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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems and happy New Year, welcome to twenty twenty one. We are past it. We've gotten through one of probably one of the worst years that I can remember as far as the amount of things that happened last year. But we are here.

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We made it. We're into twenty, twenty one. If you had fantastic things happen to you last year, I love that for you. But a lot of people did not have good things happen. So hoping that twenty, twenty one brings about some more joy and some more wins for us today. I wanted to talk to you about resolutions and specifically what you can do other than making New Year's resolutions. Now, I'm not saying don't make resolutions at all.

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I'm actually still working on my goals and intentions for next year. That's what I call them, goals and intentions versus resolutions. I'm not really resolving to change things, but what I intend to do, my intentions, my goals for the next year. I've got a few more days on working those out and figuring out what I want to do. So if you have figured out what you're doing for the next year, go ahead and tag me on Instagram.

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I'm at Miranda Merten. I would love to see some of the things you guys are doing. But specifically what I want to talk about today is what you can do other than making resolutions, sometimes making resolutions and then not finishing them or not succeeding at them can be kind of a bummer. So what I like to do is throw in some things in the mix that you can actually feel like you've accomplished some stuff or done some quick wins or add a little positivity into your life, because I get tired of making the same resolutions and then looking back on the year and saying, OK, I made five and I only did one or two.

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That's not usually a good percentage of what you've done. So you can do this throughout the year. You can do them at the beginning of the year, kind of just to give you a boost and get you back into completing your thing. So I did a blog post on this last year. I will link to a down in the show notes if you want to read the whole thing. But I'll just touch base on the five things that you can do other than make resolutions.

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And the first one is review your Amazon purchases. So I try to do this at the beginning of every year. You're going to log into Amazon and leave a meaningful review for items that you purchased in the previous year. And in this case, it's everything you purchased in twenty twenty, probably excluding anything you purchased in the last few weeks because you probably haven't had time to use it. So leave out the last month or so. Just focus on everything that you've done before that anything small that's kind of obvious.

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Maybe you just bought a decorative plant. It's a plant. It looks good. Start move on. But if there's something in there that's actually has a function and you have used it and you want to write about it, those are the things I'm talking about. I love doing this because it's kind of like a pay it forward. I use the Amazon reviews highly. I put a lot of weight in them when I go to Amazon to purchase things.

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So I appreciate the people that take time to leave meaningful reviews. So go into your. Account and look at those things that you really think need a review or you can add some value to a lot of times we jump in too quickly on our reviews. They come the first week and we test them out and we're using them and it's fantastic. And then we don't have a chance really to use them. Before we go into that review. We use it for a few months or a few weeks and maybe it stops working or it isn't working as you intended.

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Most people don't go back to that review to edit it. Some people do. I do see edits on there, but a lot of people don't go back into the reviews. So that's why I say to wait that way. You've used it for a few months or maybe even you bought it in January and you've had a chance to use the whole year. And you can definitely add some insight to that. If you bought an exercise bike at the beginning of twenty twenty and now it's it's working great.

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It's still working great. You want to go ahead and put that in there. It is quality and it stands the test of time. OK, number to write a letter to yourself. This is a good one for reflection and you want to write the current letter before you open any previous letters if you did this last year, just so you're not influenced by what you wrote previously. So you can handwrite a letter either. You can either do this as a Christmas tradition to where you handwrite the letters on Christmas Eve and put them in the stockings.

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If you already did it the previous year, then maybe your old stocking, your old letters already in the stocking. So you pull those out on Christmas Day and read them as a family. That's a good tradition. Or you can do it for New Years, where you write the letter New Year's Eve and then on New Year's Day you can pull it out and then read what you wrote last year. Obviously, if you're starting the tradition new, you won't have a letter for last year, but it's good for going forward.

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You want to write in this letter, you know where you are now, kind of like a journal entry for your whole your thoughts on the whole year where you are now, where you would like to be, how your year went. Did you think it went as it should? Maybe you can put your goals and intentions in this letter at the same time, and then when you open it up next year, you can compare and you can see your state of mind.

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Where you happier back then or are you happier now in business? Did things pan out for you the way that you thought they were? Maybe you were on a journey for a healthy lifestyle. How did that work out for you? It's always good to look back on those things because we kind of forget what we actually set unless we write them down and put them somewhere. We forget our intentions. We create these big words or phrases of the year, and then we kind of put them on the back burner or maybe they're on a bulletin board somewhere, but we don't look at them.

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That doesn't really do you any good, does it? So reading the letter that you wrote last year, kind of comparing the two, it gives you a little insight on how you can move forward, things you can change. Maybe you want to create more intention around the things that you noticed that you kind of fall off on. So that's a way to help that. There's also a website called Future Me dot org where you can actually type a letter to yourself and deliver it to yourself as an email, which is also pretty cool.

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So you can either set a specific date on there or you can say one year from now, three years from now, or five years from now. You can also make it a private letter so that only you get it or you can make it a public an anonymous letter. So it will go in their public database to where it'll be listed on their website. And you can go read everybody's letters, but they're anonymous. It's not tied to you.

