So, as you probably know, I will be starting a new round of Go Team posts on January 1 – Go Team 2026!- but this is my very last Go Team post for 2025 and I have a very important message for you:
I AM SO PROUD OF YOU!
I am proud of your efforts.
I am proud of the way you keep picking yourself up.
I’m proud of the way you keep trying.
I’m proud of the things you decided to do.
I’m proud of the the things you decided NOT to do.
I’m proud of the way you poured your energy into certain things and chose NOT to pour it into others.
I’m proud of every time you spoke to yourself kindly or took kind action for yourself.
I’m proud of the times that you noticed when you were being hard on yourself instead of just assuming those harsh messages were the truth. Even if you haven’t been able to adjust your messaging yet, you are on your way!
I’m proud of the times you chose consistency, routine, place-holding, or even phoning-it-in over relentless perfection.
I’m proud of your hard work.
I’m proud of your rest.
I’m proud of everything you accomplished, everything you tried, and even every time things didn’t work out.
Your effort matters.
You matter.
And you are doing the very best you can with the resources you have and that is something to be proud of.
Especially since those resources can vary from day to day.
I’m hoping you will join me in being proud of you but if you can’t quite wrap your mind around that yet, it’s totally ok.
I’m proud enough for both of us.
I see you. I see your efforts – even the effort it takes to let yourself rest – and I am cheering you on.
I’m cheering us all on.
GO TEAM US!
2025 is almost over.
You did what you could this year and you gathered information and experience to prepare for your next steps.
And that’s all that you can ask of yourself.
Here’s the final gold star for 2025 and I offer it to you, beaming with pride at your efforts:
A small drawing of a shiny, metallic gold star with rounded edges and trimmed in black. The drawing is on part of an index card so the background is white and I have made a frame of small black dots around the edge. The card is resting against my dark green mousepad that I have propped up on my white desk.
I’m writing this on Monday, November 10 (a.k.a. My Birthday!) and I have been pondering* what to write to you about all day.
I knew that I wanted to write my favourite kind of post (a Go Team! post, of course) but I wasn’t sure what to focus on.
And then it struck me.
While I am generally comfortable asking for things I need, my ADHD can complicate the process of asking for some things that I want. I have trouble telling if I am asking for too much, if I am imposing, or if my request is annoying beyond measure.
Intellectually, I know that, as a fairly helpful, relatively reasonable person who will definitely go out of her way for people, I am probably not doing any of those things but my brain will still worry about inconveniencing people.
On my birthday, though, I give that part of my brain a break. Somehow, the fact that it is my birthday makes it a bit easier for me to ask for favours, for small indulgences, for things that would normally make me wonder if I am putting the other person through too much trouble.
And, even though it will be the day after my birthday by the time you read this, I am going to extend the brain break and ask you to do me a favour, to indulge me about something.
Today, would you consider giving yourself a little break?
You know, as a birthday present to me.
That break might look like taking a little extra time to rest.
Or it might look like changing the amount of time you spend exercising/meditating/colouring/chatting with a friend/lying on the floor so it fits your needs today.
It might involve asking your brain to stop churning up the same few mean thoughts over and over. (Try telling it that Christine asked you to shelve that list for now.)
It might mean looking in the mirror and nodding (as in, ‘Yeah, I’m alright’) instead of being hard on yourself about something.
It might mean recognizing, just for today, that slow progress is still progress.
It might mean considering the possibility that you can pick your own goals for fitness or wellness instead of being pushed around by the fitness industry.
It might mean choosing to say something kind to yourself.
It might mean saying no to something that doesn’t work for you right now.
It might mean choosing a fun workout, or a hard workout, or an easy workout without letting your brain try to tell you what you *should* (shudder) do instead.
Basically, I’d love to see you give yourself a bit of time away from any habit or behaviour or thought process that doesn’t help you be kinder to yourself AND/OR that makes it harder for you to head in the direction you want to go.
You know the kind of thing I mean – the stuff that is often described as ‘self-discipline’ but is really just the kind of crappy stuff that a mean person would say to you or would give you grief about planning to do.
Please, please, please, do me a birthday favour and take a break from that mean voice, that mean approach, that utterly unsupportive voice that keeps trying to boss you into an impossible place.
