Try my annual ritual for joy and prosperity.
Listen to this episode or read the blog post below!
“The intentions that we set are really truly so powerful in our lives.” - Linsi Brownson
I am a fan of creating a ritual or practice to celebrate the end of a year and set the tone for a new year to come. In fact, the ritual I am sharing with you today is one that my husband and I have been practicing for 11 years! It’s a combination of reflection and intention setting, but that’s honestly too basic of a description for what it really does for me!
That’s why I want to share it with you! I created a workbook to guide you through my annual Reflect, Refresh and Revitalize ritual. Inside, you'll find powerful questions to review your year, release unnecessary blocks, call in prosperity, and set the intention for your new year to come.
In this episode I am giving you a peek into what’s inside this guide (you can access this guide for free inside the Maverick HQ) along with some of my own answers to this year’s practice.
I hope you enjoy this episode, download the guide and give it a whirl. It may just change the trajectory of your year! (I’m not even kidding).
This episode is brought to you by:
This episode is brought to you by Reflect, Refresh and Revitalize, my annual ritual to create a year of prosperity and joy!
Gain free access, available now inside the Maverick HQ resource library.
Episode Links
Get the free workbook by joining The Maverick HQ
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Learn more about why we start with positive reflections in Episode 82: How to Self-Audit Your Business.
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Credits: Sound production by hearnoevilmedia.com
Reflect on the past year
The first step in this process is to reflect on our past year; recognizing and acknowledging what worked, what didn't work, how you've grown, and what you'd like to do differently.
When we do this, we always start with the positive; what worked? How did you grow? What were the shifts that you were able to make that had a bigger impact on the other side? Where are you today as a result of the person that you were being throughout the course of the year? Once we have let ourselves reflect on what went well, and what we're happy with, then we have the capacity to start to look at what didn't go so well, and what we can gain from it, and how we can do things differently next time.
The next part of the reflection is acknowledging your disappointments, the obstacles, the energy drains, the things that you're still tolerating that you want to let go of next year. And then you'll uncover the learnings and what you want to do with that moving forward.
Set your intention for the new year.
To find your intention, just imagine if you were to jump forward in time to next year's reflection, how would you summarize this coming year? Once you set your intention, then choose three areas of your life where you want to apply your intention to, and consider what your intention looks like for each of them.
For example, one of my key areas is my health, and my intention is to fortify my health. For me this looks like:
Becoming more practiced at paying attention to my body throughout the day (fortify my awareness).
When something seems off, ask myself what I think would help support me…and then
Take swift action on my answer (i.e. make an appointment, take a walk, rest, etc.) rather than letting myself spiral into overthinking or procrastination.
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Create rituals for the beginning of the new year.
This part is so much fun! I look forward to these rituals every year.
There are three rituals:
The clearing ritual, where we are physically making space for something new or something different in our lives,
The creating ritual, where we create prosperity using Feng Shui.
The releasing ritual, where we let go of the energy and the self-talk thoughts and feelings that are no longer serving you that you don't need to take with you into the new year.
I really encourage you to take your time with the releasing rituals. This is the one that will allow you to start the new year with a blank canvas. Let go of the energy that has held you back and don’t let it into the new year with you. Notice how it feels in your body to let something go - especially if it's an energy or a thought that has been plaguing you and holding you back.
Wrapping up the year.
Once again, I want to thank you all for joining me this year in our pursuit to be brilliant! I hope that this end of the year workbook is not only a fun end of year tool for you, but will propel you forward in 2022 with intention in all areas of your life.
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Episode 108 Transcript
Linsi Brownson 0:08
You are listening to Be Brilliant in Your Business, the podcast that helps you create a rich business and meaningful life. I'm your host, Linsi Brownson, and I'm here to deliver a creative cocktail of pep talks and practical tools to break the habit of being busy so you can have what you really want in life. If you are new to the podcast, welcome, I am so glad you're here and look forward to being part of your brilliant business. Before we dive into today's episode, I'd like to remind you that if you're a fan of the show, the best way to show it is to share it. Take a screenshot of this episode and tag me at Linsi Brownson, or leave us a review in your favorite podcast app. It means so much and I love being able to connect with you a little bit more personally. So are you ready? Let's go.
