by Emma Viglucci
This is about the toughest week of the year… This is when we have Blue Monday, supposedly the saddest day of the year. Bills come in from the holidays, attempts at new habits start falling to the wayside, hibernation is knocking on our door, and things just feel heavy. It’s rough to get going on creating our Best Year Yet… What’s needed is an influx of energy to set us on the right path. The best way to do that is by Embracing Self-Care and Resilience…
Self-Care is one of the 4 Aspects of Self-Love we are working on to help us start the New Year right…
Self-Honoring and Being
Self-Management and Flow
Self-Care and Resilience
Self-Connection and Radiance
Self-Care is about taking good care of ourselves- with having a wholistic self-care practice that generates vitality, health and wellbeing.
There are a lot of definitions and information out there about how to do a Self-Care Practice. My Self-Care Practice is on steroids and became the Self-Love Practice we’ve been working on… LOL
I like to look at Self-Care as solely the activities that nourish and take care of our body and wellbeing: Sleep, exercise, nutrition/supplementation/hydration, grooming/hygiene and relaxation/mindfulness.
When we give these activities the proper attention, we are taking care of our “meat suit”, our human vehicle, so that it allows us to have a beautiful, full and long human experience…
When we take proper care of ourselves, we slowdown the aging process, we increase our health, vitality, longevity and ability to truly enjoy our life. Who wants to get to an advanced age and be decrepit? Or, worse be decrepit now or have a short-lived life?
Having a rich Self-Care Practice allows us to have boundless energy and larger bandwidth, be healthy and fit, look and feel amazing, have more focus and stamina, and the ability for higher performance in all areas of our life.
A rich Self-Care Practice gives us the ability to feel happy and joyous more consistently, to better self-regulate and to be less triggerable… It helps with our wellbeing and resilience…
Watch the video for Tactics to uplevel the 5 Pillars of your Self-Care Practice… Enjoy!
MONTHLY THEME GUIDE: Identifying Core Values
APPLICATION: Some see self-care as a mysterious concept and have the mindset that only privileged or lazy people can afford it. They might consider it a luxury or a waste of time to do things to take care of themselves… Or, they truly believe they don’t have the resources for it… If this is you, I challenge you to consider that you can’t afford not to invest in taking care of yourself…
You don’t have to invest a tremendous amount of resources doing self-care tactics, you just need to make targeted investments to get the results you want.
STEP 1 – Decide what is it you want in terms of your fitness, health, and wellness. How are you doing in these areas and how would you like them to be, how would you like to feel?
Take stock of your energy level, mood, health, fitness, and appearance. What can use some upleveling?
STEP 2 – Review the Pillars below and choose one to focus on that will address the area you want to target and that will give you the most immediate results.
Depending on your current state and lifestyle, you might need to start with the basics, or you might want more advanced and nuanced strategies.
I provide a range of ideas here to get you going, feel free to do additional research to take charge of the Pillar you identify as your current focus.
Pillar 1 – Sleep: Research shows that most people are sleep deprived. When sleep is the thing that detoxes and cleans, repairs and heals, and recharges us. We tend to short-change ourselves when it comes to sleep.
At the end of the day, it’s not really about the amount of sleep but the quality of sleep you get that allows you to go through all the sleep cycles several times a night to get the most benefit from your sleep.
The key is to have good Sleep Hygiene:
💤 Reverse engineer what time you want to get up in the morning, and back up to what time you’d need to go to bed to get up at that time while giving you an average of 7 hours of sleep.
💤 Start shifting gears for sleep two hours before your bedtime – no food, drinks, blue light
💤 Start your night routine at least 30 min before you want to be asleep – account for all the things you want to do before you fall asleep…
Like: Prepping for the next day, doing your skin care routine, activating your soothing bedroom environment, gratitude journaling, connecting with your partner, reading
💤 Commit to lights out and shutting down by your sleep time
💤 Set your alarm to wake you up at the time your chose and turn off snooze, get up when your alarm goes off
Pillar 2 – Exercise: You might be doing everything right, but if you are not exercising you won’t achieve your fitness, health and wellness goals… Which are needed to support the rest of the goals in our life and to truly live a well-lived life…
There are tons of myths about exercise, and exercising as we used to understand exercising is more harmful than good. For example, spending hours doing cardio to lose weight has proven to be an ineffective tactic (you lose muscle mass which slows down your metabolism)…
What seems to be better supported is a combination of:
🏃♀️ High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT)
🏋️♀️ Resistance Training
🧘♀️ Flexibility Training
You can create a basic workout routine that incorporates all 3 per workout session or on rotation that makes sense for your life and that is enjoyable for you.
And you can choose what types of activities to do for each. You can put in as much or a little into this as you wish as long as you cover your basics.
