An Intentional Conversation for the New Year

The days surrounding the start of a New Year go in a blink. Making the most of the stillness between Christmas and New Years Day can be a challenge. This year my husband and I took some time to go on a hike and have an intentional conversation about the year ahead. It helped both of us create a sense of finality for 2020 and a forward looking posture toward 2021.

I first heard this idea from one of my favorite bloggers Kate Bryan. Read her blog post about it here.

So being inspired by this idea my husband and I set time aside to go on a New Year’s Eve hike and have our intentional conversation.

Our Year Ahead Topics

Our conversation covered five key areas:

• Personal Goals
• Marriage Goals
• Family/Parenting
• Financial
• Bringing it all together

If you choose to have this conversation your topics/themes can and should vary to meet the needs of your season and situation.

Making Room For Yes

A pillar of our marriage and partnership has always been to be in a place where we say yes to each other. We have sought to be cheerleaders of our dreams and have been supporters of the other from the start.

This may mean my husband helps me plot a plan, or cautions me to take my time with a venture. It might mean I have a catch in my spirit about his next adventure and I share my concerns with him. We always seek to come to a place where we can agree as life partners.

Our marriage is really active in this way, talking through ideas, dreams, and goals with frequent check-ins throughout the year or while things are in process. Partnering through life has always meant we make room for the other’s respected and valued input. He’s my best ally and I am his.

Looking toward 2021 with this mindset means we both can dream freely knowing we’ll have the other’s support. So as we talked about personal and marriage goals the conversation took this tone.

Question ideas:

• What do you want to do as a hobby this year?
• How would you like to grow personally and spiritually?
• What is holding you back from reaching some of your personal goals?
• How can I support you to meet or get closer to your goal?
• How can we grow stronger in our marriage and intimacy with one another?

Being Yes Parents

As our kids grow into their own stories we position ourselves to say yes to them too. We want to say yes to their dreams and passions as they unfold for them.

This is really taking shape for our oldest who is in high school. We’re seeing glimmers of our daughter’s heart gift now too. It’s an exciting season as parents. Looking into 2021 and the season of life the kids are in, we were able to reground on some parenting-as-a-partnership truths together.

Question ideas:

• What do you see on the horizon for the kids?
• Do you suggest ways I can better parent their heart?
• What opportunities do we need to prepare for, for them- financially or with our time?

The Family Board Meeting

As Co-Founders and CEO’s of this household we spent a solid chunk of time talking broadly about our finances. This is the part of the conversation when we spoke about travel, budget items, big expenses on the horizon, cabin projects, and where we want to be financially in 3 and 5 years.

This portion of the conversation feels alot like talking shop, because it is. It’s needed though, and by speaking broadly it helped align our focus.

Question ideas:

• Do you want to travel this year? Where to?
• Do you want to travel personally, as a family, or both?
• What financial goals do you have for our budget?
• Do we need to restructure anything?
• What big or small cabin projects do we have to plan for?

Same Car, Same Highway, Same Direction

The last portion of the conversation naturally led to more wrap up ideas. But the largest of these was making sure our careers (which we both have) and the above topics all align.

We often feel like we have constructed a highway with lanes for each of us. Our priority is that we keep all the lanes on the same highway, going in the same direction, and that we’re all in the same car.

It’s a simple visual but I think a powerful one.

Question ideas:

• What career goals do you have for the year ahead?
• Do you anticipate any big changes in your career?
• Does anything in the other areas need to shift a little to allow for continued growth in your career?
• Is there an area we need to flex to make more or less room for something?
• Do these goals feel aligned to you?

Stay Flexible for the Year Ahead

It’s safe to say we were all served a healthy dose of flexibility in 2020. We learned that lesson whether we wanted to or not. So as we ended the conversation we both didn’t have a sense of finality. We know the year ahead is big, beautiful, and unknown. But simply grounding in our lets start here together was a really powerful activity.

I hope you too are able to start the year with some form of intentionality.

With hope for you and your intentional home,