The joy of beginning
That new notebook feeling
Happy New Year.
You might not know it, but my previous newsletter, Plotting, has a long history. I think it started life as a personal newsletter — I have no idea what I wrote about. Then it turned into BeNourishd, where I shared thoughts about healthy living when we were trying to conceive my son. Then it turned into something more personal, where I talked about parenting. Then I went self-employed and it turned into an author marketing newsletter, which it remained for the last 5 or 6 years.
I gave it its current name at some point over the last year or so and then promptly took on a permanent in-house contract, and no longer wanted to spend my free time writing about marketing.
Over the last 12+ years (!!!!!), that newsletter veered between personal and professional, and I’ve used it both to market my products and services and to talk about my life with all its peaks and troughs. Different people have signed up for different reasons, but the bulk of people subscribed are authors looking for marketing tips and support. Now that I’m no longer writing about author marketing, I’ve found it tricky to figure out what I want to do with it.
‘Wouldn’t it be nice,’ I thought to myself, ‘to set up a brand new newsletter and start all over again with no subscribers?’
And then I realised I could just do that, and here we are.
It’s a brand new year, and this is a brand new space for me to scribble my thoughts and share them with you. My aim is to make this a personal newsletter, because at this point in my life, that’s what I enjoy writing about and what I like to read. I’ll be sharing personal projects, goals and challenges I set myself, as well as thoughts I want to discuss with people beyond my immediate friendship group.
It’s January!
My Substack feed has been full of people sharing their end of year reflections and talking about their goals for the new year, which I absolutely LOVE. Whilst I don’t believe people change with the start of a new calendar year, the reason I called this newsletter The Joy of Beginning is because that feeling of openness and possibility that comes with a new year is one of my favourites, and I want to try to harness it more throughout the year.
I’ve also been doing a fair amount of reflecting across December. Maybe it’s because there’s been so much bad news about in the wider world, or because friends and people I know have had very sad things happen over the past year, but I ended the year in a place of extreme gratitude for my health and the health of my loved ones. I have a job I enjoy, I have enough money to pay my bills, I have a safe and secure roof over my head and good people around me I’m lucky to call friends.
That means that while there are some things I want to start or tweak or do slightly differently, there isn’t any area where I look at my life and think ‘well this is terrible’.* I am hugely grateful for this.
But I’ve also clearly got things I want to work on, because that’s just part of my personality, and I enjoy doing this kind of thing. The areas I want to explore over the next year are to:
Really make the most of my work. At some point in the next 3-5 years, I expect than many parts of my job will be taken over by AI, and I’ll have to rethink my career (maybe not! I’m sort of optimistic that this won’t happen, but always prepare for the worst). So right now, I’m just thoroughly enjoying having a job, and one I enjoy so much. I have a few big projects I’d love to make happen in 2026, which aren’t really public facing, but I feel pretty motivated in this area.
Start a creative project to help me be more intentional with my spending. Last year I did low spend months from January-June, and I would like to do the same this year, but add a creative element to it, which I’ll share more about later on in January.
Connected to this, my financial priority this year is to help out future me by contributing more to my pension, reaching the goal for my 2027 holiday fund and starting to build my 2028 holiday fund. I do save towards pension and holiday already, but I want to double the current amount. My income is fine, but not massive, so this is punchy for me, but I think I can do it.
Continue to journal most days. This is something I go in and out of across the year, but I’ve been very consistent with it over the last few months, and have a brand new notebook waiting to go. My kids (/my parents) got me a fountain pen for Christmas and writing with it is such a pleasure — I’ve written more in the last week than I did for the previous 24 days of December!
Prioritise health over convenience. Although I have no major health complaints, I was also more ill in 2025 than I have been since before having children. I broke my toe, I had multiple colds, including a cough that lingered for 6-7 weeks, I pulled my neck very badly and strained a chest muscle thanks to the cough. This all happened in the second half of the year, and is almost definitely connected to me starting work in the office at the same time as the kids broke up for the summer holidays. I don’t have as much time as I did when I was self-employed, and I’ve been making shortcuts to accommodate. But there have been weeks where I have prioritised healthy eating and got in more than 10 minutes of daily movement, so I know it’s possible. I want to make those weeks the norm.
Host people more casually, more often. Instead of thinking everything needs to be a proper dinner sitting at our (tiny) table, I want to send more ‘are you free for a drink and some nibbles later’ messages. Whether I’ll actually do this one is still TBC. The problem with spontaneity is that the answer may well be ‘no’, and I need my body to understand that is not a rejection of me as a person. My mind gets it, but it feels deeply unpleasant in my body when I put out an invitation and it’s declined. In fact, maybe I need to take a leaf out of Liz Mosley’s book and aim for a certain number of these rejections over the year to immunise myself a bit!
The overarching thing I want to work on this year is confidence. I often don’t trust myself and my decision making, and worry about rejection, even with people I know love me as a friend. I have come on very far in this area over the last couple of years, but there’s still a long way to go, so I hope to take some more steps along this road over the next year.
So — a new year, a new newsletter and a new set of goals for the year ahead.
How was your 2025? Have you set any goals for 2026? If you’ve written a reflection or goal-setting post, please share the link with me in the comments or by replying to this newsletter. And if you’re interested in seeing how some of these goals progress, or hearing about other personal projects that crop up across the year, please do sign up to the newsletter!
*The only area I would class as terrible is dating, seeing as I didn’t go on one single date in 2025. But I’ve also parked this for the time being (when you’ve got one free night a week without having to pay for a babysitter, it’s hard to prioritise hanging out with strange men — I’d much rather be with friends or even just enjoy time alone!), so I guess that’s partly intentional, if a little disappointing that I didn’t have a meet cute and find someone despite those intentions.
Exciting to be making a fresh start, and inspiring! And sounds like you’ve plenty of great things to look forward to Katie. ✨
I wrote about my intentions for 2026 here: https://open.substack.com/pub/zestfulzenwellbeing/p/word-of-the-year-2026?r=337k92&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
And I’m holding a free workshop tomorrow evening on setting gentle intentions if you fancy joining: https://open.substack.com/pub/zestfulzenwellbeing/p/your-invitation-to-pause-and-start?r=337k92&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I like the idea of low spend months. Sadly my laptop has just been totally floored by the windows 11 update but maybe after I've got a new one I could try this too.
My resolution this year is to communicate more with my loved ones - sometimes weeks/ months have gone by where I've not talked to my best friend or my sister. We discussed this over Christmas - about how we think of each other often but that's as far as it gets. They live far away so can't drop in. So I'm going to make more effort - messages, gifs, postcards, notes etc.