*Consult your doctor if you have any medical conditions.
Pillar 3 – Nutrition, Supplementation and Hydration: The key here is to understand your goal and to feed yourself accordingly in a nutritious and healthy manner… There are so many ways of eating and so many different diet protocols and they all contradict each other- your head can explode trying to figure out how to eat…
My suggestion is that if you are just now beginning to take charge of your consumption that you start small and with the basics:
🤩Reduce your caloric intake- consume calories in relation to how you spend calories, reduce to a reasonable intake that still provides you with enough energy and nutrition (for women an average of 1500 cal/day does the trick but do your own research to match your situation)
🥙Eat cleaner- just stop eating all the processed foods and junk, and greatly reduce your alcohol consumption!
🥗Step it up to even cleaner eating- reduce any inflammatory foods you recognize your body doesn’t like (bloat, pimples, constipation, foggy brain, etc.)- like gluten, dairy, soy, eggs, peanuts/other nuts, corn, cruciferous vegetables, beans, nightshade vegetables, sweeteners, onion/garlic, caffeine (increases cortisol levels!).
📞Consult a nutritionist or functional doctor– get specific guidance if you are lost, confused or need additional support for creating a plan that works for you and your body… And for proper supplementation.
💧Hydrate, hydrate, hydrate- Shoot for 32 to 64 onz (1 to 2 liters) of water per day and you can step it up as you desire… I’ve been using this bottle to give me a visual of how I’m doing…
*Consult your doctor if you have any medical conditions.
Pillar 4 – Grooming and Hygiene: This is totally a personal choice of course. But I have it here as part of taking care of our body. A groomed body looks better, is more youthful and lasts longer…
👁Taking care of our skin, hair, teeth, eyes (hydrating with eyedrops helps maintain good vision!), etc. goes a long way.
💄Minding our products is super important as we try to become radiant from the inside out and minimize the toxins we put in our bodies…
🧹Adding a detoxing routine is a great practice – like body rolling, face rolling and skin brushing.
Pillar 5 – Relaxation and Mindfulness: Can you believe that we forget to breathe? LOL
We might shallow-breath to get air in for survival, but in general we don’t breathe well. We don’t get enough clean air circulating through our body.
Additionally, we don’t stop to smell the roses. We are always on go mode or mindlessly taking a break or so called relaxing.
We don’t properly restore, recharge and rejuvenate.
Our daily routine needs to include practices for being present and grounded, intentional breaks, and restorative activities like:
• Meditation
• Visualization
• Breath Work
• Taking a break from our computer and other devices
• Stretching
• Connection calls
• Pursuing an interest or hobby
Regardless of where you are with your Self-Care Practice, it’s always nice to shake things up, spruce them up and uplevel them. Focus on the Pillar that makes the most sense for you to address first, then tackle the rest as you make progress.
Don’t take all this on at once. It can be very overwhelming to make so many changes at once, and you won’t be able to fully integrate them into your life if you start slipping up (which you will if you do too much at once).
Once you selected your Pillar, do the research, set up the routines, set up the supportive environments, put all the things in place to help you work your Pillar.
Have fun with this. This is a lifelong pursuit. Enjoy the process!
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
by Emma Viglucci
Are you feeling like you are moving slow getting the New Year and your Best Year Yet started? The first couple of weeks of the year are always rough. Either we overcommit to new stuff to create our new life, or we just can’t seem to get it together to get moving… Either way we are not properly approaching the changes we want to make to get the results we want… But there is a better way and that’s Embracing Self-Management and Flow…
Self-Management is one of the 4 Aspects of Self-Love:
Self-Honoring and Being
Self-Management and Flow
Self-Care and Resilience
Self-Connection and Radiance
Self-Management has to do with taking full responsibility for ourselves- with learning how to properly manage ourselves and strive for excellence and high performance. It is about flowing through our days creating our Best Life…
Embracing Self-Management in our Self-Love Practice allows us to truly have our own back and support ourselves in our Journey…
Self-Management is a multifaceted endeavor, it includes managing our thoughts, feelings, behaviors, energy, time, space, and everything else…
For the purpose of our Self-Love Practice, I’m honing-in on how we set up and go about our days to effortlessly achieve our goals, experience joy and fully live our life.
Watch the video for 5 Tactics for managing yourself… Enjoy!
MONTHLY THEME GUIDE: Identifying Core Values
APPLICATION: Self-Management is a super skill. When we manage ourselves well, we are unstoppable! Here are tactics to help you easily start better managing yourself for more high-performance, productivity, and flow… Let your Core Values guide you as you work through this exercise.
Set some time aside to Design the Life You Want to Live…
🌟Time Mapping – Decide how you want your weeks to flow… Design your Ideal Week. Designate days with themes and part of the days for different Life Areas. For example:
–You can have writing or content creation days, client days, meeting days, admin days and such.
