The truth about truth telling

As I mentioned last week, for several years now, I've been kicking off my year with a word or a theme that will drive me forward.

The first couple of years of this practice, I would choose a word, then get swept back into the reactive way I was living my life. So by the time December rolled around, I completely forgot my word.

In the past few years I’ve found my word in a new way. I get quiet. I don’t settle on one too quickly. I check in with my body. And I only set my intention when it feels right from within. This simple shift amped the power all the way up on this practice.

My 2023 theme was truth telling. If you’ve been with me for a while, you may remember me announcing it to every corner of the earth last January.

I believed it to be the intention and driver that would glue my butt into a seat to write my story. The book…my book that seems to be rolling around in my head instead of on the page.

In Q1, I talked to book coaches. I wrote outlines. I added blocks of time into my calendar for writing. And I did not write. I didn’t want to.

I wanted to rest. Think. Play in my business and in my life.

I told myself the truth about what I wanted and didn’t want and I felt a wave of freedom. I knew I was onto something. I wondered where else I could be truth telling.

I spent time thinking about the types of clients and companies that feel most energizing for me.

I said no to the people and the work that no longer felt like a fit.

I asked for a rate I know I’m worth. And I accepted not a penny less.

Again, the freedom flooded my body and I felt alive.

So alive that I began to tell myself and others the truth about my relationship to my body. I used to say I was restricting my food to tiny portions and going without gluten for 11 years for my health and my longevity.

But it was really to be thin.

A lifelong ache rooted in childhood trauma and a culture that not only validates this self-harm, but requires it for acceptance and “ok’ness.”

But the truth.

The truth was that I was hungry and rigid and I was teaching my daughters this way of being.  

The truth was my body, my whole worthy-of-all-the-love being was done with that.

The truth was that at 49 on my way to 50, with a full life of people who love me and a career supporting women to be their fullest, truest selves – there can only be truth telling.

And so while I wasn’t writing in 2023, I was healing and advocating and connecting and playing with all the extra time that I had now that I wasn’t counting and tracking and planning my completely new life that starts tomorrow.

My body knew this is what it desired last January. It took me until April to figure it out and I’ve been in a healing place ever since.

It’s a work in progress that I will continue in 2024 with a new word that came to me while lying still on a yoga mat.

IMAGINE.

I will sit with clients to imagine their wild and energizing new paths.

I will imagine new areas to deepen within my business and new ways to show up for my community.

I will imagine the words of compassion and love and acceptance I needed to hear as a child, how they would have sounded in all of those memories instead of the ones that made me think my body was a problem to fix.

Because that’s what happens when you tell the truth. You realize the pain was real. That you deserved more and better and when you imagine, there are still some ways you can have it.

I’d love to hear the themes and anti-resolutions you’ve chosen for your 2024.