Linsi Brownson 1:01
Hey, hey Mavericks, welcome to the show. We are approaching the end of 2021, this is my final episode of this year, and I generally record podcast episodes that can be listened to at any time of the year. And that's technically true for this episode to what we're going to talk about. This is something that you could apply to your life at any point. But it really does feel special and seasonal to do this right now. So, what we're talking about today is creating an end of your ritual - a New Year's Eve ritual, specifically. And so last year around this time I did an episode it was episode 82, I did an episode on how to self audit your business. So the overview of how things are going in your business and how to make some decisions moving forward, whether that's for the new year, or at any point, just whatever comes next. Right?
So this year, I really wanted to talk bigger picture, I want to dig deeper, and talk about this life ritual, and reviewing and intentions intention-setting for your life on the whole. So how do you approach this end of the year, what is coming up for you in your life, which of course includes your business, but think holistically here? So what I'm sharing with you today, I'm so excited about this, I'm going to walk you through my process, my ritual that I have been doing since 2010. So, it's been a minute. I do this every year with my husband, he and I will usually do this the week between Christmas and New Year's, we'll work on this. And then we actually do the releasing ritual, the final ritual in this process together on New Year's Eve. This is one of my favorite things, one of my favorite moments that we share together. So what I've created for you is a workbook, and it's called the Reflect, Refresh and Revitalize New Year's Eve ritual. So I'm taking you through my annual ritual, and a handful of exercises that will help you do reflection and intention-setting. I've got some really powerful questions to help you connect with your past and future self. And you may have heard me talk about this before, but I set an intention or theme for every coming year. So I'm going to share with you what my upcoming intention is, my theme, walk you through a few of my answers in this ritual in this process. So I did mine a little early this year. So I could share it with you and give you just a little taste of what this ritual is like.
So, like I said, I created a workbook that walks you through the whole process, you'll actually go and print it out and write your answers in it. It takes you through all the rituals, and I'm giving it to you for free. It's inside the Maverick HQ. So go to linsibrownson.com/Maverick, if you're not already a member of the Maverick HQ, it is free to join, it's a place with some great resources for you. And this is going to be in there as well.
So this episode, I'm not going to take you through every part of that process. But I'm just going to show you kind of what the reflection intention and then what some other rituals kind of look like just so that you've got a sense of what all of this is about. And then I'll show you my answers to kind of help paint that picture of what you can expect. So are you ready?
Alright, there's a couple of ways that you can do this. You can do it all together. If you set aside two, maybe three hours to really sit down and go through the entire workbook, right? This is a thought exercise, gain your insights, and then do the clearing and releasing rituals. You can do all of that together in a couple of hours if you want to. The way I like to do it, as I said is that I like to work on the workbook in segments in the week between Christmas and New Year's. So I'll do the reflection one day and then I'll do the intention-setting another day and then I'll work the clearing during the ritual, usually New Year's Eve day, and then we'll do that releasing ritual that night together. So that's kind of my preferred way to do it. But it can totally be done in one fell swoop if you want to set aside a little bit of time to answer those questions and get your insights, and then do the releasing ritual privately if you want to.
So okay, so we start with the reflection section, recognizing and acknowledging what worked, what didn't work over the year, how you've grown, what you'd like to do differently, right? It's pretty straightforward. But I have a series of prompts that kind of guide you through various forms of reflection inside the workbook. So we always want you to start with what worked, looking at your accomplishments, what you're proud of what you did, well, we always want to start with the positive. So last year, in Episode 82, I talked about why it's important to start with the positive. So go check that episode out that one is specific to business, whereas this is more focused on your life on the whole. But I took kind of a different approach to this whole process and talking about why we need to start with what worked, what went well, all of those things. So for the purposes of this episode, just know, we always start with the positive in our reflections.
So when I did this exercise myself, I recognized that the thing that I'm the most proud of this year is that I stayed very true to my intention, and to my purpose this year. So life threw me a lot of curveballs, particularly with my health and with death. And by February this year, those big aspirational goals that I thought I would be accomplishing this year, it was already very clear to me that that wasn't going to happen. That wasn't a path that I was on this year. So I had to constantly recalibrate and come back to what was important and, and really get creative about how I wanted to approach things. But I did that. And I really stayed the course on what mattered to me the most. And I ended up achieving my big goals. But I approached it in a totally different way, and in a much more aligned way than how I thought I would be doing it.
