#50: In this episode I am walking you through my step by step process for closing out 2024 and preparing for a Spirit Led 2025.

From reflective journaling prompts and daily practices to creating an intentional vision board, I'm sharing everything that's helped me align my goals with God's plan.

Curious about how I end my year with purpose and step boldly into the new year? Tune in to hear my reflections, my journaling process and my word of the year for 2025 is _______. You'll have to tune in to find out.

Let's go to the show.

Key Take-aways:

• 00:08 - Preparing for a Spirit LED 2025
• 03:06 - Reflecting on the Past Year and Preparing for the New One
• 17:06 - Rejuvenate: Setting Intentions for 2025
• 26:22 - Reflecting on the Past Year and Preparing for the New One

Resources:

• Ep 39 - Journey Through Journaling: Connect with God in New Ways
• Ep 46 - Reflection and Renewal: Choosing My Word of the Year
• Ep 48 - Unlocking Your Purpose: A Sneak Peek into 2025
• Cultivate What Matters Powersheets
• Jennifer Camp - Gather Ministries
• My Instagram Reel on creating my journal cover
• New Years Reflection & Intention Journal by Stephanie May Wilson (also a digital version here)
• If you'd like my journaling pages I use, you can download January's here.

Heavenly Position Guidance Challenge:

Find a tool to help you with your own reflection and preparation.

Whether it is one of the guides that I list here or something you find on your own, spend some time reflecting on all that God has done in 2024 and allow Him room to speak to your heart and what He wants to do through you in 2025.

In a recent Jennifer Camp Flag message, she gave these questions that might be helpful for reflection:

• What are some of the things God taught me last year?
• What gifts did He give me?
• How did He use the hard things to grow me?
• What lessons does God want to continue teaching me in this new year?
• What truths does God want me to experience in a deeper way?
• What steps of faith is He calling me to take?
• What thought patterns is God leading you to let go of?

Now, I encourage you not to rush this process. God has some goodness to share with you. Take this time to bask in His presence and allow Him to speak over you.

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I'm Angie Robertson and you're listening to the Spirit Led Life podcast, episode 50.

From reflective journaling prompts and daily practices to creating an intentional vision board, I'm sharing everything that's helped me align my goals with God's plan.

You'll have to tune in to find out.

Let's go to the show.

Happy New Year.

I have missed you all so much and I'm glad to be back in your ears.

I'm even recording again, but still not in my studio.

I am actually in my car and recording in the garage.

The guest room is occupied at this moment that I'm recording this and so I didn't want to wait any longer.

I just went ahead and said, you know what?

Where is the next best place that has really good acoustics?

And that would be the car.

But either way it feels good to be back even if I'm in a car.

If you are new here, welcome to the Spirit Led Life Community.

I am Angie Robertson, a certified life and career coach, author and journaling advocate.

I'm here to share practical tools and spiritual encouragement to help you reflect, realign and co create your life with God.

Before we get into today's topic, I want to encourage you to follow, share and leave a comment on this podcast.

It would mean so much to me if you would take just a few moments.

Go into your podcast player and click the follow link if you haven't already.

You can also share this podcast with your friends or family who might be interested in this topic and who really doesn't want to learn how to live their lives a Little more Open to the Holy Spirit One other way you can support this podcast is by leaving a kind review.

When you like, share and leave a comment.

It helps others to find this podcast and we are building a community to learn how to live our lives by the Holy Spirit.

Thank you again for taking the time to share.

When I was creating this episode, I have to admit it took a bit to get into the groove of writing out the script.

I used the weeks we were off to really rest and it has been a minute since I've been in the writing mode and there is so much I want to share.

And yet when I went to start writing, I didn't know where to start.

I just kind of started writing and let the flow happen again.

And if you've been following me for a minute, you know that typically the first episode of every month is a reflection episode where I share what has supported me body, soul and spirit from the previous month.

For this episode, it will be a little different.