–You can have Self-Love/Me Time, Couple Time, Family Time, Chores Time, you get my drift.
This guides where you add your commitments in your calendar, where you focus your attention and what you work on, and helps you manage how you use your time, energy, and bandwidth… This is a one-time exercise that you tweak as you see fit.
🌟Time Blocking – Now, within your Time Map, you get to drill-in how you use any given time. You designate time chunks for tasks and commitments. This is a weekly task where you plop in what you want to work on and accomplish into specific times of your week.
Be sure to judiciously block time including buffer time and transition time. We want to allow for context shifting and build in grace for when things don’t work out as planned. This ensures more flow and ease in your days…
–This is a great activity to do on Friday before the closedown for the day, so you are ready for the next week and avoid the Sunday Scaries (AKA Sundaynitis in my home). Or, a Saturday Morning Reset activity, or a Sunday Afternoon Reset activity. Whatever makes sense for your life.
Decide when you’ll do your weekly Reset with Time Blocking. Add it to your calendar as a recurring event…
🌟Routines – This is my favorite. When we create rich routines, we can make any change we desire in our life. We don’t change in a vacuum. Creating change is very challenging and routines provide the context where the change can happen. It reduces friction, creates support and motivation. The things you are trying to do happen automatically without you having to white-knuckle your way.
–Choose a time of day where you and your family experience the most stress, where most conflict happens, where everyone ends up crying, yelling or both, or where you’d like to add more richness for a better life… This usually includes mornings, evenings, and bedtime, and other transition times like Friday evening, Sunday evening, before and after vacations or trips, and such.
–And, in terms of adding richness: Self-Care/Love Routine, Bedtime Routine, Skin Care Routine, Food Prep, Family Night, Couple Time, Date Your Partner, etc.
–Select your time by activity to improve, richness to integrate, most stressful to eliminate, by whatever you’d like to tackle first that will have the most immediate impact in your life…
Then design a routine that will address the friction and issues you encounter. For example, choose a time to start transitioning to the evening routine and what does that entail- daily review, organize for next day, closedown technology/work, connect with family members, discuss timing of next activity, start meal prep, etc.
Once you design the look and feel, tweak your schedule/calendar and your environments (declutter, layout stuff, set reminders, send notices, and such) to support your design…
🌟Habits – These are the ingredients of your routines!
Depending on what segment of the day or routine you are targeting to create more ease in your life, you can implement new habits to make that routine or time of day work better.
AND, to achieve your goals, you must have repeating targeted behaviors, tactics or habits to go along with them. Goals are achieved through taking consistent action…
To establish new habits, add them to a routine…
—Health/Wellness Habits do very well as part of a morning self-care routine and part of weekend reset routine (meal planning, food shopping, food prep).
—Connections Habits do well as part of transitions, evening routines, and weekend routines.
—Success Habits do well as part of targeted work time blocks…
🌟Special Days – These are the exceptions to your routines and the sparkle sprinkles! Think of different ways of playing hooky if you may. LOL These are theme days to take care of things and enjoy things outside your regular routines.
–Specials days can be used as: Fun Day, Me Day, Mommy-Daughter Day (or other family combos), Adventure Day, Admin Day, Reset Day, Shoot Day, Lazy Day, and so on.
Make a list of all the Special Days that would make sense and that you would enjoy in your life. Then add them to your calendar as recurring events or keep as things to be scheduled during reset or planning days.
And that is the powerful way of taking charge of your days and creating the flavor of your life.
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
by Emma Viglucci
As we start a New Year, we are looking forward to a new chapter, and possibly a new book, in our life. The thing is that the person that got us here, our current self, is not the person that can get us there… The person that got us here and only do more of the same… For us to create something new, we have to be able to Be in a new way… The new self can create our new chapter, our Best Year Yet. A way to the new self is through Embracing Self-Love and Being.
Part of our Human Experience is to continue to grow more into who we really are… To continue to evolve. Shedding the slumber, the character defenses, the defense mechanisms, and other unconscious patterns to become our Best Self. This is the pursuit of Self-Growth…
I’m looking at the pursuit of Self-Growth as having two key components:
🌟Self-Love Practice for our Being
🌟Personal Development Practice for our Becoming
This month’s series will focus on our Self-Love Practice with today defining Self-Love and setting us up for a deep dive into developing a rich practice that really honors who we are and takes care of us.
Self-Love has to do with:
💖 Self-Honoring – Respecting and honoring ourselves- our values, our needs, our body, our feelings, our intuition, our perspectives, our space, our time, our preferences, our wishes, our dreams and so on.
💖 Self-Management – Taking full responsibility for ourselves- with learning how to properly manage ourselves and strive for excellence and high performance.
