I wasn’t always into the Word of the Year trend. In fact, at first, I found it kind of cheesy. It wasn’t until late 2015 that I realized it was kind of genius. Now, having chosen words for the past three years and heading into my fourth, I look forward to the ritual each year, but I also recognize that it’s just one piece of the equation that is preparing for and walking through my year with intention.

In my final episode of 2018, I take the mic solo to reveal my Word of the Year for 2019. Before I talk about why I chose that word and what I hope it will mean for me in the coming year, I also share what I chose the past three years and how those intentions have shaped me and showed up through my work and in my personal beliefs.

What will your Word of 2019 be?

Learn more about my goal-setting experience, Chart Your Year, and how it will help you reflect, envision, and plan your best year yet here.

Check out the show notes at https://permissiontopivot.com and join the private, free Facebook group: Permission to Pivot Community.

Fellow coach, Aaliah Elnasseh, shares about the creative challenges she’s developed for both her own personal growth around deeply meaningful topics and for the collective benefit of others. With her numerous, self-directed  “100 days” projects, she’s explored important themes such as spirituality and healing through the creative lens of photography, writing, and community. Aaliah breaks down how accessible and effective these creative challenges can be in unlocking important truths, developing discipline, and connecting with others.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The illness and life evaluation that sparked Aaliah’s newfound commitment to creativity and the story behind why Aaliah wanted to pursue these creative explorations in the form of 100 day challenges
• How creative challenges can help you develop consistency and the confidence in being able to follow-through
• How these experiments can combat the overwhelming feeling of having too many possibilities and areas of interest
• Increasing the longevity and value of important memories and travel through creative expression
• Limitations and how they can be both restricting and freeing
• Releasing perfectionism through a realistic commitment around expectations and structure
• Starting where you are and building on that in order to grow and improve
• The importance of having a stopping point or a reflection point in an experiment
• Putting yourself in the posture of creativity to allow for inspiration to come, even if it’s not always profound
• The key components of a creative challenge that make it effective and meaningful
• Why Aaliah chose spirituality and healing as the themes of her last two creative projects and what she gained from them
• Striking a balance between sharing vulnerably and inviting others in that process and not making vulnerability a commodity

“Just showing up - that’s how inspiration comes. You don’t wait for inspiration. You create the conditions that inspiration can thrive in.” - Aaliah Elnasseh

“Being an artist or being a creative person or someone who is spontaneous doesn’t mean that I can’t also have structure and strategy in how I go about growing. It doesn’t have to be haphazard and random. I want to have a say and a real purpose and intention for where my life goes and the ways that I grow in. Why not decide how I want that to look like?” - Aaliah Elnasseh

“Instead of hoping that you will create these amazing ideas and find the right idea, it’s more about becoming the kind of person that ideas come to. It’s more about being than doing.” - Marissa Burdett

“The more authentic and the more honest and willing to be vulnerable, and uncomfortable as it may be, that’s the extent that we’ll receive love. The more courageous we are, the more ourselves we are, the more love reaches our core.” - Aaliah Elnasseh

“The shame we feel about having gone through difficult experiences is really costing us our own healing and our ability to be there for one another.” - Aaliah Elnasseh

Check out the show notes at https://permissiontopivot.com and join the private, free Facebook group: Permission to Pivot Community.

After her debut in Season One on “Taking the Leap,” I’ve brought Michelle Anthony LaCroix back for a conversation on how to move through our conditioned fears to do the small things that make big shifts in our lives. From establishing habits to trying new activities to putting ourselves out there in new ways, these small pivots allow us to experience more joy and expand our definition of who we are and what we’re capable of.

In this episode, we discuss:

• What gets in our way of making small shifts in our lives, like establishing new habits or trying something new, even when it’s high on our list of goals and intentions
• The paralyzing the fear of failure and the fear of not being good at something can be and how that has held us back both as children and as adults
• The “all or nothing” mentality we fall back on in order to feel in control and avoid messing up
• How to combat the stories we’ve told ourselves around failure, like “Everyone is sitting around waiting for me to screw up so they can say, ‘Ha! I told you so,’” or that “If I make a mistake, people will suddenly realize that I’m a human being and I can’t be trusted as easily.”
• Finding peace in the “worst case scenario”
• Keeping a “paper trail” of our self-in-progress to normalize our mistakes and celebrate our incremental progress
• The discouraging feeling we get when we anticipate something is going to be really hard and how to shift our mindset around challenges for our benefit
• Going after sustainable success and earning our “merit badges” rather than short-term avoidance of difficulty
• How we often skip out on things that would bring us a lot of pleasure and joy simply because we feel like we have to have a reason for doing it or that it has to lead to something important

Join the conversation around the habits we’ve established and the small shifts we’ve made in this past year over in the Permission to Pivot Community group on Facebook and on our Instagram profiles: @marissaburdett and @theheartyfig.

