Transcript · Download MP3 · Download MP4
Invitation
Whenever you read this, the coming year starts now.
Plans and metrics can be useful, but thriving is also an emotional experience. We can achieve titles, money, body targets, relationship boxes, and externally admired roles while remaining driven by fear, performance, or the need to escape ourselves.
Instead of asking only what we want to accomplish, we can choose an emotional quality we want to know, practice, and embody more deeply.
Ease. Deep connection. Lion-heartedness. Self-acceptance. Harmony. Eagerness. Being rooted, receptive, playful, resourced, lighthearted, or soulful. A quality becomes a lens through which ordinary walks, work, relationships, and choices change tone.
This is not another annual standard to fail. It is an infinite practice of attention, resourcing, experimentation, and return.
Beneath the Role, What Experience Wants to Live?
Many roles were chosen under social pressure: be impressive, partnered, thin, secure, accomplished, agreeable, or valuable. The deeper inquiry is:
How do I naturally want to be—not how other people taught me to be?
Rick once chose deep connection before knowing the work he would eventually do. The phrase changed walks with his dog, sunsets, conversations, and relationships at work. He became more aware of connection, offered more of it, developed supporting skills, noticed its absence, and found people who also yearned for it.
A focal quality organizes attention without dictating a specific outcome. Over time we learn its range, edges, blocks, ecosystem, and embodied expression.
A Body-Guided Inquiry
Settle into support. Wiggle your toes and notice your heart doing its work. Imagine each beat saying, I love you. Ask:
What spice, experience, or wonder would I like to add to my life so I feel more fulfilled, authentic, powerful, and alive?
Let an image, word, sensation, or half-formed phrase arise. Do not reject the clown; perhaps play wants attention. Write tender answers before the protective mind hides them.
Say the word aloud and taste it. Notice expansion, warmth, energy, tension, fear, or an oh dear. The body can help refine the aim. Aliveness accompanied by fear may indicate a real edge. Flatness may mean the word belongs to someone else’s agenda.
Tapping: Letting My Authentic Quality Emerge
Side of the Hand: Even though I have been trained to choose goals and roles that prove my value, I want to listen beneath the social layer for an emotional quality that feels authentic, alive, and naturally mine to cultivate.
Top of the Head: What should I accomplish this year?
Eyebrow: My mind has so many respectable answers.
Side of the Eye: Titles, money, body, status, and approval.
Under the Eye: Some may matter, but they are not the whole experience.
Under the Nose: How do I naturally want to be?
Chin: What quality would enhance my life from the inside?
Collarbone: I can let a word, image, or sensation rise.
Under the Arm: Even if it seems tender or strange.
Top of the Head: Deep connection, ease, courage, harmony, or play?
Eyebrow: Receptive, rooted, eager, soulful, or lighthearted?
Side of the Eye: I do not need the perfect word today.
Under the Eye: I can notice what brings aliveness.
Under the Nose: I can notice what brings a little fear.
Chin: The focus can evolve as I learn.
Collarbone: My body belongs in this choice.
Under the Arm: I am listening for what feels naturally mine.
Take a breath. Write the word or phrase before explaining it.
Name the Resources You Already Bring
We rarely begin from zero. The quality we want can draw on capacities already developed:
- courage, generosity, grit, curiosity, mindfulness, or resilience;
- body guidance, tapping, meditation, humor, or the ability to pause;
- friends, coaches, community, nature, reminders, calendars, and supportive places;
- evidence that we have survived and learned;
- the ability to say no, adjust, or take a baby step.
Rick recognized generosity, kindness, and appreciation as resources for cultivating eagerness. Cathy named mindfulness, supportive people, tapping, reminders, and discernment as resources for lion-heartedness.
Ask someone trustworthy: What skills or capacities do you see me bring to my life? If receiving appreciation is part of the practice, let the answer land instead of deflecting it.
Tapping: I Have Resources for This
Side of the Hand: Even though this quality feels new or beyond me, I am willing to notice the resources, strengths, people, practices, and lived experience I already bring to learning it.
Top of the Head: Part of me says I have never been this way.
Eyebrow: Maybe I have felt it in small moments.
Side of the Eye: I have courage, curiosity, or persistence.
Under the Eye: I have survived and learned.
Under the Nose: I have practices that help me return.
Chin: I may have people who can reflect and encourage me.
Collarbone: I can use reminders and supportive environments.
Under the Arm: I do not have to manufacture this alone.
Top of the Head: Which resource feels easiest to trust?
Eyebrow: Which one can support one baby step?
Side of the Eye: My existing strengths can serve a new expression.
Under the Eye: I can borrow steadiness from an ecosystem.
Under the Nose: I can ask for feedback from safe people.
Chin: I can appreciate what I already embody.
Collarbone: Resources reduce the need for adrenaline.
Under the Arm: Natural energy can have more room to move.
Take a breath. List three inner resources and three outer resources.
Stack the Whys Until the Quality Has Roots
Why does this emotional quality matter?
Because it feels good is a complete answer. Keep going if more is alive:
- It feels like returning to a natural state trauma suppressed.
- I want to radiate my truth instead of muffling it.
- I want to be more self-loving.
- It will help me care for myself and others with greater integrity.
- I want a child or person I love to see this quality embodied.