💖 Self-Care – Taking care of ourselves- with having a wholistic self-care practice that generates vitality, health and wellbeing.
💖 Self-Connection – Having a strong relationship with ourselves- with fully knowing and accepting all parts of ourselves, with keeping our own company, with having our own back, with being more present, with nurturing ourselves.
Each of these can be a whole newsletter or blog in and of themselves. LOL Nonetheless, we’ll be covering some aspect of each in the coming weeks, starting today with respecting and honoring ourselves.
Watch the video for 5 Tactics for honoring yourself… Enjoy!
Download the Identifying Core Values guide
APPLICATION: You’d think it’d be easy to be us. To be who we are. To be ourselves… As you might be aware, this is actually not the case and our Journey is about learning and evolving ourselves… Therefore, it’s imperative that we integrate tackling this intentionally in our lives…
Set some time aside to give yourself some Self-Love…
💗Values – We have to know our Core Values to help us filter our decisions and pursuits in our lives… Complete the Identifying Core Values exercise, and let your discovery inform other practices and tactics for more cohesiveness… Get the guide HERE.
💗Essence – We have to choose what flavor human being we want to be. LOL In your journal, list qualities of people you admire and who you consider role models.
1️⃣Underline the qualities you have in common with them.
2️⃣Circle the qualities they have that you’d like to embrace more in yourself…
3️⃣Summon the essence of that quality and strive for integrating it into yourself… Do this when you need a little pick me up, inspiration or motivation.
💗Feelings – Thoughts lead to feelings… Therefore, we can generate whatever feelings we like!
1️⃣Decide what kinds of feelings you want to experience more in your life…
2️⃣What kinds of thoughts would you have to have to generate those feelings?
3️⃣In your Journal, capture the thoughts so you can reference them as needed if you are having a hard time generating them, and their related feelings, on any giving day…
4️⃣Make it a habit of choosing the feelings you desire for the day first thing in the morning and go about generating them…
💗Intentions – We can be pretty chaotic in how we show up to our life and the days in our life if we are not intentional about it… Intentions are a powerful thing… You can choose how you want to show up everyday, and self correct at any giving moment…
1️⃣In your Journal, make a list of intentions about different ways you’d like to show up in your life.
2️⃣Keep this handy to draw from as needed to bring more intentionality and personal engagement in your life…
3️⃣You can use these as daily intentions, weekly themes, sprinkles for kicks and to keep things fresh
💗Roles – This one is super important. I often discuss this in our work with clients in terms of what kind of people they want to be regardless of how the people in their lives are being…
1️⃣Ponder on what kind of human you want to be, what kind of man, woman, or other gender, what kind of partner, what kind of parent, what kind of “child”, what kind of sibling, what kind of in-law, what kind of friend, neighbor, boss, and so on…
2️⃣In your Journal, capture your musings.
3️⃣Identify where you’d like to tweak how you are being in any relationship and get to making the corrections or upgrades…
Isn’t this work just so delicious!? This is a quick way to embrace you and Be more of who you want to be, who you really are… You’ll just be intentional about really Being you…
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
Copyright (c) 2022 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
by Emma Viglucci
We made it! This is the funnest Part of the funnest Step of our End of Year and New Year Planning! LOL (Yes, we already know I make up my own words) This is the reward for all the awesome planning and later implementing and doing. This is where we celebrate and honor more deeply the Being part of ourselves for trekking in this Journey… This is where we add all the actual fun, sensing, experiencing, enjoying and other loveliness. This is The Delightful Part (3of3).
I had always added this sparkle sprinkling as a bonus to prior processes and as an ongoing practice. But recently decided that this deserves its own Step as this is where the-in-the-moment and awesomeness is in life, so why not prop it up more? Right?
To that end, boy was it fun compiling the strategies worthy of this Step. AND the addition of this step made it necessary to pull the coordination and integration from Step3 into its own step, Step5-Coordinating. Woot!
I’m super proud of how pretty the process turned out. It’s a much improved and upleveled version of our usual process. Yay!
Before we jump into it, let’s recap the whole process again for easy reference, End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning Process (ENP-Process):
🌟 Step1-Clearing
🌟 Step2-Celebrating
🌟 Step3-Contemplating
🌟 Step4-Candescenting
The Inspirational Part
The Masterful Part
The Delightful Part (today’s Part)
🌟 Step5-Coordinating (today’s Bonus)
🌟 Step6-Communing (today’s Super Bonus)
The Inspirational Part covered how to get in touch with your Essence and bring it forth more…
The Masterful Part covered how to capture and integrate better habits and activities for more Flow and enjoyment in your life…
Today’s part, The Delightful Part, covers how to step it up on the fun, adventures, experiences, satisfaction, joy, happiness, and Love in your life. SO GOOD!
