You may be up early for the day after Christmas sales. Perhaps you are waking up in your childhood home visiting your family for the holidays. Or perhaps, you’re facing going back to work today. Whatever the case a lot has transpired in your life this year. In the recent 30+ days, if you’ve been engaging in our series, you’ve been invited to grow your awareness, and practice using new tools to aid in moving you toward thriving in the New Year.

There are six days left until the change in calendar year and change in decade. You’ve come this far; what’s different?

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What is your mindset toward change? What action steps have you employed to date?

If you’re like many people, you started this journey with great intentions to learn, grow, take action, and make effort to finish this year well to be ready to thrive in the New Year.

Then life happened.

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Too many real life choices of priority. Too many time obligations (this is a busy time of year!). Too many roadblocks got in the way of your participation and engagement. Maybe you simply stopped reading the posts to avoid feeling guilty or overwhelmed. Both of those reasons are 100% common when we face hard things.

By nature we humans want to avoid pain. Whether it’s physical or emotional we don’t willingly run toward things that might hurt us. If we live to avoid pain then we may not experience real life. No children are born without pain. No growth or change happens without some challenge and difficulty. Feeling the overwhelm is normal. What you do with it either keeps you the same or moves you toward your goal.

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When I planned this journey I knew I would be introducing concepts, tools, and suggesting action steps on a daily basis. I was creating a type of coaching bootcamp without the yelling and demanding statements or the ongoing accountability that one chooses to submit to when engaging in bootcamp.

This 40-Day Journey has been like a buffet of ideas and considerations with lots of learning opportunities and tools to discover. I structured the days like this purposefully to introduce you to the ideas and process of coaching.

All of these coaching ideas are too much to implement daily while living your regular life. Adjustments of time and attention need to be made while your calendar is already filled with plans. This was not intentionally structured to overwhelm you; the journey was intentionally structured to create awareness for you recognizing that to make real change in your life there needs to be a level of focus on change.

All the things I’ve shared are elements of what a coaching process looks like with one exception: the pace. Although my clients come to coaching with the desire to make change in a particular area of life, they choose how fast to grow, what tools to employ and commitments to make. I don’t just throw things at you; you set the pace. You are the one who knows what change needs to take place. I come alongside you offering encouragement, resources to support your intention that you can choose to use or not. Most crucial to the coaching process is accountability for your choice to take action. Accountability is a game changer.

Action step: What would having regular accountability do for you in taking action toward a goal? Identify one thing in your life that you want to change when the calendar turns over next week.  Write it down. Tell somebody.