So it's really interesting to do this reflection and to see that nothing went as planned, except for the fact that I saved on purpose. And I was still able to get what I wanted out of my life and out of my business, even with all of the things that happened in between that I never could have foreseen or expected to happen. So I'm really proud of myself because I practice what I preach so much that I enjoyed the process the whole way through, I had lots of free time, lots of downtime, I got to explore my creative desires, I got to take care of myself, and I got to be with my family and friends when they needed me. So that all means so much to me. And I was still able to accomplish the financial and business goals that I had. So this if I, like, if I can't be a poster child for what I'm sharing with you, and what I'm really hoping and wanting for you to have too like there is no better example than what I have experienced what I've gone through this year. So I'm super excited about that.
Alright, so in the workbook, I've got questions that will help you to pull some of that stuff out and discover that for yourself as well. Not just what you're proud of, but really start to see, you know, what were the elements? What were the shifts that you were able to make that had a bigger impact on the other side, you know, where are you today as a result of the person that you were being throughout the course of this year? Once we have let ourselves reflect on what went well, and what we're happy with, then we have the capacity to start to look at what didn't go so well, and what we can gain from it, and how we can do things differently next time. So the next part of the reflection is acknowledging your disappointments, the obstacles, the energy drains, the things that you're still tolerating that you want to let go of next year. And then you'll uncover the learnings and what you want to do with that moving forward.
Okay, so that is kind of the overview of the reflection section. The next part is intention setting or creating that theme for your new year. So as I said, I always like to choose a single word as my theme, but you can do a phrase if that is better for you, if that makes more sense. Just imagine if you were to jump forward in time to next year's reflection. How would you summarize this coming year? You know, what is it that you want to create? And look back and say, "Yeah, that's what I created". So I'll share with you mine. My theme for this coming year is Fortify. That's my word. So what it means to me is strengthening and enrichment, giving nutrients to the important elements of my life, which is really powerful for me right now, this idea of fortifying and enriching. And that word, Fortify, is really built upon my previous two years’ intentions, what I set for myself the growth that I saw the things that got me to this place today, where I'm now able to really shift my focus to fortifying that, which I already have. I would not have been able to do that in previous years, because I still had some building and growth to do. And we always see this in hindsight, right? It but it's so cool to actually start to do this ritual in this process, and to see the years and the phases of your life all connect together in a very clear way. It's like, cool, it's if that's the only reason to do this ritual every year. I mean, that's an amazing reason.
So okay, once we set our intention, once we know what your intention is going to be and what it means to you, then you'll start to choose some life domains, some areas of your life where you want to apply your intention to it. So in the workbook, I have you choose three life domains, and there are 10 to choose from. So you'll pick three. And then with each of those three, you start to dig into what that intention really looks like in real-time applied to those life domains. So I will give you an example here, my intention is to Fortify my health in the following ways. One way is that I will be actively listening to my body throughout the day, every day, that is a practice that I am learning to do, to actively check-in. And then I am now ready to take swift action when I can or when I feel I need to. So you don't know this about me, but the swift action part of this is a very different approach than my usual tendency that is a big growth area for me. My usual tendency is to procrastinate and to overthink when it comes to my health because I'm not sure what is wrong with me or what I should be doing. If this sounds familiar to you, it might be because that has been a topic of the podcast over the last couple of months, right is overthinking procrastination and the perfectionist tendency of believing that there is a right and a wrong way to take care of my health or to manage my health.
So that is a big area of growth for me not only learning to be a better, more active listener to my body throughout the day but getting into that place where I notice that my tendency to want to overthink and to kind of spiral out and worry and then not take action because we generally don't take action from worry, we freeze, right? So instead of doing that I will fortify my health by being willing to ask myself notice what's happening, ask myself what I think I need, and then just move forward and not get in my own way.
So I wanted to give you that example, because it's important that once you know your intention, then you start to give your brain very specific examples of what you mean and how you'll do it. We think that just because all these things are in our heads that we know what we mean. But we don't, we are so vague with our intentions. And we need to be really specific, we have to literally feed our brain options, because by default, our brain is going to tell us that we have no idea what to do, don't know where to start, and so on. Right. So give yourself that example. And again, I'll show you this on the workbook of how to apply your intention to these specific life domains. And then to start to figure out a few ways that you'll go about doing that. So that's some of what we do inside the intention section. There is a little bit more to it. But that's kind of a high-level overview.
And then we move into the ritual section, this part is so much fun. So there are three parts to the ritual section or three rituals. There's a clearing ritual, where we are physically making space for something new or something different in our lives. So I take you through how to choose a small cleaning project or cleaning and clearing project and how to do that. And then we work on creating prosperity using Feng Shui. So finding and optimizing the money corner in your home or in a meaningful space, how to stop energy leaks from that space, and then making that a very powerful space for you.
