Season 6 Episode 97

Listen to this episode and join our free four week workshop

Elevate Your Life 2025. 

 Show Notes:

Episode Summary:

Are you ready for 2025? We want you to elevate your life and teaching so you are living your best teacher life! This year, we want to be intentional about what we do- and how we live. This is an ongoing goal, and the purpose of this podcast- to help you live your best work life and home life so you can live your best life.

We are going to start the year by challenging you to examine what you do and how you think. Join us to gain clarity on what you want in life and how you want to show up in the world.

You’ll learn habits and strategies that will support and sustain you on even the toughest days. Let’s make this year, our best yet. It’s time to live an inspired life, and we’re going to start from a place of strength.

This is the first in a series we’re calling Elevate Your Life. You can just listen to these four episodes or you can download our free workbook with places to write your answers, additional activities and links to videos and more. Find out more in this episode.

In this episode:

This is not a word-for-word script. On the podcast, we share examples and stories. For the best experience, listen to the podcast episode.

Before we start:

We’ve created free workbook, Elevate Your life in 2025, which has a place for you to write your thoughts.

The workbook also has additional exercises that you can do to take today’s podcast on starting your new year from a place of strength to the next level. Head over to inspiredtogetherteachers/elevate to download the workbook.

Introduction:

How would it feel to start your new year from a place of strength?  We often don’t pay as much attention to our accomplishments as much as our failures or the things we didn’t do. You probably have a lot of “I didn’t…” or “I should…” thoughts. You may even feel some guilt around things you didn’t do.

Confirmation bias is a psychological concept that says that our brains are wired to see only what we tell it to see. When you focus on negative things, such as your failures or losses or negative emotions, you see and feel more negative things. Fortunately, the opposite is also true.

Oprah says, “The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.”  This week we want to focus on the things in our lives we can celebrate!

The lesson is that if you want to have more positive, affirming, or joyful experiences you have to look for those kinds of things.

How does it sound to start the year from a place of strength?

Michele: It’s easy to feel bad about yourself starting the new year. We indulge in too much food and drink and our exercise program gets lost. In our optimism for the new year, we are probably reminded of all of our failures. New year’s planning and goal setting is a tradition for me, but I can easily see my failures and the things I wanted to accomplish but didn’t accomplish in the last year.

Paula: I agree. New Year’s so often is about trying to forget all that we didn’t accomplish last year as the catalyst for what we want in the new year. I would much rather start from a place of strength than a place of regret.

Let’s talk about how to start your year from a place of strength.

In this episode we will offer a few different activities to help you figure that out. Here is the first:

How do you want to feel in the next year? 

If you understand the ways you want to feel and how you get those feelings, you are more likely to engage in activities that make you feel all the good feelings. How does that work?

Think about your best memories from the last year. What happened in those events that made you feel something you want to feel?

Consider other times when you felt positive feelings or emotions. For example, you were at peace, or felt especially loved or cared for. Think about experiences which made you feel alive, those times when life was fun and exciting and you felt energetic and like you could conquer the world.

What are some events, people, places, or things that made you feel strong positive emotions?

How can you get at those positive feelings in the next year?

You can spend some time with this, and our free guide, Elevate Your Life 2025 will help you with all of the activities in this episode and the coming episodes. You can get your free Guide, Elevate Your Life 2025 by going to our website at inspiredtogetherteachers/elevate.

Make a Win’s List

Our second activity is to create a win’s list.

These wins can be big or small wins in any area of your life or work. They might be external things, such as running a 5K, painting a room in your house, taking a family vacation. They also might be internal things, things that no one else would see but that are meaningful to you such as finally letting go of your anger towards someone, or making progress on your health by drinking more water.

Think back to things you accomplished- or steps you took that move you into a direction you want to go. What are you proud of?  What did you get right? What did you do that helped someone?  What did you stop doing that wasn’t serving you?

It doesn’t have to be something that feels like a win to the world, it only has to feel like a win to you!

Creating your wins list will remind you of your best self and the things you can do. It will get you in a positive mind frame for starting the new year from a place of strength.

In one of the activities, you will examine your personal strengths and gifts. We all have unique gifts and talents, but we often don’t recognize them or realize that we have strengths that others do not have.  When we are good at something, we often enjoy doing it When we enjoy things, we want to do more of them.

In another activity, we use a moving analogy. Think about the times that you physically moved to a new classroom or a new home. You likely discarded some things before moving. You boxed up other things to take with you into the new space. We want to take the best with us, and discard the rest.

Based on the activities we have done so far, what do you want to “box up” and bring with you into 2025?

The last activity in the Elevate Your Life 2025 workbook takes a look at the stories we tell ourselves- some of them are true, and some of them might not be true. We’ll help you examine those stories and create a new story for the new year.

Recap:

In today’s episode, we talked about starting the new year from a place of strength. Examining the feelings that brought you joy and happiness, is a good place to start because it helps you to understand the kinds of feelings you want to have in the future. We also talked about making a “wins list” which will help your mindset in focusing on what you are capable of. Lastly, we talked about several more activities, available in the workbook, that can help you start your new year from a place of strength.

Homework:

In true teacher fashion we end our podcast with homework. Our homework for you today is to go to our website at inspiredtogetherteachers.com/elevate and download your free workbook so that you can elevate your life in 2025!

Quote:

“The more you praise and celebrate your life, the more there is in life to celebrate.”

Oprah Winfrey

Connect with the Inspired Together Teachers Community:

Download our FREE resource: The Inspired Teachers Guide to Taking Back Your Life.

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More About Inspired Together Teachers:

Are you a teacher struggling to balance your best work with your best life?

If you are dedicated and caring but often overwhelmed and exhausted, join us at Inspired Together Teachers. We’ll give you inspiration, strategies and tips that help you navigate life’s challenges as a stronger, more confident, and more joy filled person, both in and out of the classroom.

Inspired Together Teachers will give you practical tools to experience more of what matters most in your life.

Co-hosts Paula Schmidt and Michele Vosberg are award winning educators with the experience and skills to help teachers thrive in life and work. They’ve taught at all levels, worked with thousands of teachers, and conducted workshops around the world. They are also the authors of the #1 best-selling book The Inspired Teachers Journal: A Weekly Guide to Becoming Your Best Self.

Paula and Michele would love to have you to join them on their quest to lived inspired lives.

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