First of all, I hope you all enjoyed Christmas. It was a great time. I probably ate a few too many Christmas cookies, but that’s okay, I plan to bounce back quickly. This post is meant to shine some light on the parts of 2012 that will help me to make 2013 one of the best years ever. And I really do believe it will be one of my best years ever.

Where did 2012 go? Seriously, it’s a blur; a total flash in the pan. It was a great year; a welcomed relief from the doozy of a year that was my 2011. I want to do a little 2012 recap to reflect on some major moments and clear the way for 2013.

1) Starting the New Year off right! New Year’s Eve 2012 was one of the most fun NYE celebrations I’d had in a while. I’m really into staying low-key on NYE, and that’s what we decided to do last year. We invited a bunch of our amazing friends and family over to the house and we all wore ugly sweaters. That definitely spiced things up. It was just plain old fun and no stress. Cheers to ringing in the New Year in style.

2) Realizing that by doing something you love, you can be truly happy. We’ve all heard the chatter about how work doesn’t feel like work when you follow your passion. I’d have to agree for the most part. I LOVE what I do; I am passionate about it, but I won’t lie and say it’s not hard work. I think doing what you love just softens the blow. I am constantly thinking about the people I work with on a daily basis. Making my people happier, healthier, and better all around is my goal each day. I have realized that by doing what I love, work feels less like work and more like striving for satisfaction. Not just feeling like a hamster running on a wheel, but making genuine progress toward greatness all the time. It’s a really good feeling.

3) Becoming very comfortable in my own skin.
I have struggled with body image for the majority of my life. I became conscious of what I looked like while in middle school and went through phases where I was very fixated on this and even based my self-worth on whether or not I felt like I “looked good”. As a young women this was really hard to avoid. I think it’s even worse these days. Girls and women (and men too) are bombarded with images of an unattainable perfection that is unrealistic and in many cases, impossible. Makes me sad. Anyway, 2012 was a huge turning point for me. Staying committed to my training and my nutrition allows me to feel amazing on a daily basis. I surround myself with positive, healthy, like-minded people. These days I am much more concerned with my performance in the gym than what I look like. When you treat your body like the amazing machine it is; when you respect it, and feed it the fuel it wants to be fed, it responds in a really cool way. It performs how you want it to perform and it looks how you want it to look.

4) Letting go. When I let go of some things that I once considered to be staples in my life, I realized that I didn’t need them as much as I thought I did. I’m not going to go into a lot of detail here, because the concept is very simple. Evaluate your life and identify what’s not going right. If you’re not getting anything positive from your interactions with these things, people, foods etc, let them go. It’s much easier said than done, but once you get the guts to do it, you will feel better. Once you do this you will automatically have more capacity for the good stuff!

5) Push your comfort zone. I’m still working on this, and I think it’s something I will always need to work on, but I did some things in 2012 that pushed my comfort threshold. The first is that I began competing in CrossFit. It began with the CrossFit Open and has continued with numerous individual and partner local and regional competitions. I’m not the best, I usually finish somewhere in the middle of the pack, but it’s fun, challenging, and allows me to test all the hard work I put into my training. Another thing I did was participate in the Lurong Living Paleo Challenge. I really needed to get back on the clean eating train after a summer of fun and this 9-week challenge seemed like the perfect way to do that. The best part was the 43 other people from The Fort that joined in the effort. The challenge proved to be an amazing success. I am 100% happy that I remained committed and it left me feeling pretty dang good – mind, body, spirit. It seems that by moving toward the things that make us uncomfortable, we grow as humans and we become better by taking those leaps.

Resolutions…Goals…Intentions? I’m not a huge fan of making New Year’s resolutions, probably because most people just talk about them and never actually follow through. For me they lose their luster and never really amount to anything. I think a better way to follow through with a resolution is to make it into a specific, measurable, and realistic goal. Don’t make it super-lofty, put a time limit on it and create a plan for success. If you need help setting a goal I can surely help. If resolutions work for you, please, go for it! I definitely want to head into 2013 with an open mind and an intention to keep doing what I am doing since it’s working for me.

Cheers to 2013.