In fact, I was talking to a listener over the break and she asked me about my word of the year and if I had picked it.

We were actually sitting at a table together and I told her that I had and I looked at her face and she was waiting with anticipation of me telling her my word.

And then I told her she would have to wait until this episode to find out what it was.

And needless to say, she was not happy at all that she was going to have to wait.

But nonetheless, I am sharing all of this as an encouragement for you to really explore and co create your year with God.

So without further ado, let's dive in.

As you know, I am an avid journaler and I mean we did an entire month on the topic of journaling in October and I'll be sure to link to those episodes in the show notes in case you want to listen or have a refresher.

But for those of you listening, if you aren't a journaler, I want to encourage you to not skip this episode.

I am not going to spend the entire episode talking about journaling.

I'm just going to be sharing my process and I do this process in my journal.

You can do it in a Google Doc, you can do it in a spreadsheet.

However, whatever feels comfortable for you.

But I don't want you to skip this episode just because I'm using the word journaling.

I am confident God will share something with you provided you keep your soul open and remember your soul is your mind, your will and emotions.

For example, today is January 9th when this episode releases, so I looked in my past journals for any entries on January 9th.

Doing this process helps me to see how I've grown as a person, what God has been doing in my life, where I was in my season of life, and if there are any patterns I tend to be stuck in.

Everything in the worst case scenario list didn't even happen and almost everything, at least everything that affected me in the best case scenario list did happen.

I have never experienced anything like this before because I've never done a best case scenario list.

I've always only ever done a worst case scenario list.

Now, for someone who's an enneagram6, which I've mentioned in many podcasts, that our superpower is to think worst case scenario.

And it can be a good thing and it can be a bad thing.

It can help us to anticipate things and avoid pitfalls.

But it can also be a bad thing in that we focus on the worst case most of the time.

So it was super important for me to see this list.

It really shifted something in my brain and allowed me to trust God at a whole new level.

And if I hadn't done that reflection, I would have missed that.

So if you're an enneagram6 listening, I encourage you to try this exercise.

If you're faced with a decision, write out your worst case scenario, but also write out your best case scenario list.

I've heard all the advice about how statistics show that most of what we worry about doesn't come true, but until I saw this list for myself, it didn't seem possible.

This is just one of the huge benefits of journaling and reflecting on past journal entries.

Not only does it allow me to keep a record of how God is moving in my life, it also provides a space to get all the crap out of my head.

Again, as a six, we're in the head triad.

We are overthinkers to the point where we exhaust ourselves with overthinking.

It feels like we've actually done the very thing that we've been thinking about even though we didn't take a single action.

Now I'm not going to go on a crusade of why you should journal.

I'm bringing all of this up so you understand my process of how I close my year and prepare for the new year.

Journaling is a huge part of this process.

Again, you can hear my journaling process in depth in the episodes from October which I'll link to in the show notes.

For me, I do a new journal entry every year.

I have a digital journal so this is an easier process for me.

You could do the same with a paper journal, although for me it feels cleaner in digital format because I have no blank pages in my journal.

I build pages as I write, so once my journal is done, it's done.

To finish my journal, though, I typically use some sort of end of year reflection guide.

I've mentioned in the past that I use the powersheets from Cultivate what Matters and I might incorporate other items I've learned about over the years, but the power Sheets are my main guide.

I'll link to a few resources along with the powersheets in the show notes, but always consult the Holy Spirit about how he wants you to process and plan for the year.

There might be other tools that he wants you to use.

There are so many and really find one that resonates with you.

I will also say don't let it not being a Christian resource stop you from using it.

First of all, you're co creating with God so the Holy Spirit will show you what he wants you to use and you can like leave the rest I remember I was wanting to design the website for the virtual assistant school and I was kind of stuck.

So I was praying and talking to God about it and the Holy Spirit reminded me of a book that I had bought several years ago that was in my Kindle that I hadn't even revisited and it wasn't a faith based book.

