64. Setting an Intention – Creating Your Vision for 2025

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple, Dr. Stacy Heimburger dives into the power of setting an intention for the year ahead. Learn how creating a clear, focused vision for 2025 can guide your actions, help you say "no" to distractions, and align your daily decisions with your long-term goals. Dr. Stacy explains how intention-setting differs from traditional goal-setting and offers practical tips for turning your vision into actionable steps. If you're ready to create a year of purposeful weight loss, mindful planning, and lasting change, this episode is a must-listen.

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This episode was produced by The Podcast Teacher: www.ThePodcastTeacher.com

Transcript

Have you ever set a New Year’s resolution only to see it fade away by February? Alright, this is the way we’re going to approach this year ahead. We are going to start with setting an intention. So, I want to talk about setting an intention during this podcast. This will help us craft our vision for 2025, and the more specific we can be in our vision, the easier it’s going to be to pick goals. And then, when we pick those goals, I will teach you how to break them up to make them 100% inevitably achievable.

So, the power to completely transform how you approach this year is going to be by setting an intention. I really believe this is true, and it is not the same thing as setting a goal. Goals are wonderful, and we’re going to talk about them, but that is something we can measure progress toward. Intention-setting is more about setting the focus and the energy that we are going to use as our litmus test for any new things that try and displace our goals. Okay? It’s going to help us align our goals, align our actions with this bigger vision, and then, when things try and distract us throughout the year, we’ll have this vision that we can sort of put it up against. If it doesn’t match our vision, we can discard it. Makes it much, much easier to stay on course when life gets chaotic.

I think this really helps in deleting tasks that are not moving us toward our vision. This clarity of purpose will help us from being overwhelmed, which is so important, especially if you have any people-pleasing tendencies at all. It can feel very hard to say no when someone comes to you and asks for help or asks you to be involved in something. So, if we have set this beautiful intention, and we are clear on what we want for 2025, it just makes it so much easier to say no. This helps us create a year that aligns us with our long-term plan of who we want to become.

Research shows when we set clear intentions, we will feel more connected to our purpose, be more focused, and less likely to get lost in the distractions of everyday life. It helps us cut through the clutter and bring us back to what matters. This is like setting the GPS for the entire year. Without it, we are just driving around hoping we get where we want to go, right? We’ve got some goals, some stops on the way, but this overarching intention—like what our true point B is—is totally lost. Having a clear sense of purpose will help you mentally and physically because you’ll focus on it, and then it’s like this GPS compass.

I’m telling you, as a working mother to young children, I get asked to do a lot of things, a lot of things. And if I have not set my GPS, it’s like squirrels in the yard, right? My attention keeps getting diverted, and then when I look back and do my assessment, I’m like, “Why didn’t anything get done that I wanted to get done? Why didn’t my goals get achieved? Why didn’t I make the progress I wanted to make?” All my goals? Well, it’s because I didn’t set this intention. I didn’t set my purpose, and I forgot to set that—like these requests—against my purpose. Right? If I decide 2025 is a year I want to concentrate on my business, and then someone’s asking me to bake cookies, is that gonna help my business? No. Okay, that’s a no. If I decide 2025 is the year I’m gonna focus on, like really, like I’m gonna quit my job and be a stay-at-home mom, and then someone’s like, “Oh, but I want you to lead this group, I want you to do this podcast,” it’s gonna be a no. Right? Those are very extreme examples, and I’m not picking either one of those things, but I’m using them to show you—if we have set a clear intention, it becomes super easy to say no to things, which makes it super easy to not get as overwhelmed.

There’s still other things that are gonna happen that are gonna try and overwhelm us, and we will fight those battles as we go, but this is a big one to help it. Also, I think it’s very transformational, like because it does give us this clear reason to say no. And I just think that it helps us align our goals as well. Right? I have this theory, and I’ve seen it happen, and I’ve done it, where I will set too many goals for the year, and it’s because I’m all over the place. Right? I really do have a little bit of a squirrel brain, right? And I’m like, “Oh, that sounds good. That sounds good.” Like, “I’ll do all 20 of those things, and for the year, those will be my 20 goals.” 20 goals is too many goals. Okay, but I never set the GPS. I never had an intention. I never knew what I was working on. Okay?

This year for me, my intention was balance. Or last year, we’re in January right now, last year my word was balance, and I did a pretty good job, I think. And it helped me say no to stuff because my brain was like, “Oh, we should launch this new program.” Right? It was all saying no to stuff in my business because I get very excited about everything with the business, and I want to teach everybody everything that I have to teach. Right? And every new thing I learn, I’m like, “Oh, I want to teach this too.” And I’ll create this new program over here, and I’ll create this new free resource, and I’ll see if people want to come to this call. Right? But when I could then go back and be like, “Well, is it gonna knock me super out of balance?” Like, it was—I had to cut back. It happened a lot, right? Especially the end of last year when I was feeling so tired because I was starting to lose my balance a little bit.

It wasn’t until one of my kids was like, “I know, Mom, you’re working. You work all the time,” and I was like, “I wasn’t interacting with them.” I was, like, constantly all day long, on a Sunday, at my computer, working, working, working. I had forgotten my word, but as soon as I remembered, as soon as I said that, I was like, “You know what? I’m out of balance. I’m not in balance.” So I didn’t launch what I thought I was gonna launch at the end of last year, and that’s perfect. It was perfect. It’s exactly what I want.

