A Year of Manifesting Wellness
TL;DR (Too Long, Didn’t Read):
Each month in 2024, we’ll spend at least one issue of the newsletter talking about a monthly theme and progress on my yearly theme of Manifesting Wellness
Welcome to 2024! I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I enjoyed the break - spending time with family and spending Christmas Day at my house for the first time, perhaps ever. I also did a lot of planning and thinking about the year ahead. You can see much of that in my “What I Published” section below or in my community which you can also find a link to below along with discount coupons for as much as 90% off forever!
This year, I’m going to be using a “content schedule” for all of my various publishing platforms with the goal of publishing something nearly every day. Some days that may be nothing more than a tweet or, as they are called on Hive, a buzz, and other days it will be a full length independent article or part of a series. I’ve got a load of ideas on my content ideas list and I’m looking forward to building new things for the newsletter including some printables and other fun downloads.
Each year, I choose a theme for the year. Last year my theme was manifest. Unfortunately, I fell off track in several areas and so didn’t keep my theme top of mind throughout the year. So, this year, I’ve kept manifest and added wellness to it to create a phrase - Manifest Wellness. I like that manifest makes wellness a more active sounding word than it is on its own.
Daily reading, writing, exercise, healthy eating, and learning are already a reasonably regular part of my habits. I’m still going to do my best to intensify these but wellness is broader than just health. Wellness, when discussed in the research, has 8 dimensions:
Physical
Emotional
Social
Intellectual
Financial
Spiritual
Environmental
Occupational
Obviously, physical is a focus now as I continue to battle endometrial cancer. But all of the other areas are important as well and I don’t want to overemphasize my physical health at the expense of the other dimensions of wellness.
To help with this, I brainstormed a list of possible monthly themes that correlate with the areas where I feel the most need to focus during the year as well as other areas of wellness (you’ll still see a LOT of physical health related stuff in my final list as I navigate cancer treatment). Those are emotional, social, financial, and environmental. I do a pretty good job right now of focusing on physical and intellectual, occupational, and spiritual are always a focus for me.
Once I had my brainstormed list of themes I started fitting them into months based on things happening that month as well as an order that felt natural and right to me. That resulted in this list of themes. Where they correlate very specifically with something, I’m sharing why that month seemed the right one for that particular theme.
January - Finances
February - Friends
March - Energy
April - Outer Order ← Tax time is always a good time to get things in order
May - Play ← Cancer treatment should be OVER!!
June - Body & Spirit ← My body has been through a lot. Time to give it some focus.
July - Family ← I’m headed out on vacation with the family at the end of the month
August - Health ← This is the normal time I do my “project health” month
September - Work ← Labor Day is a nice reminder to focus on work
October - Celebration ← I’ve got a big birthday this month
November - Awe and Wonder
December - Onward
This concept of monthly themes is very closely related to Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project - a book I reread every year around this time (and will be publishing a full note and review from in my community in the next couple of weeks).
If you’ve read this far, you might wonder why I’m telling you all of this? Well, you are going to be part of my accountability for the year. Each month, the first issue of the month will be dedicated to the plans I have for my monthly theme that month. So, let’s dive into my plans for finances.
You Need a Budget
In 2023, I became a certified coach for the budget and money software called You Need a Budget, but more often referred to by its initials YNAB (pronounced why-nab). I finished the coaching certificate just before I moved and then moving, vacation, and cancer happened and I’ve done next to nothing with it. So one of my goals is to do some brainstorming about how I want to launch my YNAB coaching services and some related classes and content.
However, that series of crazy events - buying and selling a house, moving in with my best friend, and getting a major downer of a healthcare diagnosis meant that a LOT of things happened financially and my YNAB fell apart. Most of that is because the way Gayle and I share household expenses has complete changed my budget but the health stuff is also a small part of it. So, my second goal is to reset YNAB and get back into my daily logging habit.
Plan and Start Creating Financial Content
Several years ago, I resolved to “get better with money” whatever the heck that means. For me, that meant reading a LOT of books and articles on finance and money management. I developed a passion for it and have now read several great books including Tori Dunlap’s Financial Feminist, Lynne Twist’s The Soul of Money, Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich and Brent Kessel’s It’s Not About the Money. I loved Kessel’s book so much, I even made a video about it a while back
I’d like to make more practical content like that video but also enhancements to my Facts of Life Book Course and perhaps content that would support my YNAB coaching in the month. I don’t necessarily have to have all the content done but adding to my idea list of content would be great.
The maker of YNAB also wrote a book called You Need a Budget and I have added it to my “To Be Read” list for this month.
Audit Myself
Several years ago I did something that was really useful - I audited myself. This is not an audit in the accounting sort of way. Instead, it’s a “What am I spending? Do I need to spend on that?” kind of audit. In fact, Gayle and I did a little of this just last night as we were talking about the upcoming Olympics - something we both love. We know we’ll want Peacock throughout the Olympics and pretty much any other subscription service NBC throws at us to allow us to watch ALL the Olympic content we possibly can. When we talked about adding Peacock we immediately talked about what we could get rid of. So many of our streaming services are on all the time and we don’t need them to be. So, it sounds like Netflix is going to go by the wayside until the next seasons of Wednesday or The Diplomat or another of our faves is released.
