Your New Year Reboot

Happy New Year!

This break has been such a gift. My husband and I both had 3 weeks off from teaching, which gave me a week of normal coaching work, plus additional time to prep for the holidays, 1 week with my family visiting for Christmas, and now a week where I am jumping into my Q1 Stay-at-home Retreat. AKA Bliss. If you missed my first retreat roundup, you can read about it here. 

I’ve also been finishing up the last of the 2023 Strategy Sessions that I offered. They’ve been so wonderful, and have brought about so much clarity for those who did them. One very interesting thing came through loud and clear from almost every single person, though, and I was a bit surprised. 

In narrowing down the values and areas they wanted to focus on, nearly everyone listed “Community” as one of their top 3. One could argue that it’s because of the pandemic that people are feeling lonely and isolated, but what I kept hearing over and over again was the opposite. That during the pandemic, they felt a STRONGER sense of community. With everyone at home, we had to be more intentional about who we were going to have those zoom cocktails with. People had neighbors and close friends with whom they would sit around fire pits drinking hot chocolate in zero-degree weather. And people talked about their online communities. FB groups, coaching cohorts, online classes, and virtual festivals. All of them creating close-knit communities of people going after a common goal. 

Now that the world has gone back to IRL activities, everyone is scattered, busy, running around from gig to gig, teaching, chauffeuring kids around, and too exhausted by the sudden increase in activity to socialize. 

I mean, I didn’t have “people missing zoom happy hours” on my BINGO card, but here we are. 

One of my favorite communities (online or otherwise) is this one. The musicians, artists, former musicians and artists, and all-around creative people who read this blog, get my newsletter, are in the TFTL FB group, or take part in my periodic Thrive Fests. 

It’s a community based on 3 things: 

1. Nurturing our creative work

2. Growing as humans

3. Balancing our artistic lives with our real-world commitments

As for the Thrive Fests, we’ve done a January Practice Cure, A Spring Clean, A Summer Practice Challenge, and a Holiday Edition. And whether you end up doing every single task every single day, or doing them sporadically as you have time, the comments, insights, and sense of community are always amazing. 

So I’m bringing it back! This one is a New Year Re-boot and will last 3 weeks. From next Monday, January 9th-to Friday, January 27th, I’ll post a prompt for a short, easy-to-accomplish task to be completed that day. On Fridays, there will be a FB Live Discussion/Q&A in the group, and I’ll email out the list of that week’s prompts including that weekend’s longer task. 

The Focus this time? Tweaking and Organizing, so that you can get on with your creative work, and maybe even have a bit of a social life. As creatives, our lives generally follow the Academic calendar, so we’re 4/10ths of the way through the year. Studios have gotten messy, our systems have lapsed (or we desperately NEED a new system) and our habits have, well, let’s just say they could use a Reboot. 

If you’ve participated in a Thrive Fest before, you KNOW you’re in for a treat. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll join us for this round. They are always free, and the comments are always worth the effort of logging into FB! In fact, this year, there will be prizes for most comments, funniest comments, most liked comments, sharing on socials, and bringing new friends in. 

We do love prizes. 

So join us by signing up HERE, and get ready to wake up on February 1st with purged closets, organized music collections, clean brushes, and feeling GOOD. Feeling invincible. Feeling…Thrive-y. 

Cheers!

Kate