Quotes:

“It’s so much braver and stronger to take the risk and fall on your face and so much easier to be the Internet troll who is going to tear down everyone’s efforts. If that person’s never going to step up and do anything themselves, then why do they matter? Who cares. Let that guy be a troll and keep on moving forward.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“Anytime that we start thinking about ‘worst case scenarios,’ the best way to combat that is to start asking ourselves, ‘And then what?’” - Marissa Burdett

“The longer we spend avoiding the work because we’re afraid we’re going to be bad at it, we’re just wasting time. It’s an inevitable part of the process and we’re better off investing our time and energy getting comfortable with that truth.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“We need to shift from the belief that hard work is bad to hard work is worthwhile.” - Marissa Burdett

“It’s a lost cause to set out with the goal of avoiding difficult or hard experiences on your way to where you want to get.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“Success is fragile when you don’t have the experience and the ‘oops’ to back that up.” - Michelle Anthony LaCroix

“There’s nothing wrong with being intentional, but our intuition doesn’t necessarily have words yet. Sometimes our intuition isn’t logical. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense. If our intuition is guiding us in some way, maybe that’s reason enough, even if you don’t know where you’re going with it.” - Marissa Burdett

Check out the show notes at https://permissiontopivot.com and join the private, free Facebook group: Permission to Pivot Community.

We’re back with season two of the Permission to Pivot Podcast! Since we wrapped up Season One earlier this year, a lot has happened. In our inaugural episode of this season, I’m turning the tables and having my former coach, Rachel East, interview me about the biggest transition I’ve made this year: quitting my job and going full-time in my coaching business. 

This highly-requested conversation peels back the layers of an often glamorized experience, sharing an honest glimpse into my first quarter of full-time self-employment–the good, the bad, and everything in between.

In this episode, Rachel and I talk about:

• What actually led to my decision to quit my job and go full-time with my business
• Moving from an energy of pushing and forcing and burnout to slowing down, taking a step back, and trusting that the Universe will step in to support me and make the right things happen
• How I’m better off now having slowed down and surrendered instead of jumping the gun at the first several signs of discomfort in my job
• Going from this abstract, “one day” decision to actually going through with it and how it differed from the expectations I had
• How anyone can use a “now and never” mentality to truly think through a decision and form a realistic plan, rather than continuing to put it off and hoping for external circumstances to “force your hand”
• How the Universe has made it clear that this was the right decision for me at the right time, even if logically it didn’t always add up financially
• How to cultivate self-trust through callous-building experiences 
• The truth about what self-employment has looked and felt like for me in the first three months, including the challenges I face around money and finding my focus and what I’ve enjoyed most so far
• How I “deal with” self-doubt and loneliness that inevitably comes up
• The most helpful thing I’ve done to support myself in this transition
• How doing more isn’t always the goal, which challenges the typical societal beliefs under capitalism
• What’s next in business and life and not having to know all of the steps ahead

“The moment I decided to put it on the backburner was the moment that things started moving forward and gaining momentum for me.” - Marissa Burdett

“One of the hardest lessons we ever learn is that you have to be more willing to get what you need than what you think you want.” - Rachel East

“I think the reason a lot of people sit on the precipice and never jump is that they haven’t allowed themselves to experiment and fall on their face a number of times. The benefit of having done that was that you proved to yourself that you’re capable of recovering from things that don’t go well or don’t go the way you expected, which gives you the ability to step out into the unknown.” - Rachel East

“There’s something satisfying about struggling towards the thing you really want versus struggling toward the thing that you don’t want.” - Marissa Burdett

“Instead of trying to fix everything and control everything, maybe we just have to let it be. Maybe you don’t have to know. You just have to believe what’s currently unfolding is greater than anything we could even imagine.” - Marissa Burdett

Check out the show notes at https://permissiontopivot.com and join the private, free Facebook group: Permission to Pivot Community.

In this episode, we talk about: