Description: It’s time for a new narrative around the new year. Maki Moussavi, author and mindset coach, joins the pod to share her perspective on intention setting, why commitment matters more than motivation, and living more aligned. Grab your journal, you’ll want to take notes!!

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TRANSCRIPT

INTRO

Kerri: Hello and welcome to the Flourish and Friends podcast. I’m your host, Kerri, and I’m here with my friend and collaborator, Esther.

Esther: Hey friends.

Kerri: Our goal for this podcast is to create space for our flourish community, to gather around important conversations that lead to more growth and more flourishing. You are welcome.

Esther: Yeah, nothing is really off the table because how we lead our lives spills into how we lead at work, and overall, our brand reflects that, especially as creative.

Kerri: Today we have a special guest. I’m sitting down with author and mindset coach Maki Moussavi to talk about New Year’s goals and shifting the narrative around the new year. It’s an amazing conversation and I’m so excited for you all to hear it. 

But first, let’s start with some fun things that are giving us life. 

FRESH PICKS

Kerri: All right, Esther, what’s your fresh pick this week?

Esther: Well, continuing the theme of January Planners, and Organization. I wanted to pick my moleskine weekly planner. I got it last year and it has, honestly, I’ve never spent more time in a planner. It’s been amazing, especially when you’ve got a lot of different things churning, so you can’t keep track of things just on your calendar or asana and writing them down.

What I love about this moleskine notebook is that it has the months and everything. It’s got all the extra index things, and then there’s notes in the back. But for each week you have a week on your left side, just blank. So it’s like Monday you get this nice big rectangle where you can write in stuff, and then on the right you have just lined paper so you can write down to-do lists and, you know, little notes that you have. I, I really highly recommend that if you’re still looking for a planner. 

Kerri: Love it.

Esther: So, Kerri, what is your fresh pick this week?

Kerri: My fresh pick is composting, which isn’t really a product, but it’s a service and I just wanna encourage all of our lovely friends and listeners to consider composting this year. If you’re in Kansas City, a local here, there’s a service called Compost Collective KC, and it’s fantastic. You put your compost in a bucket and they pick it up either weekly or every other week.

And I know a lot of more pro-progressive cities have composting already included as part of their taxes, so I’m hoping we’re moving in that direction. If you’re wanting to be more green this year, reduce food waste. Food waste is a huge emitter of greenhouse gasses and it’s so easy to put all of the food in the bucket and then it goes and gets composted.

And I’m not a huge home gardener either, so the ROI on me doing my own compost is just not there. So this is a great in between and it’s really rewarding because we do it every other week and we like pack it down cuz we do a lot of cooking and just to like lift it up and be like, oh my gosh, this is all of our food waste and it’s actually going somewhere productive and not just in the trash is really fun.

So I highly recommend composting.

Esther: Have you, have you seen your, like regular trash, go down significantly?

Kerri: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yes, definitely. Trash has gone down. Composting is going up. It’s, it’s really awesome to see. And you realize too, like I, you’re just more conscious of it too, like the food waste that’s happening. So start composting or sign up for a service, or maybe you’re lucky and you already have it happening.

Okay, now it’s time for our conversation with Maki Moussavi. 

MAIN CONVERSATION

Kerri: Hi friends today. I’m so excited to be joined by Maki Moussavi. Maki is a mindset coach and author. Who helps successful, unsatisfied people catalyze empowering change to create more satisfied, meaningful lives.

She’s also the author of the book that I love, called The High Achiever’s Guide. Maki, welcome to the podcast. I’m so glad you’re here.

Maki: Thanks Kerri, I’m, I’m really excited to be here and talk about what we’re gonna talk about today.

Kerri: Yeah, so today we’re chatting around the topic of New Year’s goals, and as a mindset coach, as an author, I know you have a lot of perspective and experience around all this topic entails and your book, The High Achiever’s Guide speaks to high achievers. I know I myself identify as one. I’m sure many who are listening may identify as a high achiever as well.

And I just feel like the new year timeframe brings this like both excitement and optimism and there’s a blank page. And then also this like cultural pressure to become a new me or have these momentous goals that we’re gonna achieve this year. So I’m like curious your thoughts just generally around the whole cultural narrative of New Year and this time of year and goals in general.