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So if you wanted to do that, that's an option as well. It's kind of cool. I did the futureme.org letter one year and this email from myself popped up in my inbox. And at first I was kind of freaked out. I was like, because I forgot about it. You forget that you do these things, which is what makes it really cool. So it pops up in my inbox and I read this letter and it is it blows my mind.

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I'm like, you know, the things that you think about or the things that you want to do. And it's also interesting, if you're kind of in the same place, it shows you where your weaknesses are and what you actually need to focus on moving forward. So if you do this every year, you can kind of adjust those patterns and maybe change a little of those things.

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All right. So number three, you can create a vision board. I know a lot of people already do this, so this is nothing new. I wrote a blog post on this. It's called Vision Boards Manifest Your Dream Business and Life. I will leave a link to it done in the show notes. You can find it at Mirandamerten.com forward slash vision. Dashboards. And there's also a free checklist included in that, but it's a pretty lengthy blog post showing you how to create a vision board.

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So if you are unsure of where to start or what you want to include, go ahead and read that post. Some people swear by vision boards and do them every year, and it might be a good option for you if you're visually motivated. So go ahead and try it out. If you do post it or you start it, tag me on Instagram. I'm at Miranda Merten. I would love to take a look at your vision boards. All right.

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Number four is do a bucket list challenge or create a bucket list. You can create a bucket list either for the upcoming year or you can create one for the next three or five years. However you like to do that. If you're motivated to move a little quicker, then you can do that. Obviously, if you had done this in twenty twenty and you had a lot of travel on there, you probably didn't get a lot of travel done.

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But there's a lot of things you can add to your bucket list, you know, doing staycations, baking or cooking, reading books, watching certain types of movies. I created a giant bucket list and I actually think I'll go through and update mine to change those, because, you know, if you created the list two years ago, some of that stuff on there might not be appealing to you anymore. If you said, hey, I'm going to go down to the orange groves and pick oranges.

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But that's not really a thing you're interested to doing anymore, then it's fine to change it. You know, these bucket lists aren't set in stone. You can change them. You can add new things. I've got a reading list and a movie list and a one giant bucket list. So I actually do need to go back in and update those. Mine is a five year list. So, you know, by the time I forget when I did that one, so I think I have about three or four years left on it.

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So I'm going to go back in and update my lists and I challenge you to do that, too.

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And I actually have a fourteen day bucket list challenge. If you're interested in that, I will drop the link to that. Down in the show notes, you can get your email prompts delivered directly to you and it helps you. Number one, create a bucket list. And then number two, you'll get a prompt every day to choose a certain day or a certain item off that list.

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So it'll say choose item number twenty five on your bucket list and do it. Or it'll say if there's a movie on your list, go ahead and watch it. Something like that. So fourteen day challenge, super fun. It just gets you jumpstarted into doing things and you can do this any time throughout the year. I would recommend even like maybe a couple times a year.

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Do you the bucket list challenge and kind of especially at the end of January and the end of February when we are kind of trickling off on our resolutions and you are looking for a jump start, everything is kind of getting stale. Pull out your bucket list and say, hey, what can I do on here? Or pull out your resolutions list and revamp it and say, how can I revamp or start over here? All right. And the last thing that you can do is do less.

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Just do less. You don't have to if you're not one of these people that are going to have this whole big plan for Q1 and everything's mapped out and you've got your year on the wall and you know, you've got fifteen intentions and five resolutions. You don't have to do that. So don't feel less than if you aren't one of these people that are planning everything. We see it everywhere. Everybody's got their words of the year and they're phrases of the year and everything.

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So gung ho. The gyms are packed in February. Well, maybe not this year because of covid still going on, but you know what I mean. Truth be told, a lot of people end up falling off the wagon to begin with. So just do less. It's OK to choose just one or two things that you really want to focus on if you've ever read that book. The one thing I believe it was Gary Keller, if you've ever read that book, just focus on one thing.

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And if you focus on the one thing, you're probably going to do better anyways than everybody else who's focusing on all this other stuff. And I've got twenty five things on my bucket list and I'm going to do two per month and it's going to be fantastic. Just do less. You can even set an intention to do less, maybe meditate or bask in silence, do less social media, whatever. Do less means for you if. You're normally working 14 hour days, maybe pair it back a little, have the intention of start times and end times, those are the things that I suggest that you can do other than New Year's resolutions.

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They will help you get a jump start. You can do them either at the beginning of this year or throughout the year to kind of give you a little kick in the butt. If you do any of them, let me know about it. Tag me. And I would love to follow you on your journey.

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All right. That is it for today. And I hope you have a wonderful new year and a fantastic celebration for the rest of this weekend in Atlanta, Georgia. And our New Year actually was really cloudy and rainy. It's raining right now. And I know there's a meteor shower happening this weekend and we're not going to be able to see any of it because our skies are not clear. And that's a bummer. So actually, I never see those meteor showers.

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They always tell me that there's a meteor shower and never fails, that our skies are cloudy. But I digress. That's all I have for you today. Happy New Year and I will see you next time.

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Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode. Down in the show. Notes are on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with another bestie who would love it too. And join me here next time.