This intention-setting can be transformational because it will empower you to make decisions that put you where you want to be. Right? If I talk to future Stacy, I’m like, “Hey, what do we need to get where you are?” I knew 2024, I needed balance. I felt very, like, spastic in 2023 trying to, like—I felt very out of balance, and I felt like everything was failing, all in personal and professional. And so when I did my assessment, I picked my intention for 2024. I was like, “You know what? I need to focus on balance.” Because not only do I need to balance work and family, my health is a priority too. Right? So that’s what I did for 2024. It just helped me get clarity. It helped with my overall life satisfaction. It helped with self-regulation. It really helped me, as an inherent people-pleaser, to say no, to scale back. Right? And to really take stock when I was tired and what I needed to do about that because I had put myself in the mix of balance. It wasn’t just working, family, work, family. It was my health. So when I felt tired, and I got invited to do something on the weekend, and I knew I needed to rest, I had no problem saying no.

Which, for anyone out there who’s a people-pleaser, you know that can be a very difficult thing to say no. I had no problem once I had set my intention.

So how do we do this? How do we create this vision for 2025? We have to dream big, and then come back and get small. We get specific. So, I want you to imagine yourself a year from now—your best self, future you. What does that look like? Right? So, picture that person. How do you feel about your health, about your career, your relationships, your personal growth? I have these life wheels, right? You can go through all the different aspects—like spiritually, friends and family, relationships, career—like go through all of them. Where do you want them to be? What do they look like? Think about the qualities you’ll need to embody or want to embody to have those things. Do you want to be more confident? Do you need to be more focused? Right? Are you feeling a little off balance? Do you need to be more balanced? Do you need less stress?

So I want you to have this vision that reflects what you want to achieve, but also how you feel. Right? If you want to succeed professionally, and you have this vision of the new corner office, right, in your cute power suit and your beautiful high heels, looking amazing—how do you feel? Are you totally stressed out and overwhelmed? I hope not. Do you feel confident? I hope so. So, it’s not just about what you look like with the vision, it’s how you feel. And then, we can like—it might be something as simple as, “I just want to feel healthy and energized in my body. Right? I want to feel connected to my relationships. I want to feel strong.” We’re not creating this long to-do list here. This is just a vision of our best self and how we want to be when we’re there. What does it look like, and how do we feel?

We’ve done the power of visualization before, so this is important. Don’t miss out on this. And if you want to do it for a few days—like sometimes I like to do this when I’m driving in my car. I have that long car ride. Sometimes I just won’t put any music on, and I’ll just think about what the future looks like. And I dream big, big, big, big, and then I start to get a little specific, like, “Oh, well, if that’s what’s gonna happen, what do I need to do?” What is this year gonna look like? Alright, my brain has a tendency to go 5 to 10 years in the future. I have to start there and work my way back to one year. Like, “Oh, if that’s what 10 years from now looks like, what is one year from now look like to be on track for that?” Okay, and how do I feel doing that? So, is it health? Am I healthier? Am I moving more? Am I stronger? Right? Am I less stressed? Have I found better balance? Maybe I’m cooking more. Maybe I’m just more connected. Maybe I see myself, you know, just me and my husband on vacation. Like, is that what I want?

These small intentional choices help us start to see the big picture of our time, and remember, we’re setting the GPS. And then, this vision, this GPS, will help us then talk about the small steps we want to take to get there. We have a tendency to really underestimate what we can achieve long-term and kind of overestimate what we can achieve short-term. Right? So that’s why my brain—if I said, “Oh, one year from now”—like the vision it will give me is definitely too big. It’s definitely more something like three years out, and then I try and scale back a little bit. Otherwise, like, because it’s overestimating what I can do in a year, but it’s probably underestimating what I can do in five. Right? So, I think it’s such a big vision, but it’s probably not big enough for five years. Maybe it’s just a little big for one. That’s okay.

Okay, so I want you to do this. Have this vision. Think about how we’re gonna feel. And I want you to take a minute and sort of write down what your intention is for 2025, somewhere visible. If you can find just one word, and I’m telling you, if you Google or Pinterest, like words like “yearly word,” “go word,” or “vision words,” right? Setting this word of the year—you will find all kinds of examples, and you can pick one from there. Okay, it’s not just about writing it down. This is something we’re gonna get to revisit. So, we want to put it somewhere once we’ve picked, once we’ve decided, once we’ve cross-referenced, and once we can really see that vision and we’ve picked our word or guiding statement. It doesn’t have to be just one word; it can be a statement. Once we’ve sort of picked this guiding force, this GPS for 2025, we’re gonna write it down and put it somewhere where we can see it.

Okay, so on the wall, on your phone, on your planner, wherever we want it to be, somewhere where we can see it. Right? If we set the GPS, we need to watch where it’s telling us to go. The same thing like we’re using Waze in the car—if we take it off the screen, it’s not helpful. We have to keep it where we can see it so we know we’re following the direction we laid for ourselves. So maybe we put it weekly on our planner. Maybe we use it as a daily affirmation. We put it on our bathroom mirror. Okay, if it’s something really good, right, if it’s a statement you’re like, “Oh, that really inspires me. I love it,” get someone to make it like out of vinyl and put it on your mirror. You read it every day. Okay, we just want it somewhere where we can revisit it so that will keep us on track and connected to our purpose.

I would love for y’all to share what your intention for 2025 is. Either put it on my social, send me an email. I would love to know, but I want you to at least commit to the vision this week. I would love it if you could just daydream a little bit. What can you achieve? What does the next version of yourself look like a year from now? How does it feel? And what is the intention like? How do we get there? What’s the little GPS we set as our guiding force?

Alright, y’all, until next week. Bye!