But he had me go to that book and he told me there was some chapters in there on website design and sure enough they were and he told me to focus on those and then just discard the rest.

Don't even think about looking at the rest of the book, just focus on those chapters.

It was such an interesting experience and it got me unstuck and I actually designed the website and launched it and I did it within a short amount of time and it resonated with people because they signed up and I had no marketing that I was doing.

So Holy Spirit knows what he's doing and I continue to use that same process to this day.

Now I love the end of the year so much and so many people create guides for the end of the year, and I have tried so many of them, and I may revisit some the next year or I may not.

I just kind of build what works for me and whatever season I'm in.

So let's look at how I end the year and look forward to the new.

Now, I'm not going to share every single thing I wrote.

And I talk a lot about the body, soul and spirit and how we're made up of three parts, just like God is a triune God and He made us in his image.

I then go month by month and answer some questions to reflect what was good and not so good for the month.

I love and hate this exercise all at the same time.

I love it because I get to capture the entire year in a synopsis, if you will.

But I hate it because I tend to get bogged down going through my journal entries.

So I kind of used that to make it a little bit easier to see what I was being grateful for.

And that kind of helped me to see what was going on that month.

Otherwise, I was finding that as I was going through the entire month's worth of entries, I was getting.

It was getting a little crazy for me because I was reading so much and trying to remember what I wanted to capture.

So kind of going through those gratitude lists really shortened that for me.

Now, after I complete this, it is now time to write what my word of the year was and how true was it for my life.

I talked about this in episode 48, which I'll link to in the show notes.

And like I just said, my word for the year was change from celebrate to pivot.

I'm not going to rehash all of why I made that change and all that.

You can listen to that episode.

It'll go into more detail about it.

I then do some reflection exercises like how have I evolved in the last 12 months?

What did I let go of?

The very first exercise is writing out my word of the year.

And there are so many processes to finding this.

I take about four to five days to go through this process to make sure this is my word of the year.

And last year, I didn't do this.

I just went with the first word.

I kind of went with a word that seemed obvious and like, okay, we're gonna.

So that would be the word.

I didn't go through my process, and I paid for it.

When I realized that celebrate was not the word and that pivot was my word, then I kind of went through this process and took a little more time to make sure.

Needless to say, I have learned my lesson to not rush the process.

In fact, if nothing were to come to me during this period, I would just continue to wait.

I mean, after all, it's the word of the year, so why rush it?

It's going to be for the whole year.

Now, I will say, and I mentioned this in that episode 48.

I'll just reiterate it here, that some people don't do a word for the year.

Some people do a word for each month of the year.

Some people do a word for the quarter.

Some people do a word for half of the year, and then pick another one at the midpoint, whatever is comfortable for you.

That's what I recommend you do.

And again, consult the Holy Spirit about it.

For me, I pick a word for the entire year.

So I'm not going to rush it because it's going to be for the entire year, and I'm going to be living into it.

So I don't want to want that to be a rushed process.

In order to pick my word for the year, the first thing I do is a meditation.

And it's just an opportunity for me to breathe and stop for A moment to get out of my head.

It's kind of like if you've been on a journaling with Jesus, gathering with me.

It's like the meditation we do at the beginning to kind of ground ourselves and be present and bring ourselves present into the moment so that we can start to hear from God.

So it's the same thing with this meditation exercise.

I do the same situation.

So when I did the meditation for this year's Word, it was in fact, during this meditation that the Word came to me.

And I was kind of surprised by it.

And it wasn't at all what I was expecting.

It wasn't a word that I would have even thought about.

Like, it wasn't an obvious word or anything that I was even considering for the year.

And even though I felt really strongly about the Word, I still went through the entire process just to be sure, because I didn't want to repeat what I did last year.

Then when I got that list of kind of words that were possibilities, I looked up their definitions, I looked up alternative words to them, whatever might have a similar meaning.

I then go through the list of words and circle words that really kind of stood out to me and really spoke to me the most.