The way I did this before was massively time consuming so I’d like to find a better way to do it that divided the task up into more chunks and makes it much easier to review on a regular basis.
How can you help?
You still might be wondering why I’m telling you this. First, I hope you find this concept interesting and that you might share ideas for this and future months with me in the comments or by hitting reply and sending me an email. Second, I hope you’ll help hold me accountable to carrying forward with these projects during the year. You can do that simply by continuing to subscribe to my newsletter and supporting the work I do. You can also do that by asking me about this at any time. Again, just ask a question in the comments or hit reply at any time! I love to hear from you. And, finally, you can tell me when something really resonates with you - good or bad. Again, post a note in the comments or drop me an email.
I’d love to hear your goals for the month or the year. Do you find the new year as a time for goal setting or do you do that at all kinds of other times during the year? Comment below and let’s have a conversation.
Some Things You Might Find Interesting
What I published: I’ve did some good work over the holiday break and I’ve done some great work this month so far. Not only am I keeping a content calendar this year, I’m also trying to do 30 publish every day months on the Hive Blockchain. I published all 7 days on Hive last week but didn’t earn the badge because Hive days run on UTC time rather than Eastern Time and I was late one day. That said, I’m still very pleased with my effort but it’s good to remember that I need to publish early in the day every day if I’m going to get the publish every day for a month or year badges at some point.
In many cases, I’m publishing things on my community BEFORE they ever get published anywhere else. Newsletter readers can join anytime and choose their own discount using CHOOSE10, CHOOSE20, etc all the way to a 90% discount with CHOOSE90. Join now and get the things I publish earlier than anywhere else.
Multi-Layer Planning in Obsidian, What and Why - Medium
My 24 for 24 lists - Personal on Hive or Medium and Professional on my Blog
Three Tune Tuesday - Anthems to Sum Up 2023 - Hive
AI and I go on a walk through NYC - Hive
Breathe New Life Into Office Hours with These Fresh Ideas: Teaching Tip Thursday - Monarch Strategies LLC Blog
Fiction Friday: A Space Drama Unfolds, Pt 1 - Hive
My Turkey Chili Recipe - Hive
Keep Up With My Cancer Journey: If you’re reading this on Monday, I’m 12 days past my second chemo session. This session has gone very well. It’s on my list to write about this cycle and preparing for cycle 3 (the halfway mark!!!) by the end of this week. If you’d like to follow along in more detail on this journey, you can request access to my Cancer Journey website at https://www.mylifeline.org/invitation/Monroe4702670/c4d9a0945939697870a9267ec2cd951230b25b0e9f023ca466233659967b5e46
A Quote from 15 Minute Inbox: The following quote came up in my Readwise feed as a suggestion of something I might like from a book that I haven’t read. This is one of my favorite features of Readwise’s daily email. That email brings me a look at 10 quotes I’ve highlighted from books I’ve read in the past. Much of the inspiration for what I’m going to write about that week comes from those daily quotes. This quote particularly struck me because I’m once again on a relentless unsubscribe quest - which I know is odd to tell people in my newsletter that I’m relentlessly unsubscribing from things that aren’t resonating with me right now, but it’s true. Here’s the quote…and a couple of my tips follow. “Deal with email in batches, during limited, fixed times every day Process your inbox to zero at least once a day Constantly create filters, opt-out and delete faster Think before you send Plan filing maintenance once a month .”
I disagree entirely with doing any sort of email filing. I have one button - archive - and that’s all I use. I file very, very few emails (ones for my taxes and one related to cancer treatment are the only two things getting regularly filed now). Everything else just gets archived and I use search to find them later.
Thinking before you send is THE. SINGLE. MOST. UNUSED. SKILL, IN THE BUSINESS WORLD. I was in an email conversation last week that NEVER should have happened because the sender decided to try to handle a highly complex AND emotionally charged topic via email. All it did was result in confusion and more ridiculous emails before someone said, “Let’s just hop on a zoom.”
Planner for Everything: I love NPR’s Lifekit podcasts. This year NPR put together links to common “resolutions” and things people want to stop and start doing (see my most recent newsletter for a tool to help you decide what you might want to stop and start doing). Each resolution includes a link to resources about how to do that thing. It’s a great tool to bookmark anytime you want to try one of those common things we’re all trying to do nowadays.
The Atlas Six Series & Finding New Reads: I just started a new to me book series - The Atlas Six. I’m listening to it rather than physically reading. The reading is performed by a team of people rather than a single narrator so it’s giving me the most wonderful experience of listening to the film playing in my head. It’s another “school of magic” type of book series so chances are if you liked Harry Potter then this might be good for you. As noted, I just started the series so if I end up disliking it for some reason I’ll report back.
I started the series because the third book in the series was available in my Wowbrary Newsletter for one of the libraries I’m a subscriber at. To see if your library offers this service, just click the link and enter your zip code. It’s one of my favorite emails to get every week and definitely one I’m NOT unsubscribing from anytime soon.
Twelve Days of Christmas: I recognize that the Twelve Days of Christmas is officially over, but this video is just too priceless not to share with you. I laughed so hard watching this.
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