Maki: Yeah, I mean, I, I think it’s a really interesting time of year because people are ready to have a clean slate or to start over in some way and maybe do some things that. They wanted to do previously and they didn’t get a chance. And so it can feel kind of energizing, especially cuz you have time off, usually a little bit around the holidays to set some intentions. But, I am a firm believer in general that most people go about setting goals in a way that isn’t very aligned, which is why a lot of people who reach their goals don’t necessarily feel the way they expected to feel when they reach the goal. So I know for me personally, one of the things that I used to note about myself was I would reach a goal that I was really excited about and then I would celebrate for like 10 seconds and I would be ready to set another goal.

Cause that you know, like, it was like, okay, that’s done. Now what? You know.

Kerri: Mmm.

Maki: Or, you know, you, you reach a goal and maybe you had some significance attached to it, like you thought it was gonna feel a certain way, and it’s a let down.

Kerri: mm.

Maki: To, to have gotten to the finish line and be like, eh, like it, it’s whatever. And then if you’re like a lot of people, you may have goals that maybe you’ve set the same goal or resolution for like five years and there’s, it still isn’t something that you’ve done. There are reasons for that, but I don’t think that most people take the time to do the examination around, how am I doing this in a way that it’s just not leading to the outcome that I want?

Because there’s a lot of, kind of, deeper meaning usually around that than we take the time to think about.

Kerri: Yes. You talk a lot in your book about programming and this concept of, you know, internal programming, external programming from like places like our family or where we live, our geographical location or even our socioeconomic status among a lot of other things. And I think it’s interesting cuz we also have kind of this societal programming of a system like school, which we all grow up in and it’s based off these.

These goals are like this measurement and performance mindset. So you do this thing and then you get this grade, and it’s a very black and white view of, of goals. I’m curious, as you are thinking about goals and intentions, like how do you, how do you think about them differently? In your book, you talked about the process of setting, kind of trying to switch from setting goals in favor of setting intentions and how it wasn’t necessarily just you know, flip the switch. It was a, a deeper process. Can you, can you talk to us about how that went and how that, how that goes?

Maki: So as somebody who was chronically dissatisfied, despite meeting a lot of goals, you know, I had to think about what is that? Why are we like this? And then of course, as I’ve worked with clients, I’ve seen that same tendency for the reasons you mentioned, because we are programmed and taught, conditioned to pursue achievement in a very specific way.

Kerri: Hmm. 

Maki: And that achievement is almost always based on how somebody else would determine whether or not you’ve reached the outcome. So it’s a grade, it’s a promotion, it’s a contract, it’s a salary increase, right? It’s up to someone else to decide whether or not you’ve met that. And we are encouraged to set our goals. Thinking about how somebody else is gonna measure the outcome. You know, I even remember, I think it was SMART Goals or something, there’s like that acronym, and I think the M stands for Measurable you know, so we are very obsessed with tangible achievement. The challenge is that, the reason we feel dissatisfied or can’t actually get to completion on goals is because we are not grounded in what it means to us personally. So if you set a goal and you say, I wanna have this promotion, and everything about that is based on you needing to prove your value. You needing to meet an external checklist, you needing to show other people what you’re capable of. That’s all externally oriented, and it’s all based on a box that you can check. When it comes to being in the energy of a goal.

The reason I switch that to thinking about intention is because there is a little bit of a deeper meaning around intention. And it helps you so much more. To orient around what you want to feel when you have achieved that outcome. And that is how you ground into this is something I’m doing because it matters to me, not because it’s a checkbox, not because somebody else told me it’s important, but because this is why it matters to me. 

And sometimes if you can’t, if you’ve set a goal and you cannot commit to seeing it through, it may be as simple as you don’t actually care about it that much. Someone else has told you that you’re supposed to care about it. You’ve been taught to care about it. You think it says something about your character if you don’t care about it. But fundamentally you don’t care right? So you’re never going to meet that goal because it’s not important to you, right? And an intention is more like, let me think about it will mean to me to achieve this outcome.

That isn’t based on some external reward. You know, how am I gonna feel when I’ve reached that milestone? How is that important? Why is that energizing? And that is, is going to take you through and help you commit in a way that just trying to meet a checklist does not help you stay committed to that final thing that it is that you’re going after.

