✨ 2025 Aspirations & Vision Board ✨
no dream is too big!
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I don’t think I’ve ever felt more like a year is a complete blank slate than I do this year. I’ll get into this more in my next Unemployment Update, but losing my job has really opened up a lot of space for me. It’s afforded me the opportunity to get really clear about what I want my life to look like and for once it doesn’t feel like I’m fighting against the waves, but instead I’m paddling with the current.
Looking back at the goals I set for last year, I was disappointed but not surprised to see that while I thought about these things a lot during the last year, I didn’t particularly devote myself to any of them.
And as much as I hate a SMART goal (sometimes I just want to have a dream without a plan, okay?!) I can see how adding some parameters might have been helpful here, since a lot of my goals were pretty vague.
My word of the year last year was also “nourish” which I don’t feel as though I embraced very much.
Alas, it is a New Year! And this year I’m doing things the same, but different.
Instead of goals I’m setting ✨aspirations✨. A year is a long time! Who knows if the things I think I want in January will still be relevant by December? Plus “aspirations” makes it feel more like if I accomplish these things - great! If I don’t, well, it was aspirational anyway.
Without further ado, here are my 2025 Aspirations, in no particular order:
2025 Aspirations:
Grow this Substack. Without a job I’m finding myself with a lot of time and mental capacity to spend writing. It’s my goal to double my subscribers this year and have half of them be paid subscribers. This is a comically easy goal to achieve since these are very small numbers we are working with here.
Find a new job (or some other way to get income). This is another one I’ll talk about more in an Unemployment Update, but obviously I’m job hunting. Unfortunately we are not independently wealthy so I can’t just bop along like this forever. However, I am not attached to finding another full-time position and I’m open to more creative solutions for making money. Maybe not going full Margot’s Got Money Troubles or @blueeyedkaylajade (I don’t think that life would be very lucrative for me, tbh) but something more like freelancing or cobbling together some contract roles.
Finish a draft of a novel. Last year I had “devote more time to writing” as a goal and that’s just too vague. I have a couple WIPs and I’d like to finish at least one of them this year. I’ve been setting a very small and achievable goal of writing at least 200 words every day, and so far I’ve stuck to that. I’ll probably break that down into a yearly word count goal, because I’m sure there will be days I miss and days I go over, but for right now it’s working.
Spend more time in/at the ocean. I mean, it’s RIGHT THERE. And I love it! There’s no reason why I shouldn’t visit it more often. Dragged Henry to the beach on Sunday in the frigid weather and he wasn’t thrilled but I was happy to get a little salt air in my life. It really does do wonders.
Spend less time on my phone. This is a big one. I KNOW I spend way too much time on my phone. I definitely use it as a way to disassociate and zone out but I hate thinking of how often I have my phone in my face when my kids are around or how much time I waste scrolling. I have some ideas how to combat this and I’ll probably talk about this more later.
Finally clean and declutter the whole house?? Last year my goal was to decrease all our belongings by 50% which was…cute. If anything we increased the amount of stuff in our house. It’s just so hard when you have kids and the kids have a grandmother who never says no to them. And when those kids are also absolute slobs. The good news is, my current job is cleaning the house. I have a goal to do a donation drop off weekly and seeing as we will be on a strict budget for the foreseeable future I’m hopeful less stuff will be coming into the house.
Spend more time outside. During most of the summer and especially the fall, I actually feel like I did a really good job being outside, because it’s easy to get outside when the weather is nice. The kids like to play outside and I wold post up in an Adirondack chair with a book and be happy as a clam. It’s harder in the scorching heat or freezing cold, but I’ve been doing it! It has been SO COLD here this week, but I’ve gotten outside every day. It’s just been to walk to and from the bus stop with Julia, but still. It counts!
Make meditation, manifestation, and journaling a regular practice. These are kind of three different things but I’m lumping them together as I usually do them at the same time. I’m currently doing Gabby Bernstein’s 21 Day Manifestation Challenge and while it’s not new content for me, it’s been nice to have a daily check in with myself. It’s definitely helped during this time of uncertainty with my life to be able to set aside time to dream and have a positive mindset. And journaling really helps me clear out the brain clutter. (Speaking of journaling, have you checked out Becca’s recent post about journaling? It’s a good one and I need to start my own “junk journal”!).
2025 Vision Board
These are just fun to make and you can set it as your desktop or phone background so you are seeing the things you want to bring into your life every day. I used images from Pinterest (search for whatever you want + “aesthetic”) and plopped them into a template in Canva.
“Amazing” is in there as my word of the year since that’s how I want to focus on feeling. I’ve got some manifestation things in there, writing and journaling, reading, spending time with the kids, potentially a new house?? We are not doing limiting beliefs this year! I can go from unemployed to a new house! And can’t forget the ocean. I’d like to spend more time in whatever clear, turquoise waters those are so here’s hoping 2025 whisks me off on a nice vacation, too. No dream is too big!!
Now it’s your turn - I love hearing what other people are ✨aspiring✨ to for 2025. Add yours in the comments!
Gahhhh I love everything about this! I made a vision board for the first time in years and I think it's helping! Also I am doing the 21-day Gabby challenge with my friend Ali and while not new it's been refreshing to remind myself of how to achieve these goals I set! I'm a big fan of decluttering - we used to be a VERY cluttered people and now I try to stay vigilant about what we're bringing in because it adds up. Any time I go to tuck something into a drawer / closet I think "Wait....do I need this???". Not that it always helps but it keeps me more mindful. Lastly I laughed so much at the line "sometimes I just want to have a dream without a plan, okay?!" because SAME! I am a PM by trade but I'm also a little woo-woo and sometimes I just want to daydream about the "what if" versus diagram my plan to death. I hope you have a wonderful 2025 and I can't wait to keep reading!
XO
*Sam