How to Ensure 2025 will be your year

Well it’s the end of another year.. all of our hopes for the next year suddenly come flowing in amongst the magical vibes of Christmas. As I am a 33 year old single woman, these feelings of this time of year have become somewhat stale. Along with this thought I am trying to center myself into the fact that it’s only me who can change this reality.

The first questions I think of is how the last year has been like for me? What has changed? How have I improved, matured and grown throughout the year? I try to be as positive as possible when thinking of my answers and usually I am pleasantly surprised. Take this year for example. 2024 has been a pretty amazing and very busy year for me and my company. We have been blessed with ample opportunities for work from content writing, public speaking at many schools and amazing conferences to starting providing support work for participants on the NDIS, along with training multiple support workers. So I guess I am very proud that me and my amazing team have really jumped into a flow that would hopefully continue in 2025. Personally, this year I have been able to overcome funding challenges with my NDIS and balance it more so I get what I need without over doing it with my funding.

Although I aim to be positive, I feel that it is very important to think of the negative aspects of the past year as chances to grow and develop new skills. For me, these situations have concerned my love life and carer team. The reasons that I find it important to remember these negative aspects is that so I feel proud of  myself to overcome them and so I can analyse ways I can improve myself too. As you can imagine particularly remembering the errors that you’ve made is sometimes brutal or disheartening however I try to remember that it’s important to acknowledge these mistakes so you grow and learn from them.  As I hinted at before, some of these situations involve moments when things go wrong with support workers, which I am sure you can all relate to.

As I have been self managing my support worker team for well over a decade now and I can very easily say that I have had my fair share of stories based on what can happen when connections between our support workers and us go wrong. Interestingly, these situations have come up in various forms including short and long term working relationships. After over ten years of managing my own support worker team and many many experiences I can very easily say that the most important thing to remember is that you need to put yourself, your needs and wants into the centre of your support, environment and life. Personally, this is the hardest thing about managing my own support team that I have found. This is primarily because I am extremely awkward around conflict, especially for people who I both have formed a relationship with and people who I am in extremely  vulnerable positions with. For these reasons I have to admit that I find it best for me to have those conversations online instead of in person. Although in most situations this method of conversation is very frowned upon I have learned that due to this circumstance and my vulnerability it is very necessary.

After you have sorted out your perfect support team you are abled to really focus on yourself, your goals and your future. Personally for 2025, I feel that goals will include focusing my brand  ‘On Our Own Tracks’ more the themes of adventure, nature and the outdoor and focussing on fitness and monitoring my eating and drinking. Admittedly, I’ve had this goal across many years now, Although this may seem negative that positive part of this is that I definitely feel that I have somewhat improved my diet over the past year. However feel I definitely need to raise that level of commitment substantially.

This brings me to my final goal, which I encourage you to have in 2025. That is to find new adventures and experiences. A few years ago I was right into this concept and it literally changed my life. So I encourage you to think of how you could make 2025 your year.

In amongst this, I have definitely discovered strategies that really work for me in reaching my goals. The most effective strategy that I have found works about 90% of the time is a rewards system, which basically involves me only drinking alcohol on weekends. Although I have slipped up a few times I have been pleased with myself and know that I can go for days without alcohol.