Kerri: Why do you think it’s so hard for people to focus on or even know? How they wanna feel around their intentions. Even the process of understanding what, what is it that I wanna feel and exploring our feelings. You talk about being guided. I forget what the name of the chapter is, but you talk about feelings specifically in your book towards the end. Why do you think that’s so challenging for us to do?

Maki: Well, part of our conditioning and our programming is to. Ignore how we feel, uh, quite frankly, you know. We will, we will, we have very common sayings and cliches that we use all the time, like don’t let your, don’t make an emotional decision. You know, let you think logically, don’t think emotionally. We, we tend to shy away from how we feel and, and often when we don’t feel good, the first thing that we wanna do is stop being in that energy of not feeling good. So we set that aside. We get focused on action again, and we medicate through those behaviors, right? We just wanna leave the things that we’d rather not deal with under the surface. And when you’ve done that long enough, You’ll find that you don’t have easy access to your emotions or you don’t have a very good language for describing how you actually feel. 

So I know one of the things that I say is in the book is to be very specific, you know? And if, if I ask you, you know, how do you feel about this? I don’t wanna hear, well, it feels bad because that doesn’t mean anything. Do you feel exhausted? Do you feel frustrated? Do you feel depleted. You know, what are the, what’s the specific language that describes how you feel? 

And it takes a little bit of effort to be conscious because we have adopted so many. Coping behaviors that are kind of put us on autopilot, where the second we start to not like the way we feel about something, we shift into those coping behaviors that keep all of that under the surface. So it requires a little bit of consciousness to say, how do I feel right now? And let me be honest about it because unless I’m honest about it, I don’t have the capability of defining how I would rather feel instead.

Kerri: Yes, absolutely. And I think that’s even interesting to think through if you’ve already written down some goals for the new year and really haven’t thought about the intention behind them, like what is that feeling that you’re expecting from those goals that you have written down? Is there a feeling you have associated or can you try to peel back the layers of it around that and try to align those more with a deeper intention in your life?

Maki: Yeah, for sure. I think it’s a great opportunity to look at what you’ve already tried to maybe accomplish, and especially if it’s a, a resolution or a goal that continues to show up on your list, that for some reason it still hasn’t come to fruition.

Kerri: Absolutely. So folks who go through the process of setting the intention, you know, a lot of people will set like a word of the year, which is a, a bit, it’s all encompassing. It’s not really a goal, it’s just kind of a, it’s a word we’re speaking into being or, or goals, um, goals that underlie underneath that intention.

I think the next kind of natural thought process goes to, well, how do I stay motivated to achieve this goal or to achieve this intention or manifest this intention in my life? Because I got so, like all the good warm fuzzies. Finding the word or picking the goals. And then now I’m, now I’m frustrated because I see it, or I, I know what I wanna feel, but I’m not there and I have this, like, I just, I feel like it’s on me cuz I’m not staying motivated enough.

What would you say to people who feel that way? Um, and it’s still January, so maybe we don’t feel that way quite yet, but February comes around or March or you completely forget it and then you’re like, oh yeah. Dang it. That word or that goal that I had,

Maki: Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, I think this is a really important question and so I would frame it in two ways. There’s motivation and then there’s commitment. So I think what’s really important to understand about motivation is that it’s. By its nature, it’s fleeting, right? We don’t stay in a state of high motivation.

It’s just not, we’re not built to operate that way. But we’ll hear ourselves say things like, I’m just not motivated to do that, or I’m not motivated to continue with something. If you can reframe your perspective to think of motivation as more of an activation energy, I think it starts to make more sense.

So motivation is almost like the spark that comes in. To help you see, like, this is a thing that matters to me and I want to pursue it. Okay. So it, it can go pretty hand in hand with intention. Like, uh, there is a deeper meaning. I do have the motivation because I am attached to feeling this specific positive way at the end of it, right? But motivation is, is a momentary or cyclical state to be in.

Kerri: Mm-hmm.

Maki: When you don’t ground yourself in that intention around why the thing matters to you, then your motivation, once it goes away, you’re gonna drop your effort to reach that outcome.

Kerri: Mm.

Maki: What an intention helps you do is to use the motivation as the spark you need to get on the path to say, this is why this is important to me. But then you have to shift into commitment because the motivation is not going to stick around. What you need to do is use the motivation to then be committed to achieving the outcome. 

