So both my private mentoring groups and I do an exercise each year to set us off in a strong direction.

I call is Setting Your Intentions.

We did this exercise together this week and everyone – to a woman – surprised herself and took a lot from it to use as she set forth into 2025.

Everywhere you read you’ll be reading about goal-setting and New Year’s Resolutions and blah blah.  

Not a criticism just an observation that these words are everywhere and a lot of the time people drown them out as just New Year’s Noise…

• If you don’t really know where you’re heading and what you want, how do you set goals and then break them down into consistent actions?
• If you keep ‘resolving’ the same thing each year without colour and clarity then its a short lived exercise for you.  
• What if you Set Your 2025 Indentations instead?

The essence is that you take yourself to 31st December 2025 and sit quietly – with a notebook and no distractions – and look back over the year you’ve had – as if it’s already happened.

Now bear with me!  This can sound a bit woo-woo and out there but here’s the thing, it works.  

It sets you on a path to be able to set goals and ‘resolve’ when you’ve considered and already ‘lived’ what’s going to happen.  What your intentions are.

When you’ve Set Your Intentions this is how your internal SatNav can guide you.  It knows where you’re heading and, most importantly, where you’re starting!

The only ‘Warning’ I can offer you is this.

>> Stay loose to the form, the when, the how your Intention presents its self to you.

Try not to be too fixed…here’s an example for you <<

I set my intentions in early in 2021 that we’d one day have a blonde, hairy Lurcher.  

We’d always had smooth Lurchers.  When we lost dear Pharaoh, one of our skinny Saluki Lurchers in mid January 2021, something happened which tested me and is the lesson for us both.

I belonged to a private Facebook Group all focussed on hairy lurchers!

All I’d said on this group was that we’d had to let Pharaoh go and put a photo of him.

A kind woman got in touch via private message from the group with, at the time 19K members. 

She said her Lurcher was having pups in about a month.  She could see from my posts how much we loved our hounds and the life they had with us.  Would we like to home one of them…

Looking at her photos, the mum was blonde, hairy Lurcher with such a lovely life…

I said thanks but no thanks. 

Despite my Intentions, 

• I didn’t want a puppy.  
• Didn’t know who she was AND
• it just felt too much too soon…

So, Snowy and I chatted and after 2 days I/we changed my mind.

Asking her if I could still be considered and if there was a male pup, we’d love to offer him a home.

And that’s how Douglas Puppyhound arrived with us in March that year.

Or in someone else’s words…again…

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And in other news…

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We’ve already had some twists and turns in our 2025 with friends being unwell and me taking longer to get stronger.  Patience, kindness and gratitude are on my menu!