The Delightful Part
In our quest to have a Brilliant Human Experience™ we struggle, we suffer, we stretch, we learn, we rejoice, we celebrate, we enjoy, we savor – hopefully… We are great with the beginning part of this list. Even those that are better are taking it easy and enjoying, might still miss some of the beauty that is possible in our Experience…
I’ve on a mission for myself and to help others have the Best Human Experience ever. Woot!
Hence this newest Step, and particularly this Part, was added to our Planning process to really *capture and focus on the more awesome side of life.
*I imagine this might be offensive to some who are not in a great place, have the means and such. If this is you, I get you and please know that the whole process is meant to help you move your life forward… Also, know that my work with partners and couples focuses on healing, growing and evolving… Right now, I’m covering the icing on our cake…
Depending on where you are and what you need most in your life right now, can determine which step/s you give the most attention.
Also, note the whole process is to help you take charge of your life and make it what you want. If some parts are too much for you, overwhelming or superfluous, by all means tweak them to fit you and your situation.
NOTE: You DO NOT have to implement all the tactics. I’m offering a menu for your choosing. The point is to make things better in your life, not overload and stress you out filling up your life with more stuff.
SO, we know what we want. We know how to do what it takes and how to be to get it… Now, we are on to enjoying it!
The video covers 5 Tactics to Delight you in your Journey… But before we go there, I want to share the BONUS step to bring it all together.
Step5 – Coordination and Integration
The focus today is on the Delighting Tactics, but I want to wrap up this series with a quick overview of this last step to bring it all together for us for a complete process.
The purpose of this step is to make sure you didn’t just plan to your heart’s content and for your process to be forgotten till the end of the upcoming year when you think about setting goals again…
We want to make sure all the clarifying, designing, and strategizing you did gets actually integrated into your life- and work- flows and easily assimilated to help you create the changes and upleveling you are seeking.
SO, here are the Parts for Step5:
⚡️Time Map – Map out how you want to use your time, parts of the day, theme to the days in the week, special times and such. You can create a template of this on a separate calendar (works great with google calendar). View the template and your regular calendar simultaneously for the template to serve as a guide as you schedule yourself on your regular calendar and make commitments…
⚡️Habits and Routines – Add tactics/habits to a Habits tracking app and to your daily routines to make sure they get integrated into your flow and tracked to ensure you stay the course and make progress. I’ve been using Habits, it’s fairly robust yet pretty, flexible and user friendly.
⚡️Calendar – Add your activities, tactics/habits, flow/routine tasks, special days and times, and events for holding space for things to be booked or scheduled. Use a shared calendar with your partner as necessary. Invite others to the events.
⚡️Project Management and Templates – Add your projects, tasks and to-dos to a project management app. I use Asana. This is great if you run a business. For only personal use I recommend Trello, though you can run a business on there as well. Create templates for recurring tasks to safeguard your brainpower for what matters and to keep you organized, not for remembering tasks and steps. And, these are great collaboration tools as well!
⚡️Environments – Finally, review your environments to make sure they support your new habits, routines, activities and interests. Remove any friction that might cause you to falter in your quest and add touches to encourage your follow through. For example, having a water bottle you like to help you drink more water.
You see how all the fleshing out and designing you did become a part of your life and easier to tackle as it gets incorporated into your routine, flow and systems?
This is how you create change and progress and ultimately live your Best Life!
And finally, Step6!
The next thing about all this is that if you haven’t already done this process with your partner…, that you share what you came up with and encourage them to do this for themselves as well. Please note, that they might not go as in depth or as thoroughly as you did, and that’s ok. We all have our own way of doing things…
Then review what you each have to create a Joint Life Vision and approach, and tweak your flow and integration of tactics as necessary to capture the Partnership…
Voila!
Now for real, you get to watch the video for 5 Tactics to help you Masterfully enjoy your Journey… Enjoy!
Download the End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning Process
APPLICATION: Today’s Part is the most fun. Here is where you really get to sprinkle the sparkle! Here is an overview of the process and the Tactics for today’s Part:
A – Complete Steps1 – 3 if you haven’t yet!
B – Tackle Step4 – You don’t have to do all of these. Select what tickles your heart and have at it!
⭐️ The Inspirational Part
⭐️ The Masterful Part
⭐️ Today’s – The Delightful Prat…
🔥 Self-Love Practice – It is very challenging to feel OK if we don’t love and take care of ourselves…
If you are already overwhelmed and tight for time, don’t skimp on this Tactic but maybe hold off on the others. This Tactic is the one that helps you do your self, your relationship/s and your life better!