And the commitment comes from being grounded in why it matters to you. If you don’t have the why, and it’s all that external stuff like we talked about, you won’t remain committed and you ultimately will not see that goal through to the end. So if you can think of motivation as this thing that kind of comes in to help you see what matters most to you, enough to kind of get on the path and then know that it will sometimes bubble back up and you’ll be like, yes, I still this still matters to me and I let it go for a long time, but now it’s time to get back on a path that’s a much more supportive way to view it versus something that needs to be there in order for you to continue to make pro, progress because that, that will wane and it will go away. But if you’re committed, you’ll continue to move forward.

Kerri: I love that grounding in the intention and in the why. Do you have any personal practices or things that you’ve helped your clients with in terms of grounding back in that intention, in the why throughout, throughout the year, throughout a season that might be challenging?

Maki: One of the things that I have my clients do is come up with a few intentions that can span not only over a year, but you may have the same intentions for several years, um, from an energetic perspective. So,

Kerri: Hmm

Maki: let’s say you’re in a state and you think, I don’t even know what I want right now, I can’t even articulate it. I just know that where I am right now is not where I want to be.

Kerri: mm-hmm.

Maki: So that’s also really natural because when you spend most of your time in an energy that you don’t wanna be in, it’s hard to access where you’d like to be instead. So there’s a discernment exercise that I give around. It’s okay. Like let’s just do the brain dump of all the things that are going on that are not working for you.

Let’s get it all out. So that avoidance activity that most people engage in, we’re not doing that. Let’s talk about all the words, all the ways you feel, all the things you wanna shift. And sometimes, you know, you may start with 20 descriptions of emotional states that describe where you’re at, and you’ll see that a lot of them are related to each other.

So you can start to narrow that down and say, no, this is really the word that fits. And from there you can say, okay, well I’ve been, I’ve felt depleted for years at this point. I’ve been working too hard. Uh, I don’t have great energy around this thing that I’m doing. I don’t wanna feel depleted anymore. So maybe one of the intentions you set is to feel energized. 

That can be one of the words that you have on your list of three to five words that are gonna carry you through. And what they can do is act as a check and a balance for you. So if you end up in a situation and somebody says, I want you to do this project, or Do you wanna engage with this client? One of the very first things you can do is look at your list and say, does this meet? The criteria that I’ve decided matter most to me. So by default I might normally say yes to things, even if I don’t wanna do them. Now I can look and say, does this energize me?

Kerri: Hmm

Maki: And if the answer is no, then the answer is no.

Kerri: mm-hmm.

Maki: Right? And so it kind of helps you make decisions based on what you’ve decided matters most to you instead of defaulting to old conditioning where you’re just agreeable and it’s your job to say yes, and that’s how you prove your value in a certain professional capacity or in a relationship. And you’re saying, you know, if it doesn’t meet what I’ve decided I want, which is to feel energized, maybe it’s to feel, um, connected to people. And in the past I’ve just kind of stuck my head in the sand and I haven’t made time for that. Whatever those words are. you can use them to keep yourself on track.

So that’s one of the things I do with my clients. You know, if you’ve had these things that you’ve been, where you’ve put yourself last for the sake of others for a long time, or the sake of your work, your new intentional energies, or you know, states that you wanna be in. Act as your check and balance. So before you say yes to something, if you’re not sure you review it, does it meet the criteria? You can still make a decision sometimes to go against that, but you have to do it consciously. So you know that you’re compromising. And then when it doesn’t work out, you have all the proof you need. Like I, this wasn’t gonna work out. I knew it from the beginning because I didn’t adhere to what I said I was going to adhere to.

And that’s just the learning opportunity.

Kerri: Uh, that’s so good. I was gonna ask like what, in that example of a project, say you’re in a company and they ask you to do something that isn’t aligned with your intention or your energy or whatever that intention that you set was gonna be. But you feel like you have to and, and or, or you feel like you don’t have a choice.

And I think some people sometimes feel like, oh, I don’t have a choice because I’m in this role, or I’m in this company. And maybe there’s a lot of really good things I, I hear from friends this like, um, , I don’t wanna say making excuses isn’t the right word, but they’re justifying, justifying these, these different pieces.