And then I go through another series of questions.

So it is a process, and patience is required.

And I sat with my Word for some time, even though I got that word in the first step of the meditation, I sat with it, I added it to my list, I looked up the definition, and I continued to sit with it throughout the whole process before declaring that it was my word, because I really wanted to make sure that I gave it due diligence.

So what is my word for the year?

The word God has given me is rejuvenate.

And the definition is having been given new energy or vigor, revitalized.

Your promise revives me.

It comforts me in all my troubles.

After a year of pivoting, I can say this word super excites me.

I have been in a challenging season for the last five years with lots of growth and I'm excited to have a new energy and move into the next season.

God has and I'm not going to lie, I have some intrepidations of this word as well.

I mean, my six mind goes to what am I going to need this new energy for?

And the verse he gave me says comforts me in all my troubles, like hello, I'm going to lean into the new energy and remind myself while I can conjure up as many worst case scenarios as possible, God has my best case scenario in his hands.

I write in certain categories like my body, soul and spirit and the three parts of each.

And if you know, you know, I go through these areas and answer a series of questions.

This is my favorite exercise and there were some areas I wanted to skip, but I'm glad that I kind of pushed through.

Okay, so let's recap.

I have picked my word of the year.

So the final exercise that I do is to write a future letter to myself.

This is how I'm feeling and thinking and and what has happened.

So keep listening.

Because I thought it was really.

And I went back and read it and I was kind of taken aback by it.

So here's what I wrote.

You made it to the end of the year and you celebrated all the things you lived fully and big.

You stepped into another zone of yourself you knew was possible but wasn't sure it would happen to you.

Guess what?

It did.

That thing.

Those arrows you listened to and followed were true.

It was and is possible.

Anything is possible.

The other shoe didn't drop.

You lived loud and large.

You loved fiercely.

Congratulations.

And when I reflect back on this, I can't believe how true this was.

But Holy Spirit knew and that's what he wrote through me.

I love doing these exercises because it isn't really goal setting, it is really creating an intention for how I want to co create with God in the new year.

And I have done goals in the past and sometimes I hit them and most of the time I don't.

And what I have found that works for me is focusing on how I can experience God more, walk in his, love more, share his love more, and live more by the Holy Spirit than my flesh.

Now, once I've completed this entire process, now the fun creative part comes in.

It's time to create a vision board which will be the background screen on my computer, my lock screen on my iPhone and iPad.

And I use Canva to create my vision board and I try to use no more than eight photos to represent my intentions for the year.

And I also use this vision board as the COVID for my journal for the New year as well.

I also add my Word of the Year to the vision board so it's on there as well as the scripture that God's given me as well.

This is by far my favorite part of the whole entire process.

But I can't get here unless I had taken the other steps.

Because how would I know what are my intentions unless I go through the work of doing the reflection and doing the setting the intentions of what you know, really praying and asking Holy Spirit and involving God and just co creating with Him.

So I'll be sure to post a photo of Vision Board in the newsletter and I also have an Instagram reel that I'll link to in the show notes that I share how I create my journal cover for in Canva for GoodNotes I use the GoodNotes app for my journal.

So if you're interested in that, I'll share that in the Show Notes.

Now if you want to see my vision board in the weekly email and you're not on the list, then I want to take this time to invite you to be a part of the Spirit led Life community by joining the mailing list.

If you go to spiritledlifepodcast.com you will see the subscriber form down towards the bottom.

I'd love for you to fill that out and join the list.

You'll be notified when new episodes release and I share things in those emails that I don't share anywhere else, so be sure to sign up@spiritledlifepodcast.com and you'll be added to the list.

You won't miss another episode.

And now you are a part of the community.

My last kind of step in finishing all of this out.

I used to just have blank pages and journal, but now that I have more of these kind of prepared pages, it helps me to actually journal daily and answer questions and I'm more consistent.

And so I kind of change things around.