And, Team, I know this isn’t going to be an easy thing to do so I am not only offering you a gold star for your efforts, I’m offering you a heart in my favourite colour so you can know that I am sending a little extra love to help you with the hard work of thinking about things a little differently today.
Go Team Us!
Image description: a small drawing of a shiny gold star with black trim surrounded by small black polka dots. The card with the drawing on it is propped up against a black surface.Image description: a drawing of a green heart with black trim surrounded by small black dots. The drawing is propped up against a black surface
PS – If you want to have a nice snack (cake, maybe?) or take a good nap or read a fun book, I would also happily accept that as a birthday indulgence.
*That word always makes me think of Pinky and the Brain. You know the – “Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?” “I think so, Brain, but what if the chicken won’t wear the nylons?” – kind of thing. So, for your amusement, here’s a list of all of Pinky’s ponderings from the show.
While I understand that influencers and content creators and marketing people are always looking for something to hook their current campaign on, I find the hype to ‘make the most’ of the rest of 2025 to be both tiresome and tiring.
And judging by these posts, I’m sure that Sam and Catherine feel much the same way.
I’m not tell you how to feel though! If you find yourself fired up and inspired by making the most of the rest of the year – please forge ahead.
However, if you find yourself greeting the whole ‘become unrecognizable’, ‘fall reset’, ‘maximize’ approach with a weary sigh, then I invite you to take a few minutes to consider this:
We all have plans, goals, hopes, and ideas for different time frames in our lives.
Some of them work out well, some we need to adjust, and some we abandon – consciously or by default.
All of those things are perfectly normal, human things to do – they are all part of the greater contexts of our lives and, over time, some of them will matter to us more than others. And that’s totally ok.
But, while our brains tend to default to noticing what we failed to accomplish* and to keep us focused on doing more and doing better – we can also consciously choose to notice what went well, what we have already done, what worked.
We can choose to notice our victories – planned, unplanned, large, and small.
I happen to think that this is a GREAT time of year** to reflect on the things that went right so far in 2025 – the activities and events we enjoyed, the things we accomplished, the stuff we learned – and celebrate them.
And, if we feel like it, we can try to add more of those fun, victorious things into the months ahead.
It’s totally ok to add other unrelated goals, of course, that’s up to you. Just don’t think that you MUST add stuff or that you have to always be pushing yourself to go bigger and get better at everything all the time.
Oh, and while I’m at it – Don’t forget that the whole ‘end of the year’ time frame is actually pretty arbitrary – especially for personal goals – and you can start and finish things at any time that suits you.
So, Team, today and always, I invite you to notice and celebrate your victories, to go easy on yourself for the things that didn’t work out, and to be gentle and kind to yourself throughout the whole process.
Here’s your gold star for your efforts.
Go Team Us!
Image description: a small drawing of a gold star against a background of closed spirals drawn in black ink. The star and the drawing are both framed in black. The drawing is propped upright against a green surface on a white desk.
*While we’re at it, let’s practice going easy on ourselves about all of this stuff. I’m not suggesting that we must only do easy things and I am definitely not suggesting that we avoid challenges- doing hard things, learning, and challenging ourselves helps us to shape our lives in satisfying ways – but we don’t have to be mean to ourselves about things that don’t turn out well. That meanness feels useful, it feels like being realistic and self-disciplined, but if treating ourselves that way created good results, we’d all be superheroes by now.
**Spoiler: It’s ALWAYS a good time to notice and celebrate the good things and plan for more of them!
I know, I have probably already reminded you about this before.
And you probably already know that you are the boss of you.
But…
But…
If you are anything like me, there is a big difference in understanding it in theory and actually practicing it.
So let’s review it together…
You get to decide what’s important to your well-being.
You get to decide how to take good care of yourself.
You get to decide how you want to move, what you want to eat, whether you want to set goals, if you want to journal, whether meditation is right for you…
YOU are the BOSS of your life and you don’t have to do what’s trendy, you don’t have to be a certain size, eat a certain way, or take up any exercise or wellness practice that you don’t want to.