- It supports the work, relationships, and world I want to co-create.
Stacked whys become an energetic ecosystem we can revisit during depleted seasons. They are not rewards at the end. The practice itself is the infinite game.
If the fear of selfishness arises, include loved ones honestly without making them the sole reason. A why needs resonance inside us or it becomes another role.
Tapping: It Is Safe for This to Matter to Me
Side of the Hand: Even though wanting this experience for myself can feel selfish, exposed, or too hopeful, it matters to me for reasons that reach my own heart and may also nourish the people and spaces I love.
Top of the Head: Who am I to focus on how I want to feel?
Eyebrow: Shouldn’t I be producing something measurable?
Side of the Eye: Part of me expects judgment or demands.
Under the Eye: If I become stronger, people may want more from me.
Under the Nose: If I become visible, I may scare myself.
Chin: No wonder I have kept parts of me small.
Collarbone: This quality matters because it feels deeply right.
Under the Arm: My experience belongs in my life.
Top of the Head: I can let this nourish my own being.
Eyebrow: I can model it without performing it.
Side of the Eye: I can use boundaries when others pull.
Under the Eye: I can share with people who respect the process.
Under the Nose: I can return to my whys when the season changes.
Chin: This is a direction, not a demand.
Collarbone: I am allowed to cultivate what matters to me.
Under the Arm: My thriving can have roots and reasons.
Take a breath. Complete This matters to me because… until one answer produces a felt yes.
Expect Blocks Without Turning Them into Stop Signs
Blocks may be emotional, physical, relational, financial, practical, or psychological. Fear can feel like proof that the direction is wrong when it may mean we need a smaller step, another skill, protection, or support.
Common blocks include:
- other people’s judgments;
- fear of outgrowing a family or role;
- pressure to embody the quality constantly;
- burnout from overdoing it;
- insufficient boundaries around new vitality;
- not knowing the full range of the quality;
- old experiences where expression was punished.
Write predictable blocks while resourced. At three in the morning they will look larger.
For each, complete: When this happens, I can… Build a menu: tap, pause, walk, ask for help, take a smaller step, rest, reconsider, say no, or return to a steady landing place.
Tapping: I Will Probably Scare Myself
Side of the Hand: Even though cultivating this quality will probably scare or overwhelm me sometimes—and I have a history of overdoing and burning out—I can prepare choices now without abandoning what matters.
Top of the Head: I am probably going to scare myself.
Eyebrow: I might become overwhelmed.
Side of the Eye: I might pressure myself to do this perfectly.
Under the Eye: I might move too fast and burn out.
Under the Nose: I might worry that other people want more.
Chin: These are predictable blocks, not prophecy.
Collarbone: I can pause and tap.
Under the Arm: I can turn toward my resources.
Top of the Head: I can take a powerful walk or timeout.
Eyebrow: I can choose a smaller, softer step.
Side of the Eye: I can close the door and replenish.
Under the Eye: I do not have to feel this way all the time.
Under the Nose: I can explore the full emotional range.
Chin: A quiet version may be authentic too.
Collarbone: I can land in presence, awareness, or self-acceptance.
Under the Arm: Recalibration is part of the practice.
Take a breath. Choose a steady landing state for days when the focal quality is unavailable.
Explore the Range, Not a Caricature
Every quality has tones. Eagerness may be a quiet radiance, active engagement, or exuberant let’s do it. Over-eagerness may carry desperation, pressure, or disregard for the we-space. Lion-heartedness can be mindful courage rather than charging every battle.
We do not need to be the focal quality all the time. Turtle mode, solitude, awareness, calm, or rest can be honorable landing places. The aim is flexibility, not emotional monoculture.
Different we-spaces may welcome different portions of us. Family may hold a genuine slice while friendship, community, work, or artistry receives more. Growth does not require dragging every relationship into the same depth.
Practices for Living This Skill
Choose a Felt Quality
Use emotional vocabulary for inspiration, then verify the word in your body. Let it evolve.
Create a Lens Question
Ask during ordinary moments: What would deep connection, ease, harmony, or eagerness notice or invite here?
Inventory Inner and Outer Resources
Name capacities, people, practices, environments, and reminders that support the quality.
Stack Your Whys
Keep asking why until the answer feels rooted rather than performative. Save the list for depleted seasons.
Predict the Blocks
Write When ___ happens, I can ___. Give the primitive brain several believable moves.
Define the Range
Describe soft, medium, strong, and overextended forms. Choose a safe landing state.
Use Gentle Reminders
Post-it notes, calendar prompts, an object, a friend, or a daily question can return attention without scolding.
Review for Evidence, Not Perfection
At week’s end, notice moments when the quality appeared, what supported it, what blocked it, and what you learned.
Bringing It Into Your Life
The coming year is not asking us to perform a perfected identity. It offers a landscape in which one meaningful quality can become more familiar, nuanced, supported, and embodied.
We choose a lens. We bring resources and reasons. We expect blocks, practice boundaries, explore range, and return without punishment. At the end, the gift is not a completed checkbox. It is that this quality has become more available to us—and therefore more available to the future we are creating.
Choose what matters. Resource the practice. Let the year teach you its living form.
Continue the Conversation
Questions, reflections, and real-life examples are welcome. Continue the conversation about Thriving in the Coming Year in the Thriving Now Center.