So you probably don't know this about me. But I used to be a Feng Shui nerd when I was like 13, I used to read all kinds of books and practice it and taught it to everybody who would listen I was super into it for a while. So I am by no means an expert is only something I used to play with. But there are certain things that I have taken away from it that I still am practicing and using My life today. And this is one of those things creating prosperity and kind of finding the energetic spaces in your life. And the best word I can give you is how to fortify those spaces. So we have the clearing ritual, then we have the creating prosperity ritual. And then the last ritual is the releasing rituals. So this is the one that I love to do with my husband together after we've done the worksheets throughout the week. You can also do this privately. And you can do it all together at the same time, if you want to, I just like to break them up into smaller chunks.
So we've got the clearing ritual was about physical spaces, the releasing ritual is energetic, so you're letting go of the energy, the self-taught thoughts and feelings that are no longer serving you that you don't need to take with you into the new year. And I really encourage you to take your time with this ritual. And really notice how it feels in your body to let something go, especially if it's an energy or a thought that has been plaguing you that's been haunting you and holding you back. This is a very cathartic experience. I love it. It's such a great way to end this entire ritual. It's also an incredible way to end the year, we make this such a magical experience with candles and burning stuff, and music and the whole - the whole deal. So if you are an introvert like me, and you don't like going out to parties, a New Year's Eve, I hate it. This is like the best excuse ever is that you've got an annual ritual to perform. So check it out.
I hope that you enjoy this. And I hope that this episode was kind of fun to just walk through what my ritual looks like, and what's inside the workbook for you. Like I said, there's definitely more to it, than what I covered here, but I just wanted to take you through the process a little bit and give you a taste of it. Once again, this workbook is free. This is a holiday gift from me to you sent with love. And if you're into this sort of thing, I hope you will download it, join the Maverick HQ and go through this process. I would love to hear how it goes for you. So if this is something, maybe there are elements of it that you want to integrate into a process you already do. Maybe this is brand new. And you're going to tell me from start to finish what it's like to go through it. It's been a long time since I was new to this. So I would love to hear what that perspective is like from you. If you choose to do the ritual by yourself, or if you do it with someone else, I'd love to know how that goes. Just anything. If you do this, I would love to hear from you. Tell me what happens, I would really like to know. Overall, I am just really excited and grateful and happy to share this with you because it's been such a meaningful process and part of my life. And it's certainly something that I have played with as the years have gone on. But it's been significantly impactful for me over the years, it's made such a difference, and what my years look like and what I'm able to accomplish.
I'm so surprised sometimes and I'm sure you will be too in looking back at that reflection. Sometimes I'm shocked at what I was able to accomplish, and how much it was aligned with my goals and the intentions that I set, even if I wasn't paying that close of attention throughout the entire year. So the intentions that we set are really truly so powerful in our lives. And even if you're not doing what I said earlier, and like recalibrating, and constantly coming back to that intention, it's still going to have an impact on your year and what you're able to do. So I love this kind of work, it will do amazing things for your life. And I hope that you enjoy it. And I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. A very Happy New Year, we are going to be taking a little break from the show. So please go back and check out some of our older episodes. Listen to Episode 82. To get a little refresher on the business-specific self-audit, and year-end evaluation. We've also got tons of episodes that you can learn new stuff from even if you've heard the episode before, so plenty to do in the meantime. But I hope that you have a fabulous holiday season with lots of downtime and creative space. That is what I want for you most of all, and thank you, thank you for being here. Thank you so much for being part of this community and this podcast. It means so much to me that you tune in and that you get value from these episodes. Really and truly this is such an important part of my life to be able to create this for you. So I'm very grateful that I get to do this and I'm grateful to you for being here. Thank you. I'll talk with you soon.
Linsi Brownson 19:46
Thanks for listening to the Be Brilliant in your Business podcast. I hope you enjoyed this episode. And if you heard something particularly insightful or inspiring, I would really love to know what it was and I'd love to get your review. So I have a fun way to do this. Come in, find me on Instagram @linsibrownson and send me a private message with a voice memo or a quick note, something that I can share here on the show. As a thank you for sharing your thoughts about the show, I've made a special gift to get you energized and inspired when you open your laptop. I created some beautifully designed desktop wallpaper with some of my favorite mantras and motivational ideas. And I think you will love to see it's a win-win and a fun way for us to connect. So come find me on Instagram @LinsiBrownson and let me know what you think.