Sure, we all have different needs, different pressures, different capacities, different obligations, and different abilities and those things are going to factor into our decisions but one thing we can all be sure of is that we don’t need to do ANYTHING just because someone else thinks we should.
We don’t have to do any resets, any boot camps, any ‘disappear for 30 days and become unrecognizable’ *programs that people are peddling left right and centre.
You can do any and all of those things if you want to but if you don’t want to do them then you don’t have to.
Why?
Because YOU are the BOSS of YOU and your plan is your business.
So, Team, please join me in ignoring the very notion of a ‘should’ and let’s really get in to being the boss of ourselves.
It’s hard work but we can do it.
And here’s a gold star for our efforts!
Go Team Us!
A drawing of a gold star with concentric gold stars within it (is concentric just for circles? I have basically drawn smaller and smaller stars within one another.) The background is purple with red dots and is framed with black lines.
PS – Right now (9:40PM on Monday night) boss is telling me it’s time to get ready for bed. You know, I think it’s a good idea to listen to her – she seems to know me pretty well.
*I know they are speaking metaphorically but, yet, every time I see one of those ads, I think, “I don’t want to disappear for one day, let alone thirty. And being unrecognizable just seems weird.”
Here I am with my latest reminder for us to be kinder to ourselves.
…wait, can I shorten that to ‘my latest re-kinder’? Probably not. That would probably work better aloud.
ANYWAY!
I remember reading a blog post or article years ago (I have not been able to find it since!*) in which the writer described her conversation with another Mom at the playground. They were discussing the challenges of getting supper on the table when you have small kids and the writer was feeling guilty about the easy meals she was serving. The other Mom explained that she generally served (carefully chosen) pre-prepared meals or meals that could be created from pre-prepared elements and things she could quickly put together (a supermarket-cooked chicken paired with a salad, for example) because she had decided that she wasn’t in a elaborate cooking season in her life right now.
That framing of the seasons of her life really stuck with me.
She had found the best solution she could for the realities of this part of her life and had decided to let go of any guilt or weirdness about it.
She was fully aware that things could (and would) change later and that she could/would re-evaluate things at that point.
And I think that framing works just as well for fitness and well-being as it does for meal planning.**
Maybe you are in a season of your life when you can really focus on intense exercise towards a specific goal. That’s great but please don’t get tied up in knots about other things that *don’t* fit into this season – perhaps your season for yin yoga will come later.
Maybe you are in a season where gentle stretching is the only thing you have the capacity for – you can relax into those stretches without feeling like you *should* (ugh! that word!) be doing something else. (Yes, it is hard to let go of that feeling but practice will help.)
Maybe your family commitments limit your time-flexibility right now so you have to do short bursts of exercise when a bit of time opens up, or perhaps you can only meditate for 2 mins in the car before going into your office – those practices still help.
Maybe you can’t sit to write in your journal these days but you can make some voice memos on your phone while you fold your laundry – you’re still getting your thoughts out of your head and giving your brain a break.
Maybe the literal seasons are shaping this season of your life. If it is too cold or too hot to follow the plan you would like to follow, there is probably another way to get the feeling you are looking for without compromising your health and safety.
The point here is that life is complicated enough without giving ourselves extra things to feel bad about.
If you find yourself feeling bad about what you’re doing or not doing for your own well-being right now, it might be a good idea to figure out what season your life is in at the moment and adjust your expectations accordingly.
I know it isn’t easy – it’s not like you can flick a switch to the acceptance setting – but identifying this season of your life could make things a lot easier on your brain.
(This framing really helps my ADHD brain step away from the all-or-nothing default that I get stuck in. I’m not claiming that I always remember to consider life seasons but things are better when I do.)
So, Team, I invite you to give this seasons thing a whirl and take your self-kindness up a notch. Let’s find the kindest, gentlest description of your current season and adjust your expectations and your self-talk accordingly.
You can totally do it. I believe in you. 💚
And here, as always, is your gold star for your efforts to name your season and to be kind to yourself about it.
May you find ease.
Go Team Us!
Sometimes I forget how relaxing it can be to draw some patterns. I highly recommend it for my future self and for you. Image description: a small drawing of a gold star against a background of a series of concentric circles in which each set of circles overlap the other sets. The star has thin black lines running vertically that create a striped effect and the stripes alternate in colour between yellow and gold.
