Greetings and Salutations, 2025

Yvette greets the new year.

Like many people, I have created vision boards as one year ended and a new one began. For the past four years, I used a planner that prompted me to describe what I wanted the new year to look and feel like. When I initially transitioned to this method of establishing my vision, I started by simply writing my ideas in the bubbles (see image below) and then I later moved to adding stickers.

Side Note: I’m not sure why stickers can still be magical and fun way beyond childhood. I remember fondly my sticker books that housed puffy stickers, scratch and sniff stickers among others. I think some of the enjoyment I get from stickers, as a middle-aged adult, comes from a sense of play that stickers offer. (A quick search led me to a sticker company’s explanation of the 5 reasons why people love stickers, including that stickers help one communicate and spark emotion, sentimentality, and even creativity.)

But I digress, this isn’t a treatise on stickers. This is simply about how I started this new year.

A tiny glimpse at my vision for 2024

As 2024 was ending, I wasn’t quite sure what I was envisioning for 2025. I had considered continuing to use my vision board from 2024. (A copy of the pages from the planner adorned a wall in my office space.) My plans and goals were moving slower than I intended; but I did not want to craft something new. I wanted to continue on my current trajectory.

As I was wrestling with how to begin a new year, my neighbor invited me to a vision board party. She was hosting the gathering for the women in her family: nieces, sisters, sisters-in-law, and daughters. I had become family. Though I wasn’t sure about creating a new vision board, my past year of collaging left me wanting to craft at an appointed time, so I accepted the invitation. And when I arrived at her home, I knew inspiration would strike.

I flipped through magazines and pulled images that delighted my eye. I found a page of four Buddhist monks walking in a landscape of lush green and a tinted bright sky that offered peace. I wanted the entire image to ground my work. I saw mindfulness, beauty, connecting with nature, sitting in the sun, breathing deeply. Eventually, I ditched the idea of creating a vision board and walked towards creating an affirmation board.

I needed more positive language to help reroute my thinking when I found myself ruminating on negative thoughts that sometimes knocked me off course. In those tough moments, I needed to change my mental channel quicker. I needed to have words at the ready that were empowering.

I also wanted to be more mindful. To be quiet in the present moment. To slide into a quicker awareness when my thoughts were threatening my wellbeing. I sought to create a visual that would remind me daily of who I was, what I was I doing, and where I was going.

I wanted to create with my hands (play) and my mind (write). My new 2025 affirmation board would sit next to my 2024 vision board, as I continued creating and chasing that previous vision. There were no sharp edges (of failure or incompleteness) to the ending of one year and the beginning of another. There was a merging. There were new strategies and new thinking that would help me as I continued with what I had set forth a year before. Proceeding boldly onward would be #winning.