When you not find but make the time for self-care, treating yourself and connecting with yourself, everything else is good. I promise. Connecting with yourself, means you are never alone and unloved. Prioritizing mindfulness and taking care of yourself keeps you healthy, resilient, energized, inspired and motivated… From this state you can conquer and master everything else…
Stay tuned for more on this in coming issues!
**Make a list of Self-Care and Self-Love activities to choose from to add to your flow… Include little luxuries, pampering, and honoring of yourself. Shoot for Sparking Joy and Delighting Yourself…
**Design your morning, afternoon, and evening routines as well as other special times and dates with yourself adding to them some specific activities from you list…
🔥 Experiences Map – Have more fun and adventure!
**Make a list of amazing experiences and memorable moments you want to have this upcoming year. Places to visit, social engagements, people to hang with, things from our Bucket List/s, First Time things (thanks for this last one Sherri!), and such.
**Draw a line down a paper to represent the upcoming year. Starting at the top add January, go down a bit and add February, and so on to capture the whole year. Then, add the items from your list as makes sense to you and your life, including how you’ll stretch, to the different months of the year.
🔥 Interests and Activities – Enrich your life and have meaningful personal experiences.
**Given your Personal Brand that you identified in The Inspirational Part, decide what kind of hobbies, interests, and activities you’ll want to pursue in the coming months. What kind of flavor will they be: Nerdy, sporty, adventurous, healthy, creative, artistic or what?
Note, more doesn’t mean is better! You already have a full life- we just want to add things that make it more special. There is no need to overload, cram and fill up every minute…
🔥 Passion Project – You don’t necessary need more things to do. But if you are looking to add more meaning and depth to your life and to feel more engaged, this might be a good a good solution.
**If you don’t already have a cause, an interest or a passion, check out what others are doing in their lives when it comes to this. Think about different parts of you, your life, your home, your community and such where you can dig in and add more pizzazz.
🔥 Giving Back Plan – This one piggybacks on the prior tactic but takes it to a more external, humanitarian and philanthropical level.
**Do some soul searching and some online research as to areas where you can contribute, influence, and make an impact. Depending on your ambition, you can tackle the 17 Sustainable Developmental Goals to a degree of your choosing.
Or you can simply identify charities you want to support with contributions or through volunteering, support organizations or associations with your time and talents, mentor youth or team member at work, donate stuff when you declutter your home, or give a helping hand to brothers and sisters in need.
C – Schedule Step5 – You see why this step needed to be added? So much yumminess came out of this process. This is how you make a rich, meaningful, and joyous life.
**Now it’s time to make all your plans, designs and selections from all your work a part of your daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly life using tools and systems. This might take some time, so a separate planning session might be in order. LOL
⭐️ Time Map
⭐️ Habits and Routines
⭐️ Calendar
⭐️ Project Management and Templates
⭐️ Environments
D – Embrace Step6 – Include your Partner!
You did it! Wow!
Doesn’t that just feel incredible, to know exactly what your life will look like, the work and the fun, next year? To know that you got it all covered, and that it’s going to be epic? Knowing that it can all be revisited and tweaked as necessary…
Great job having your own back, future you appreciates you…
Here is to your Best Year Yet!
See you in the New Year!
With Much Love & Light!
PS – Check out past Holiday posts to help you Thrive this Holiday Season and start the New Year right!
Letting go, productivity and meaningful holiday
Acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments
Intentionally plan your holidays and year-end
Giving to yourself for ultimate success
Give the Gift of Understanding and Compassion…
Giving, meaning and success
Have a 100 year plan…
Why you need Purpose in your life?
Do you have clarity?
Let your Values rule your life
Live by your Character and Practical Strengths
Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
by Emma Viglucci
We are knee deep in setting ourselves up for an amazing New Year! Do you usually give this much thought? Do you do personal End of Year and New Year Planning? Do you take the time to be with yourself and get inspired to design the life you want and map out how to make it happen? I do, and I know that those who do also create Masterful Lives… Therefore, I’ve added the Sparkling Step to my planning process to help you do it as well. Today, we are covering The Masterful Part of this step (2of3).
But, first a quick recap – End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning (E.N.P.):
🌟 Decluttering and minimalism (Step1-Clearing)
🌟 Closure, clearance, and celebration (Step2-Celebrating)
🌟 Vision, strategy, and intention (Step3-Contenplating)
🌟 NEW: Enrichment and meaning (Step4-Candescenting)
The Inspirational Part
The Inspirational Part covered how to get in touch with your Essence and bring it forth more…
Today’s Masterful Part covers how to capture and integrate better habits and activities for more efficiency, productivity, ownership, empowerment, focus, presence, harmony, joy and enjoyment in your life…
The Masterful Part
To have a Brilliant Human Experience™ we have to Live our life… This might mean different things to different people. To some it might mean achieving great success professionally and making an impact. To other it might mean mastering themselves, physically, emotionally, etc. To others it might mean partying it up every weekend. To others it might mean going on great adventures a few times a year. And, yet to others it might mean a combination of these and other essential experiences and masteries.
