret for me for so long. And as I wrote this in my journal back on January 1st, 2020, I had a lot of rules around what it would look like to change my relationship.
No drinking on weeknights, planning to drink in advance, knowing that I can drink, but asking myself if I really needed to. Those are certainly valuable practices, but this was one goal on a list of, let me see, six goals. So let me keep sharing.
My second goal was to pursue personal growth. Believe it or not, believe it or not, the number one thing on this list was continue piano. Now I'm remembering in 1999, I had picked up piano again.
I played when I was younger and I always wanted to get back to it. And I'd actually found a piano teacher who ended up canceling on me during COVID and I never picked it up again. But this was my second goal starting 2020 was to continue piano, connect with current events, and to listen to audiobooks.
My third goal, because that was all just part of my second goal, was to pursue professional growth. I guess I had just gotten Brendan Burchard's high performance habits planner and I was planning on applying that to many areas of my life professionally. Number four was cherish time with my family.
And then I had a little asterisk next to this saying, no, that's number one. So I'm shaming myself, even in my goal setting that I should have had cherished time with my family as number one. Take adventures with the boys.
We had been planning to go to Australia for spring break in 2020 and obviously that never happened. Number five was consider my social circle, explore new friendships, network, make myself available for friends again. After this list, I wrote, it's a long list, but a meaningful list.
My overarching goals were to be present, to be peaceful and purposeful. I love this list for so many reasons. First and foremost, because it's such a laundry list of things.
And there's nothing wrong with any of these things. They're actually all beautiful goals. But how many of us approach the New Year's in this way with this list of all of these ways that we should be better, even down to me playing piano again, something that I hadn't done since I was 18 years old.
Is it really any wonder that we end every year thinking back to our prior years, New Year's list and think, wow, I didn't get any of that done. So for me, looking back then on my 2020 year on December 31st, 2020, how far did I get with these goals? And let's keep in mind that this was the year of the pandemic. I wrote, this year has been crazy, but I feel like I have moved forward as a human more than any other year in my life.
This was actually the year that I decided to get certified in coaching. I had been following the work of one coach for some time. And so during the pandemic, I was so attracted to this work that I thought, well, why not get certified because I'm sitting around, I have plenty of time on my hands.
I might as well do something productive. So I did a virtual certification program. And one of the first goals that I really tackled with these coaching practices was my drinking habit.
During the height of the pandemic, I had stopped drinking for about 100 days. And for me at that time, having not been able to go more than two days without pouring a glass of wine, not drinking for 100 days felt like the most monumental achievement that I could even imagine. It was almost like in doing that work and understanding how to break that habit, I had unlocked a whole new level of potential for myself in my life.
And so by the end of 2020, I was incredibly proud of the work that I had done just in that one area. So I was going into 2021 really thinking about wanting to recommit to limiting alcohol in my life. It was still something that was buzzing around in my head as a problem.
I also had goals around wanting to eat healthier and lose weight. That was probably the second area of self-judgment that I've held on to for a really long time in my life. But I do notice in this journal entry that I did talk about wanting to find compassion for myself.
But then I said some things I want to keep in mind. My workouts. I want to fit in yoga.
And is it really necessary for me to get up at 4.15 a.m. to fit in journaling in my workout? I wanted to commit to meditation more regularly. I wanted to plan my weeks in advance and know exactly what I was planning to do. In fact, towards the end of that journal entry, I said one of my goals at the end of each week is to not be exhausted.
And I also want to plan non-working hours more intentionally. So I take care of my boys, make more dinners, make myself more available, dedicate time to my husband, and take care of my home. But not let it eat into time that I could be relaxing.
This was the year that I launched my coaching practice while I was working at a full-time job. And so for me, figuring out how to balance those two things while taking on creating a business that was an entirely new skill set for me, particularly the marketing aspects of it, so brand new to me that looking through this list and even seeing my willingness to dive into this new skill set where it was very clear that I didn't really know what I was doing, but I was willing to try. So even as I think about my own evolution from 2019 to the end of 2020, already I had taken what felt to me like a monumental step of proving to myself that I could break a habit that had plagued me for years.