So if someone comes to kind of that point where there’s that friction and they, maybe they do say yes to their intentions and that creates consequences that happen in their lives. I guess what, what words would you have for, for those people? Because it can have sometimes extreme consequences, sometimes not extreme, but sometimes it may.

Maki: Yeah, you’re right. And, and it can be tricky when you work for somebody else. You know, there are things where you have to look at where you’re willing to make those compromises and go against what matters. What you’ve decided matters to you in order, whether it may be temporary, you know, it could be that you’re going to continue to say yes to things that don’t feel super aligned to you, until so that you can give yourself time to have the conversation with your executive or whoever is managing you is to say.

Kerri: mm-hmm.

Maki: You know, what I have found is. These are not the areas that leverage my strengths, and I don’t enjoy doing work like this as much. Here’s what I would enjoy. I’m happy to do this because I know it’s important and it’s necessary, but can we also have a conversation about how I can work on projects that are more aligned to me, or are there opportunities to maybe see where different people on the team have, they feel like the strengths or like the natural inclinations to make this go in a way that feels good and energizing to them when it does it so much to me.

Kerri: Mm-hmm.

Maki: So part of what it opens up is, um, the necessity to use your voice, and that is a thing that people really struggle with, right?

They say, I’m in this organization and these are the expectations, and so therefore I just have to march. But sometimes you do that without ever having a conversation about how things could be different. When it, they might be able to be. If you just have the conversation or if you have the conversation and they just shut down and say, no, you know what? I don’t really care and you’re just gonna do what you’re told. Then you personally have a decision point.

Kerri: Mm

Maki: That you’ve gotta decide, am I willing to continue to compromise in this manner, or is this my signal that it’s time to look for an opportunity elsewhere?

Kerri: I’m curious, like within friendships and in connections and community, if there are ways that we can help each other, you know, sometimes we may have a friend that comes to us and is, is struggling with this whole season of goals or, or mindset and intention. How can we use connection and community to help spur each other on and, um, help each other reground?

Maki: One way that you could do it, especially if it’s people you already have a connection with, if they say like, here’s my goal. you know, you could ask like, that’s cool. Why are you excited about that?

Kerri: Such a good question.

Maki: You know, and, and because sometimes they may not be, they might be like, oh, why would I be excited about it? It’s just a goal, you know? And that right there is a sign that, okay, well then maybe we need to talk about why you would you set a goal for something that you’re not. Excited about. Is it because you feel like you have to, should, you know, always look at when you’re telling yourself that you should be doing something, cuz that is an automatic red flag that it’s misaligned to you.

Cuz you don’t want to, you feel like you have to.

Kerri: mm-hmm.

Maki: But just ask like, Hey, you know, why are you excited? And then that can create some fun accountability because then somebody will say maybe they are excited. And then as they talk about it, that kind of. Brings in that motivation, the spark to commit to it, and then you can help provide that support. But if it’s not aligned, then you get to explore like, well, maybe what? What would you, what would you be excited about? Maybe this isn’t it.

Kerri: Mm-hmm.

Maki: Let’s talk about something else. you know?

Kerri: Such a good question. Just even, yeah, going back to the, okay, why did, why did we put this here? You know, why, why is this here in our, in our new year? And I think there are those cultural expectations of like, I need to make a goal in this area of my life and this area of my life. And maybe they’re even good.

Good as, as a, as a word. I’m not even sure that’s the right word, but they, they’re, they’re nice things to like maybe aspire to, but they’re not. If you don’t feel excited about them, then you can let them go. We don’t have to hold so tightly.

Maki: Exactly. You can let ’em go and maybe, maybe you’ve had years of disappointment around resolutions and goals you’ve set, and maybe what feels really good this year is to not do it, at all.

There can be a lot of pressure to have a goal and have a resolution and all of that. And maybe this is the year to not, you know, if you feel like you do it because you should do it and you really don’t want to, and it doesn’t really bring you anything, then just don’t do it.

Kerri: Yes. I love that. Why don’t we listen to ourselves and like, check in on ourselves, on like, are we just going through the motions or is this something that we want to do? And maybe could be, could be inspiring and, and a time to reflect. Um, but maybe not. Maybe this isn’t. 

Maybe cuz it’s winter for you. This is not a great, great time. Maybe spring is more of a time that you wanna think about these things.

