Episode 26: Checking In on 2025

Description: This week, Dr. Tina Boogren invites you to pause, reflect, and check in on your 2025 goals—whether that means recommitting, adjusting, or starting fresh. There’s no magic in January 1st—your fresh start can begin today!

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Transcription: Hi, and welcome to Self-Care for Educators. I am your host, Tina Boogren, and this is episode 26 for the season. And in this week's episode, what I want us to do is kind of pause and take stock of how we're doing. We're well into 2025 by now. Gosh, doesn't it kind of feel like we're 14 years into 2025 right now. Anyway, we are well into 2025 and I feel like it's a good time for us to just kind of pause for a second and loop back to our original intentions and goals and resolutions and all the good stuff that we had in mind for 2025. 

You know, what typically happens is we get super excited for the new year, and we set resolutions, and we create vision boards, and we do all the things. And then research shows that for New Year's resolutions in particular, by the second Friday of January, most of us are done, and by February, we're pretty much all done. And so, that's okay. If that's where you are, that's perfectly fine. If you kind of even forgot that you made a New Year's resolution, great. No problem. You are normal.  

What I want us to do is not feel bad about that. Instead, I want us to just check back in. Or perhaps we start fresh. Or we make some changes. I feel like the world feels a little different. Now than it did perhaps in January or in December when we were thinking ahead to our goals. And so it's a good idea, I think, personally, to just kind of  take stock. 

So there were a bunch of ideas that I threw around, in terms of ways that we could tackle 2025. So you might remember I challenged you to find Delight in 2025. That's one of the things that I do, is every day I look for delight and it's one of the things I like to post on social media and keep track of myself.

I also shared the idea of creating your own 25 for 2025 list inspired by Gretchen Rubin. I know some people love to do that where you create a list of things you wanna do or accomplish, or places you want to go visit- a gazillion ways you can do that. And it worked out pretty cool this year because you could make a bingo board out of it, um, put a free space right in the middle there.

Um, I also shared that I had created a vision board for myself. Um, some years I do this, some years I don't. This year it felt really good, so I did it all digitally. I found photos. I created some photos via AI and I found some images that really represented what I wanted to accomplish in 2025, how I wanted to feel in 2025. And that felt really good. Also, choosing words or phrases or guiding questions. I chose a couple this year. And I just want us to reflect on those things. Did we do those things? Check back in and see if they still feel good. Or maybe you want to make some changes. 

I looked at my vision board again and it actually reinspired me. I felt so on fire when I made that originally and then, you know, life happens and it gets cold and dark and ugh, get back into the mundane of everyday and everything that's going on in the world can feel a little overwhelming right now. And so when I revisited that vision board, it like put me back into the headspace that I was in when I originally created it. And that felt really good. And it reminded me of this path that I'm on, what I want to happen, how I want to feel. It was good. 

And on that vision board, I have my guiding phrases that I have for 2025 and I reconnected with those. I recommitted to finding delight in the daily grind, if you will. And it all felt good, so I didn't make any changes. I just kind of brought it back to the forefront of my mind.  I've been reading posts on different Facebook groups that I'm a part of and talking with different friends and a lot of people have said that they kind of scrapped what they originally had for 2025 and started fresh. And there's something that feels good about starting fresh.

Maybe you didn't do anything and now you're like, you know what? I'm going to start right now. And that's great too. There's a freshness about that. There's nothing that says there's anything magical that happens when you set an intention on January 1st versus March 18th or whatever it is. So maybe you, maybe you want to do that now where you feel like the year is underway. You've got your feet on the ground and you have a better kind of vision ahead of how you want the rest of the year to go. Seeing how, where you are in your school year and your personal life and the world. Maybe you just sit down and put pen to paper and do a little bit of brainstorming. Maybe you share with someone else. Maybe you create a vision board old school style. 

One of my favorite things to do, I did this with a girlfriend, gosh it's been a couple years ago, where we bought a whole bunch of magazines and sat in her living room and spread them all out and we had poster board and we like cut out images and words and created actual physical vision boards and it was so fun to do. Maybe that's a fun project that you can do in the midst of the cold winter. Um, for many of us. Some of you are not cold in the winter, but so many of us are. And that might feel like a fun project to tackle. Maybe you do it with your students. Maybe you do it with your family. Oh man, I have a dear friend of mine that does that with her family and I'd love the thought of that and maybe you didn't do it in January or in December in preparation, but you do it right now. Fantastic.  

I just like the idea of forgiving ourselves if we've gotten a little bit off track. Recognizing that's completely normal. There is nothing unusual about that. And then just kind of like standing up, shaking ourselves off, toss, toss -a  little nod to Wicked there- and regrouping a little bit. Just kind of grounding ourselves again in that idea of, for me, it always comes back to the core question of how do I want to feel? And then from there, determining, okay, so what does that look like? What is the, what are the actions that I take to get there? And just, that feels like a really good guiding question. So that's what I want you to play around with this week. Revisiting things you've already done, just wadding it up, lighting it on fire, being done with it completely and starting fresh or somewhere in between. 

And just think of this as the new, new year, if you will, and lean into that. If that feels good, I hope it does. As always, oh, Adrienne, you're the best. We're so grateful for you. We're also so grateful for Solution Tree and Marzano resources for this job I get to do, and for you, my badass self care squad, I'm going to wink as I say this. Happy New Year. I'm cheering so hard for you.