About halfway through 2024 I looked ahead to the calendar, and specifically for August, September, October, and I kind of freaked out. I saw that nearly every single day in those three months was completely booked out. And from a business standpoint, you might think, well that’s a good thing, right, Colleen? You’ve got business going on.
But as I was looking at it, I had a couple of responses. One was, I was getting a little bit of PTSD from my burnout in 2013. I was having some flashbacks. I’m like okay, we cannot get to that point. But I was also number two saying, is it filled with the right things? Is this really what I want to be doing?
I’ve got these speaking engagements, or I’ve got this personal commitment. Are those the things I wanted to have said yes to? And so I started to say, I am going to call 2025 my Year of Release. I want to go into the year releasing some things, because I need to free up time, energy, money, and resources in order for me to say yes and have capacity and bandwidth and openness to some new things.
You know that every time you say yes to one thing, you are actually saying no to something else.
You may not be intentionally saying no, going through the act of saying no, but when you say yes to this thing, that takes up some sort of resource that is no longer available for you to say yes over here. So inherently, you are saying no. I knew that I wanted to create space for new opportunities professionally. I had a new client opportunity that I was going to need to create space for that time, my resources.
I also looked ahead on the personal side, and I thought, my youngest Reese, she only has a couple more years left of high school. I want to participate in a completely different way that I wasn’t able to with the other two, and so I need to release some current things to create space for that. And when we do that, when we start to release, say no to some things that we are currently doing or say no to new things that are coming in, we allow that openness for the better things that are out there for us.
And guess what? Some of them, you don’t even know what they are. I have had things that have come to me in the first half of the year where I was like, I didn’t even know that was a thing! I didn’t know that was going to be brought to me. Thank goodness I started to release some of my 2024, so that I had that energy, that awareness, that openness, the resources available for that.
So I wanted to bring this concept to you, Year of Release. And you may not look at it as a year. You may say, okay, I’m just going to look at a week of release at a time, or a month. I shared this last year with some of my closest friends and colleagues, and I know that they have taken this into their own life, that they are starting to approach things as this release, just releasing things that no longer serve us.
I hope that this supports you in whatever that next thing is for you as you approach, whether it’s the next few months, the rest of the year, but this year of release or concept of release to free up so that you can really say yes to the things that are most important to you!