Maki: Great point. Letting, letting it be natural to you. If you have a time of year where you’re more energetic and feeling more driven towards certain things, then do it. Yeah, do that. Do it then. It doesn’t have to be now.

Kerri: Yes. I think as high achievers, again, we can sometimes we, we have these expectations that we don’t even know why, as we’ve, we’ve talked about. And so it’s like, okay, I need, it’s January. I need to do this, and, and it’s just like you’re just, It’s so easy to just go through the motions and then again, as you started your book with that programming and like that, that all plays into, into it and it’s like, well, we actually have an opportunity to pause and ask like, why are we doing the things we’re doing in our life?

Like we get, we get to choose what we let occupy our life, but also our brain space cuz we’ve only got so much. Brain space and we don’t need to be so hard on ourselves. I think part of it too, with that more high achieving performative mindset is this, I’m not doing enough. It’s that enoughness or it’s not, it’s not being the way it should be with that should word.

You know, I don’t have my 12 month plan outlined for the next year, and it’s like, you know, that’s okay. We can let it go. It can be organic too. It can be both organic and intentional, and those things aren’t mutually exclusive.

Maki: Absolutely. And I love what you said about getting to choose cuz it really is a choice and so much of our conditioned behavior feels like it’s not. But you can always choose whether or not the things that you’re doing are working for you. And if they’re not, choose to do something different or just choose to stop. And yes, the organic approach. You know, one thing that is really challenging about being in the conditioning of always doing is that you don’t leave a lot of space in your life for opportunities that you may not have considered. If you would just. stop for a moment and give yourself some space to breathe and see what might be trying to get your attention that’s outside of the framework that you’re living in.

We are so in our boxes when we’re in that mode of tunnel vision, right? This is what I’m trying to do, this is what I’m trying to accomplish. And sometimes what’s available to you is a lot bigger than what you have your site set on, but you don’t give it space to actually enter your life or your experience.

Kerri: That’s so rich. That’s gold. That breathing room is so, so important. That’s really refreshing. Well, as we close our conversation, do you have any final words of encouragement for our listeners and community just around this topic of, of intentions and goals and keeping them in motion versus commitment? And just people who are hoping to have a wonderful 2023.

Maki: You are here to be who you are. And there’s layers on top of that right now. The layers of duty and obligation and what you should be doing that you, that you think is where your value lies. And it’s not easy to unwind from that. So what I don’t wanna do is, is inject a lot of toxic positivity around just being yourself and just being authentic, because those things are often disruptive. 

But the, the huge benefit to you personally, even when it’s a little bit disruptive in your, in your surroundings and in your relationships and in your orbit, is you get to put down that burden of always trying to meet expectations that are coming from outside of you and always trying to prove your worth. To what lies outside of you. So if you can find this one small way around being more intentional, not being driven by a checklist, thinking more about what matters to you personally. That sounds like small work, but it can help shift everything for you in a more positive direction and give you some momentum around. Wow, that worked out really well for me. Like, where else can I apply this different way of thinking about myself and what I want?

Kerri: Thank you so much, Maki. How can our listeners support you or stay in touch with you?

Maki: Yeah, so I have the book, like you mentioned, The High Achiever’s Guide, which is available on Amazon. It’s also available if you go to my website, which is just my first and last name, dot com. I have got a little tab there. I’ve got a blog out there. I just started kind of a monologue, podcast where I’m not doing interviews, but I’m just kind of doing musings.

That’s called Musings of a High Achiever, and I cover any and all topics that are relevant to people who are you know, trying to overcome some of this conditioning and programming to live a more aligned and fulfilled life, and that’s on the normal podcast platforms as well, so.

Kerri: Thank you so, so much Maki. We so appreciate it. Appreciate your time and yeah, we’re just excited to have, have a wonderful year with all the wisdom that you’ve given us here. So thank you.

Maki: Thank you so much for having me.

RECAP

Kerri:  So Esther, what did you think of that conversation? Wasn’t there so much gold in there?

Esther: So much gold. I mean, I loved just off the bat that she was talking about how intentions are internal versus goals being more external.

Kerri:  Hmm.

Esther: Yeah. She seems to know, ha have worked with so many people like that who have struggled with just expectations versus what they want. And so she kind of, I felt like focused more on like, let’s uncover what your motivations are and what things you’ve kind of attached that are actually external expectations. There’s a few takeaways I had. The first one is to not ignore your feelings, because when you feel bad, you need to access why you feel bad about maybe not meeting those goals or, those shortcomings.

