Can you believe it’s already December?! I certainly cannot believe we are almost done with the year 2023. I’ve been back in a good morning routine recently that includes journaling and I have been journalling about how fast time seems to go. I talk more about this in my video but I’m learning how to combat the feeling of time passing by before your own eyes and what helps me personally feel more in control of my days and feel like I have more time in the day.
As we near the end of the year, I want you to reflect on how far you’ve come. I know we may not have met all of our goals we set for ourselves in January, but you have come SO far this year. No matter what happened this past year, I hope you take time to acknowledge how strong and brave you are. Even if I don’t know you personally, you have positively impacted someone, somewhere, sometime this past year.
Let’s not forget the small things that add up over the course of a year. The smiles between strangers in the grocery store, the person who patiently let us over in front of them in a traffic jam, the babies who were born, and the hot coffee on a chilly morning. I want to remember those who left us in 2023 as well, and those who are grieving and suffering in 2023. Always count the blessings that you have in your life, no matter how small.
Okay time to make goals!! I always break my goals up every month into actionable lists for both my business and my personal life. My life and mindset has COMPLETELY changed since starting these monthly resets in May. I also started writing my goals down on a sticky note and putting them on my bathroom mirror and WOW that made all the difference in the world. I encourage you to come up with just one thing to do for the rest of the month and year, and stick it on your bathroom mirror or somewhere you will see it every single day. And, most important of all, do it.. Stick to it.
December Reset Video:
In this video, I talk about how November went, my goals (both business and personal) for myself in December, and my favorite items from the month of November.
Last month’s favorites:
Since November was no doubt my biggest shopping month of the entire year (whoopsie) I’m sharing what I purchased and loved in one big collage:
Old Navy Men’s Pajama Pants (to match me lol)
Books I read last month:
All books linked here to shop through Amazon
Things We Left Behind by Lucy Score
Rated 3/5 stars - Book 3/3 in the Knockemout series, about Sloane and Lucien. I LOVED the first book in this series and gave it a rare 5/5 stars, and the second one I rated 4/5, but this last one I had to give only 3 stars to. I really enjoyed reading it and it was a good book (super spicy, actually a little spicier than I enjoy because I was feeling very awkward reading this on a plane) but after the first 2, I expected Sloane’s story to be way better. I don’t really know how to describe it except the character development just wasn’t there as much as the other 2 books. I still loved the series and think they are worth the read but this one just wasn’t as great as the other two in my opinion!
Some of my highlights:
No one feels worthy. Everyone feels like an imposter. It doesn’t matter what family you come from, your net worth, or how many powerful friends owe you favors. None of that is going to make you feel like you deserve to be here.”
“No, but you’re making me wonder if it’s not better to at least take a chance. Maybe getting my heart ripped out and stomped on is better than being too afraid to try in the first place.” “Love makes men stupid,” I quipped. “Yes, it does. But does denying it make us stupider?”
“You remembered,” she said softly. “I remember every second of us.”
Marry me. Be my wife. Remind me every day that I’m better than I think I am. Show me what it’s like to be loved by you. Because that’s all I ever wanted. To be good enough for you.”
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
Rated 5/5 stars- The way this book changed my life!!! I have never highlighted SO MANY parts of a book that I NEED to come back to. It’s about a girl named Nora who is depressed and has a lot of regrets in life and she tries to kill herself. In between life and death she is in the midnight library, where she gets to learn that her regrets aren’t really regrets at all and she gets to live an infinite amount of other possible lives. There’s so much more to the story that I can’t really get into without ruining a lot of the plot but through living all the possibilities of her life, she learns how life is a precious gift and what really matters. The philosophy is incredible throughout this book and I loved it so much I want to give the physical copy to my loves ones with my favorite quotes highlighted.
Some of my highlights: only a few or this post would be 3 pages long
She stepped outside, wondering whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday. Or maybe that was all you needed.
Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’
‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘You must always remember that.’
‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina. Keep swimming .
For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live – the happily-married one, the successful-poet one – was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn’t get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don’t live.
I am here but I also know I am not here. I am also lying in a hospital in Paris, having an aneurysm. And I am also skydiving in Arizona. And travelling around southern India. And tasting wine in Lyon, and lying on a yacht off the Côte d’Azur.’
It’s amazing what the brain can fill in. And what it is fine with forgetting.’
There are more possible ways to play a game of chess than the amount of atoms in the observable universe. So it gets very messy. And there is no right way to play; there are many ways. In chess, as in life, possibility is the basis of everything. Every hope, every dream, every regret, every moment of living.’
It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.
How to Stop Time by Matt Haig
Rated 4/5 stars- About a guy named Tom who has a condition and lives for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Matt Haig is just an INCREDIBLE author- another book with great life lessons on living in the present moment. The story goes back and forth between current day and other centuries this guy has lived. He is also trying to find his daughter from hundreds of years ago- he had to leave his wife and her because his condition caused people to think his wife was a witch and people wanted to kill his family because he never aged. He finds out his daughter is like him; an “albatross” and he makes it his mission to find her. The plot honestly wasnt that intriguing which is why I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 but the quotes I highlighted and the philosophy in the book is enough that I would recommend it and rated it highly!
Some of my highlights:
I noticed his hands. They looked old. Liver spots and baggy skin and indigo veins. Faces could lie easier than hands could.
she seems wholly herself. It takes a lot to be unique in a species of so many.
I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body. I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad.
Just sitting there, in the comfortable silence of a couple.
‘You possess a young face and a wise tongue. People hate that. They know it could fool them.’
Pale-faced ladies with artificially blackened teeth to simulate the mark of luxury that was sugar-induced decay (a fact I always remember in our modern age of bottle tans and teeth whitening procedures).
What was it about those silent exchanges in a crowded place? There was a magic to them, like a secret shared.
I have only been alive for four hundred and thirty-nine years, which is of course nowhere near long enough to understand the minimal facial expressions of the average teenage boy.
‘If there is such a thing as good marriage, it is because it resembles friendship rather than love.’
‘Anxiety,’ Kierkegaard wrote, in the middle of the nineteenth century, ‘is the dizziness of freedom.’
It may seem strange, falling in love with someone because of a gesture, but sometimes you can read an entire person in a single moment. The way you can study a grain of sand and understand the universe. Love at first sight might or might not be a thing, but love in a single moment is.
It is the simplest, purest joy on earth, I realise, to make someone you care about laugh.
People you love never die. That is what Omai had said, all those years ago. And he was right. They don’t die. Not completely. They live in your mind, the way they always lived inside you. You keep their light alive. If you remember them well enough, they can still guide you, like the shine of long-extinguished stars could guide ships in unfamiliar waters. If you stop mourning them, and start listening to them, they still have the power to change your life. They can, in short, be salvation.
YouTube content from November
Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to you! I hope you have a happy holiday season. I know the season is difficult for many who have lost loves ones and I hope you know you are never alone- don’t forget the reason for the season. He is with us always <3.