It is up to us to create our Best Life, a life we love. And a life well lived at the end of the day that truly represented our essence and how we wanted to have lived it…
From the work we’ve done so far, we already know what we are working towards. Now we’ll add how we want to go about making it happen. How we want to do the Journey…
Watch the video for 5 Tactics to help you Masterfully enjoy your Journey…
Download the End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning Process
APPLICATION: This process just gets more and more fun from here. Woot!
A note of caution first, you really need to do Steps 1-3 of the End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning (E.N.P.) process if you haven’t yet… This is you guiding North Star… You can sprinkle all the sparkle you want into your life and still not create your Best Life if you don’t know what you are creating at the end of the day…
Again, set time aside to play with this process, work through the steps in order, though 1 and 2 can be swapped depending on your situation.
And, now on to the Tactics of The Masterful Part…
VERY IMPORTANT: Don’t create the lists below in a vacuum. They need to flow from your vision, goals, and tactics to support your overall approach and desires for the New Year… They are additional ways to help you create your vision and achieve your goals. They are the icing on your cake. They are not meant to be miscellaneous extra things to overload you…
🌟Stop/Start List – Create a list all the minutia, redundancies, and painful tasks you do. Add to this list the negative habits, commitments, and anything else that just suck your life energy out of you. This is the Stop part of your list. Now make a list of skills, healthy habits, and activities you want to add to your life to recharge you, enrich your experience and create more efficiency and joy. This is the Start part of your list.
Select a couple from each to tackle Q1 of next year. Weave the Start items into your flow, time map, routine, calendar, schedule, to ensure you fully execute this; remove the Stop ones as you go (scrap, automate, delegate, outsource) …
🌟Life Rules – Create a list of rules to live by. This is about setting more effective boundaries in your life… This has to do with you fully owning yourself and taking charge of your life… Of not being a push over, people pleaser, codependent, and generally being at the bottom of your own list… What will you no longer tolerate, put up with or get sucked into in your life?
Select a handful to master in Q1… Diligently set out to have the necessary conversations or take the action steps to establish your boundaries.
🌟Spend for Happiness – Create a list of things you’d like to purchase that you believe will bring you more joy and happiness… Create a Spending Plan to map out your purchases for the year.
Pick out the ones for Q1 and implement your savings tactics to enable your purchases. This will keep you focused on your saving strategy and make your spending more intentional… This tames the consumerism bug, supports minimalism and essentialism philosophies and supports a more meaningful lifestyle.
🌟Special Days – Create a list of the types of Special or Theme Days you’d like to have, like: Declutter or deep clean day, life admin day, shoot day, content planning day, reset day, inspiration day, me day, celebration day, feel good day, hooky day, and such.
Next, schedule those into your calendar for Q1. Woot!
🌟Challenges – Make a list of 30-Day Challenges you’d like to do to stretch yourself, develop character strengths or personality traits, install better habits, improve some aspect of your life, stay intentional and engaged in your life daily, or just for kicks and conversational content. Here is a cool collection to inspire you.
Select the 1-3 you’ll tackle in Q1 (1 per month at most…) and schedule prep-ahead-time for each to launch into them seamlessly.
🔔Once you finish integrating these into your lifestyle, set up a reminder in whatever app makes sense in your life to grab another set of these to tackle in Q2, and so on.
The beauty of this Part is that the tactics support our achieving our goals and make the process more tangible and fun. They help us uplevel our life experience on their own right.
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS – Check out past Holiday posts to help you Thrive this Holiday Season and start the New Year right!
Letting go, productivity and meaningful holiday
Acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments
Intentionally plan your holidays and year-end
Giving to yourself for ultimate success
Give the Gift of Understanding and Compassion…
Giving, meaning and success
Have a 100 year plan…
Why you need Purpose in your life?
Do you have clarity?
Let your Values rule your life
Live by your Character and Practical Strengths
Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
by Emma Viglucci
In my ongoing quest to do our life better and enhance our wellbeing, I started paying closer attention year-in and year-out to how to we do this Season… What has developed over the years is my End-of-Year & New-Year Planning (E.N.P.) Process (condensed from its original version which can be found here). I’m so excited for its sparkling newest Step and its rich parts. Today we are covering: The Inspirational Part (1of3).