What the weather was going to be like for the day, if I worked out how much I slept, if I woke up at 3am because that's a common thing when you're going through menopause.

I then did five Gratitudes and a Prayer list.

And then I also included some open pages for free journaling.

I'm starting with how I'm feeling that morning.

Like when I wake up, what do I feel like?

Do I have a headache?

Do I feel fatigued?

Do I feel rested?

Anything.

Just list out how I'm feeling.

Then I have five things that I'm grateful for.

What lies am I believing that day and what truths to replace it?

My mood for the morning.

And I select a word.

I have like a list of words and I just select.

And I also have a place where I can write in a word.

And then finally, how did I walk in the fruit of the spirit the day before?

And I'm also including free journaling pages as well because I like to do that as well.

Now, if you'd like to use this template, I'll be sure to link to it again in the show notes for a way that you can download it and use it.

And also if you're on the newsletter list, you'll also get that in there as well.

I can say that now that I'm into the new year and I'm using my new journal and my New journaling pages.

The only thing I might tweak is how I walk in the fruit of the Spirit section.

I list out all the fruits of the spirit and then I have like a little graph, like a little bar next to it.

And I color in the bar and I kind of not.

It's not really flowing and it's not really jiving with me.

So I'm going to finish out January and see if I, I've already created all my January pages because I only create pages for the month.

I don't create the whole entire year in case I want to make tweaks like this.

So I'm going to finish out.

Because I've already created the January pages.

I'm going to go ahead and finish it out, see how that process goes.

And so far already I, I, I'm kind of avoiding that section now.

I started out the first day of the year.

I filled it in the second day.

I said, you know, this isn't flowing the third day like it's, I've kind of been avoiding it.

So I, I have a feeling that I'm either going to, I'm going to change that.

I don't know how yet, but I'm kind of sitting with it to see how do I want.

Because one of my goals for this year is to walk in the fruit of the spirit more and to really recognize when I'm not walking in the fruit of the spirit.

And so I'm trying to find a process to capture that and really alert myself to when I'm not.

So stay tuned.

We'll see how that goes.

So that is it.

This is my process for ending the year and preparing for the new year.

It is full of reflection and intention.

I really love the end of the year because I know it will be time for me to reflect.

And I don't always do the same process.

Every year.

I might find another guidebook to use as I've used several in the past.

So I'll check back in later in the year and maybe we can co create something together.

Because I'd love to hear if you do this process and what your process is like.

Like what is supporting you to reflect on the past year and set your intention for the next year.

In a recent Jennifer Camp Flag message, she gave these questions that might be helpful for reflection, and again, these will be in the show notes as well.

What are some of the things God taught me last year?

What gifts did he give me?

How did he use the hard things to grow me?

What lessons do you want to continue teaching me in this new year?

What truths do you want me to experience in a deeper way?

What steps of faith are you calling me to take?

What thought patterns are you leading me to let go of?

Now, I encourage you not to rush this process.

God has some goodness to share with you.

Take this time to bask in his presence and allow him to speak over you.

And also we're going to be looking at the motivational gifts, how God designed you and the gifts that he actually placed in you to use.

And you've had those gifts all your life.

So I'm really super excited to tap into those and start to release those episodes with you.

So stay tuned.

You're really going to start to understand how God designed you and you're going to be drawn closer into a relationship with Him.

So as I close, I will leave you with my future letter to myself exercise that I mentioned earlier.

So it'll be really cool to see.

It was a full year, a restorative year.

You stayed consistent and steady.

You loved well and received love well.

You experienced a new thing where you were dry.

God filled you anew.

You stepped into another layer of the unknown and surrendered.

You trusted more and let go of logic.

You walked in the realm of abundance.

You're doing the thing.

You're in a new season, a new soil grounded in love.

To God be the glory.

Thank you for joining me on today's episode.

This episode was produced, recorded and edited by me, Angie Robertson.

I look forward to joining you each Thursday for a new episode as we explore together how to have a spirit led life.