And also to be willing to take on something so totally new without knowing where it would head or what that would involve, but being willing to try to figure it out. And I see here also the beginning of understanding that if I was going to be successful, I was going to have to figure out a way to be compassionate with myself, even though there are still a lot of goals listed. I talk a lot about wanting to be mindful about carving out time, even though I hadn't quite figured out how to fit all of this in yet.
So then I get to the end of 2021, and it looks like we were back skiing, but I was feeling sick on New Year's Eve. And maybe it was because I was in this place of sickness that I said to myself, this is yet another reminder as I go into the new year that I want to be gentle. And I double underline that.
I realize I've been living the mantra, no pain, no gain. I've been so proud of my mental toughness, but the chronic stress that I'm subjecting myself to has resulted in me falling apart. I am exhausted, sick.
Luckily, I'm also recovering and resting, giving myself space to heal. Then in all caps, I wrote, what if it didn't have to be so hard? What if I can be everything I want to be without beating myself up? This was actually a pivotal moment because during 2021, while I had all of these dreams to build this business, I spent a lot of time telling myself I didn't know how. So I spent a lot of energy kind of in the learning and the trying to get other people to tell me how.
But because I was also working full time, I had this mindset that I only had so much time to invest in my business. And so I was constantly in this self-defeating place of thinking I couldn't do it. Really, that was the underlying framework, I think, to my belief system in 2021 was that as much as I wanted to build and create this business, that I just didn't know how.
I didn't know how to reach new people or to say the right thing to make sure that people knew that I could help them. So there was something about that break when I started to ask myself that question, what if it didn't have to be so hard? What if the answer wasn't no, that I started opening up possibilities for what else could be true? I think I started dabbling a little bit more in social media, which terrified me because I had no idea how to use that platform. I was totally embarrassed to put myself out there.
And that January, I actually launched my very first podcast, which was actually titled Letting Go of Who You Are to Become Who You Want to Be. I think that was the moment I started realizing how much I was holding myself back with limiting self-beliefs, limiting beliefs about what I was capable of, what was holding me back, how I didn't know what I was doing. And what I decided to do that January in 2022 was decide that none of that mattered, that I was willing to open the door to the possibility that I could do it and that the obstacles that I thought were in my way were truly only in my way because of the way that I was thinking of them.
A few days into January 2022, I wrote, what if it didn't have to be hard? I'm challenging the belief that in order to accomplish my dreams, that it has to be hard. What if all that needs to happen is that I keep my commitments to myself and that when I plan, I plan with love for myself? My friend, this is such a great reminder for me, even now, to plan with love for myself, to keep my commitments to myself. Early in 2022, actually around the time I launched my podcast, my son had met a woman and that relationship almost ended up taking him away from our family.
And somehow in the course of a year, I had almost lost my son only to have him potentially coming back to me. So by the end of that year, he had broken up with this girl, but it wasn't clear that the relationship was over. The one glimmer of hope was that he had gotten into college.
And so I was so hopeful about what was to come. In fact, on New Year's Eve, I wrote, it's the last day of 2022 and it's been a big year. Last night, my son talked to me for 10 minutes.
He had spent some time with one of his old friends and he was headed out on New Year's to spend time with some other friends. And I wrote, I am so happy. My son is coming back to life.
He's talking to friends. He's talking to me. He's looking forward to college and it feels too good to be true.
I'm loving this moment and I'm going to take all of the lessons I've learned into the new year. I'm so happy. It is so amazing to look back on that moment and now appreciate how much my son has grown because of that experience that he had.
And in fact, I have to say that I have grown so much as a mom because of that experience. As painful and terrible as so many parts of it were, it was all supposed to be that way. And I think one of the biggest lessons that I've tried to take from that experience is that each of these moments with our children is a season.