End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning (E.N.P.):
🌟 Decluttering and minimalism (Step1-Clearing)
🌟 Closure, clearance, and celebration (Step2-Celebrating)
🌟 Vision, strategy, and intention (Step3-Contenplating)
🌟 NEW: Enrichment and meaning (Step4-Candescenting)
We’ve covered Steps for clearing, celebrating and contemplating and now we are on to candescenting, to adding Sparkle…
I am adding this new step to add more Sparkle into our life… This is what this step is all about. We tend to focus on work, grinding, and what’s wrong in the world. We usually don’t acknowledge the good things or focus on how to better do leisure, fun, recharging, taking care of ourselves, and enjoying the finest things in life.
Our Human Experience needs to be more well-rounded…
⚡️Most people don’t dream of their future.
⚡️Most people don’t set goals to achieve their dreams.
⚡️Most people don’t develop a plan to achieve their goals.
⚡️Most people don’t design their flow (routines) to work their plans.
⚡️Most people definitely don’t add Sparkle to their flow…
These people are at risk of their life being dull and a grind… You might recognize yourself in all the above, or some. Don’t worry I’ve got the antidote in adding Sparkle into our life…
The first part in the Sparkle Step is Inspiration…
The Inspirational Part
When our life is monotonous, when we tend to grind, when we don’t recharge ourselves, we dull ourselves. We are like a house that hasn’t been dusted in a while and the surfaces no longer sparkle. We lose our sparkle…
It is our job to figure out how to do our life well, so we have our best human experience, a Brilliant Human Experience™…
It is up to us to draw inspiration and flow from inspiration as much as possible. This is a wonderful estate of Being to aspire to on an ongoing basis…
Watch the video for 4 Tactics to help you find and fuel your Inspiration…
Download the End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning Process
APPLICATION: If you haven’t completed Steps 1-3 of the End-Of-Year & New-Year Planning (E.N.P.) process, do those first! The parts of Step 4 are the Sparkling icing on that magnificent cake!
Set time aside to play with this process, it’s so worth your investment. Work through the steps in order, though 1 and 2 can be swapped depending on your situation.
For Step 4 – Here are the tactics for The Inspirational Part:
Personal Brand – Decide how you’ll continue to evolve in the coming year. Who is your Authentic Self, what are they all about? How will you become more You? What parts do you need embrace or develop? How do you need to stretch? What can you put in place to practice Being more of who you are? Choose an Identity Phrase™ or word to capture your personal brand and what you are aiming to become…
For example: Conscientious, adventurous, learner, connector, risk-taker, nature lover, wellness obsessed, turn everything to gold, and such.
Intention or Focus Term™ – Set an Intention for the upcoming year of how you’ll want to feel, what you want to experience, or who you want to be more. Choose a Focus Term™ to capture the essence of the intention to serve as your mantra, lens, filter or focus throughout the year…
For example: Ease, intentional, proactive, receptive, spaciousness, excellence, abundant, generous, confident, playful, self-care, courage, and such.
Theme – Explore what you want your overall focus to be for the year. What kind of things do you want to experience, accomplish, achieve? What life area will you be focusing on primarily and what aspects of that life area do you want to target? Name your Theme to add another layer of focus and filtering for the year.
For example: Health, fitness, romance, parenting, adventure, legacy, reading, self-care, self-love, spirituality, and so on.
Vision Board – And now you get to make it pretty! Capture the work you’ve done for Step 3 and in this Part of Step 4 into picture form. For this, Pinterest is your friend. You can create your board anyway you like.
For example: Print the images and glue them into a posterboard, tack them to a corkboard; or go with an electronic version by creating a background for your desktop or your phone in Canva.
The key here is to capture who you are becoming and where you want to go. Make sure you give yourself the gift of time and attention to really honor your Self and take care of Future You.
This Step is so fun. Make sure you do the leg work of steps 1-3 to really set yourself up for success for the rest of the year and for the upcoming year. Then dive in and have fun with this Step!
Wishing you much joy, connection and love today and always…
With Much Love & Light!
PS – Check out past Holiday posts to help you Thrive this Holiday Season and start the New Year right!
Letting go, productivity and meaningful holiday
Acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments
Intentionally plan your holidays and year-end
Giving to yourself for ultimate success
Give the Gift of Understanding and Compassion…
Giving, meaning and success
Have a 100 year plan…
Why you need Purpose in your life?
Do you have clarity?
Let your Values rule your life
Live by your Character and Practical Strengths
Copyright (c) 2021 Emma K. Viglucci. All rights reserved.
Want to Use this Article in Your Own Website or Publication?
Be our guest! Here is how, you MUST include:
Emma K. Viglucci, LMFT is the Founder and Director of Metropolitan Marriage & Family Therapy, PLLC, a private practice that specializes in working with couples, she is the creator of the MetroRelationship™ philosophy and the Successful Couple Strategy™ that assist couples succeed at their relationship and their life. Stay Connected™ with Emma and receive weekly connection notes in your inbox with Personal Development and Relationship Enrichment insights and strategies, visit: www.metrorelationship.com