Kerri: I totally agree with you. And I think she just, yeah, it has a lot of perspective and even her own story, having come from a corporate background to now being able to take all of the things that she’s learned and help other people is just really cool. And yeah, so many good nuggets and takeaways.

Hopefully listeners, if you had a journal by you, maybe you go back and re-listen and just like bullet list down anything and everything that she says cuz it’s all really helpful and a really great framework for. Yeah, just letting just not have so much pressure around the new year, which is a narrative that I think we need more of.

Esther: I think also, like just how we can engage with our like community around keeping those goals too. I love what she was talking about, how to see motivation as a spark and commitment, as something that grounds you, in your why. And, and how we can just ask each other what excites us about the goal and validate if there is a spark or if there isn’t a spark in that, intention or goal. 

So yeah, I think there’s just so many nuggets, not just for us to take away, but also just her wisdom and, just, you know, creating that space for ourselves to explore what do we want this year? Maybe it’s, like at the end she was talking about maybe you don’t set intentions this year because you’ve just created that as a expectation on yourself. I highly recommend sharing this to anyone. I had some people that popped in my mind that I was like, I need to share this with someone, who is setting those New year’s goals and yeah, it’s just a great perspective to enter the year with.

Kerri: Another reminder before we wrap up this segment that we have our January Book Club, Digital Minimalism coming up. If you had the chance to read it over the holidays, fantastic. If not, you still have some time. We’re gonna break down this book in an upcoming episode later this month. So check out digital minimalism.

BOOKMARKS

Esther:  All right. Moving on to our bookmarks this week. Kerri, is there anything that we need to read, watch, listen?

Kerri: So my bookmark this week is Google Art and Culture. You may already know about this as a thing, but it’s a service, like a free Google website, like microsite, where they take you into art museums and different collections and artists and mediums around the world. And it’s really, really cool.

I think. A lot of things online of course, are just like mindless things, mindless scrolling, but it’s like, okay, maybe it would be cool to go explore the Van Gogh museum and go in and actually like look around. I feel like these are tools also that if you’re maybe in the younger generation, you may have know about these tools from like school.

But I think having just like a learner mindset for me going into this new year and also wanting to have more art exposure. This is just a cool to, cool tool that I came across that I’ve been wanting to just explore more. So Google Art and Culture will link it in the show notes. 

Esther: Awesome. 

Kerri:  How about you, Esther?

Esther: Well, to be honest, I’ve been taking a break from media this January, so it was kind of hard to come up with one. uh, remember I watched at the beginning of January, uh, this movie called, See How They Run? I don’t know if you’ve heard of that. 

It’s on Disney Plus. It’s a murder mystery set in, London in the fifties and it, it kind of was very meta because it was around, it was a murder that happened during a play that was an Agatha Christie play that was about murder. So like, the murder happened similarly and so it was like self-referential the whole time and like, the, the guy that died was like, a movie director that was gonna turn the play into a movie. 

So, I dunno, it was just a fun play and then, it’s directed by Tom George, which I hadn’t heard of him, but I think he’s relatively new. But it seemed like he had a lot of, took a lot of inspiration from. Wes Anderson cinematically. And so it was like very visually pleasing and like some of the frames would just hold and things would come and go through the frame. But yeah, really beautiful and would highly recommend that.

Kerri:  This is good to know. I had not heard of this because I don’t have Disney Plus, so maybe I need to get some sort of trial 

Esther: Log in. Yeah. 

Kerri: log in, sign up for a month because I also see that Saoirse Ronan’s in it, and I’m like, anything that she’s in, sign me up. She’s fantastic. so 

Esther: She is hilarious in it. She is so good.

Kerri: Okay. Immediately adding to my list,

Esther: Good.

OUTRO

Kerri: Thanks for joining us today. Be sure to check out flourish creative.co/podcast to see our show notes.

Esther: We’d love to hear from you. You can send us a note to hello@flourishcreative.co or tag us on Instagram. We are @FlourishCreativeCo. And if you haven’t done so yet, please leave us a review wherever you listen and share with a friend. This really helps new folks discover our podcast community. Thank you ahead of time.

Kerri: Until next time, live well and flourish.