We have no idea where it's headed or how this challenge is going to shape both our children and us in ways that are so important for our forward growth. So just a reminder to you if you're in a difficult season with your teen or young adult, how this is a season. And then if you believe that part of this season is essential to helping you evolve, to helping your kid evolve, it's possible to look at the situation with so much more grace and self-compassion.
Even amidst the pain of 2022, I had stayed committed to building my coaching business. I put out 31 episodes, and I have to say that although those episodes were far from my best work, I poured my heart into those episodes. It was a form of self-healing.
It was a way for me to coach myself through the painful times when I thought I was losing my son. In 2022, I showed up for myself in the best way that I could. And I think what I love so much about this new year's entry from December 31, 2022, is that it didn't contain a long laundry list of things that I wanted to change and be in the next year.
In fact, I just celebrated my success in how far I had come. I celebrated the moment with my son, and it didn't have to do with him getting into college or anything other than him simply coming back to me for 10 minutes talking to me on his way out on New Year's Eve. My closing reflection on that entry is I have learned so much.
I've messed up. I've failed. But I keep showing up in my life, and that is everything.
I have to say that even as I go into 2025, that message of showing up in my life, of being willing to fail, being willing to mess up, that is everything, my friends. Last year's New Year's entry, December 31, 2023, I wrote two pages of celebration about everything that had happened in my life, my oldest graduating, a celebration of truly having my oldest son back, that he returned to us whole, stronger than ever, celebrating that first fall as a partial empty nester with my oldest away at college. I celebrated my most successful year ever as a I had committed to weekly podcast episodes, and that was the year that I achieved my MasterCode certification as well.
Personally, I had stopped drinking over the holidays. It was my first set of holidays where I didn't drink, again proving to myself that I really had the capacity to break this habit and decide that drinking was no longer a problem I needed to solve in my life. I spent time going to see friends, traveling to see friends that don't live nearby.
I felt so unbelievably grateful. But even as I look through this journal episode, I'm reminded of challenges that my boys were going through. My baby had a broken hand, which was going to wreck his wrestling season.
My oldest was going through some other challenges. And of course, I worried about them. But one thing I had learned so clearly through my challenges with my oldest son was that I couldn't fix what was going on with them, and that my role was simply to love them unconditionally and be a source of support to them.
So I wrote, Who do I want to be this year in 2024? I started with this. I want to be a mom who loves her children unconditionally. And I want to be a mom who manages her mind as she leads with love rather than fear.
I want to be a wife who cherishes her with her husband, a master coach who knows she has the power to transform lives of women in midlife. I want to be a woman who loves herself and wants to take care of her body at the highest level. I want to be a daughter, a sister and a friend who values her relationships and makes time for what's important.
I wrote, I am already all of these things, which makes going into 2024 so fun. I get to enjoy the benefits of being this person. Powerful relationships, connected with family and friends, a growing coaching business, and a healthy, strong body.
These are gifts. I go into the new year with excitement and love. My friend, I couldn't frame my resolutions for 2025 any better.
I'm going into the empty nest. So much about my life is changing. But I am very clear about who I want to continue to be in this new year.
A mom who loves her children unconditionally and leads with love rather than fear. A wife who cherishes her husband, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a master coach who knows she has the power to transform lives. A woman who loves herself.
My friend, can you celebrate all of the ways that you are these things? A mom who loves her children unconditionally. Potentially a wife, a daughter, a sister, a friend, a woman who loves herself. Could you imagine that these are the only things that you need to be in 2025? Could this new year be as easy as loving yourself and those in your life unconditionally? I have to say that for me, these simple truths of who I am and who I am always striving to be have made 2024 for me the most incredibly powerful year.
I have never felt more connected as a mom, more successful as a human being stepping into what's possible for my life, and more excited about everything that I have the potential to do. All of this power is within you as well, my friend. Happy New Year.
If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review and check out our coaching program, Mom 2.0, at www.thesmalljar.com. You have more power than you think, my friend.