*I really dislike referencing something and not being able to give the writer credit so if you know the article or post I am referring to, please let me know. Also, just to be transparent, I may be referring to a small part of a longer piece and/or I may have lost the details or other points to the mists of time.
**Have I written about this before? Almost certainly. But if I go hunting for the old post then I will get distracted from this one so I am working from the assumption that if I need a reminder of this framing from time to time then other people probably do, too.
And I definitely know that you don’t always *feel* terrific.
But neither of those things diminishes your inherent terrificness.
(Is terrificness a word? I vote yes!)
You are always out there doing what you can with the resources you have – even those resources might change from day to day (or hour to hour or minute to minute.)
It’s a hard thing to be a person and while there’s all kinds of talk out there about how important it is to push yourself and to try hard and to strive for perfection, there’s no need to be putting that pressure on yourself all the damn time.
So instead, let’s start with a basic truth – you’re terrific – and then you can add any bits and pieces to that foundational terrificness whenever *you* want (no one else gets to decide the timing on that.)
And, yeah, it’s a tricky thing to remember how terrific we are but here’s a gold star for our efforts to keep our terrificness in mind.
If you aren’t quite up to accepting your terrificness, then the gold star can be for anything you happen to be working on.
Image description: A drawing of a gold star with a background of sets of overlapping concentric circles drawn in black ink.
I don’t know about you but lately I have been getting too caught up in all the things I can’t do and the things that aren’t quite going right.
And, oddly enough, paying so much attention to the downside of things is not making me feel great.
Soooooo, for your sake and mine, let’s do a quick check-in on the things that are working right now.
I’ll go first:
My neck/shoulder/back muscles are responding well to treatment and I am doing well with adjusting my movements to improve my sitting and working positions.
My journaling and relaxation practices are going well.
I’m drinking enough water.
Sure, I’m not doing any of those things ‘perfectly’ but I’m being pretty consistent and I’m happy with how they are working.
So, that’s pretty good, hey?
Three whole areas of success, right off the top of my head!
So, how about you?
What’s working well in your exercise/fitness/mindfulness/relaxation/well-being/self-care practice right now?
And, Team, don’t even try to get away with pretending that you aren’t doing anything right at the moment.
I know you are doing what you can with the resources you have and that means that you are making something work somewhere.
Maybe you got out for a walk a couple of days last week.
Maybe rolling put your yoga mat the night before is helping you get to your yoga in the morning.
Maybe leaving your journal on top of your night stand is helping you write.
Maybe setting a midafternoon alarm is reminding you to move a bit more.
Maybe you are remembering to take deep breaths an extra few times each day.
I know that your hard work matters and that something is working right now and I hope you can take a minute to celebrate that.*
And, as always, here is your gold star for your efforts.
Be kind to yourselves, Team. 💚
Image description: A small drawing of a shiny gold star with a happy face against a background of small black dots. The edges of the star and the paper are outlined in black. The drawing is resting on a blue surface.
*Bonus points if you can stop yourself from spending too long on the ‘but I’m not doing…’ negative stuff that often gets churned up when we start focusing on what we are doing well.
Have I written about this before? Almost certainly.
Am I going to write about it anyway? Definitely.
Will I write about it again in the future? Extremely likely.
Sometimes I worry about repeating myself in these posts but then I remember that I always appreciate a gentle reminder to be kind to myself – even if I have heard it before – AND I am probably adding some new ideas (or at least some nuance) with each iteration.
ANYWAY!
On to today’s topic…
Please, please, please don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you always need to do huge things to make a difference in your life, your fitness, or your well-being.
(I find myself in this trap a lot. I do not recommend it. It is no fun.)
In fact, very tiny changes can make a huge difference.
Things like adjusting the height of your chair or wearing gloves while you use an exercise band, or leaving one water bottle in the kitchen and one in your office, or stretching for two minutes, or putting a cold cloth on your eyes for a little while, or writing three sentences in a journal, or fixing the cuff of your favourite sweatshirt, or turning the lights lower while you do yoga, or wearing a shawl while you meditate.
All of those things can make the difference between doing the thing and not doing the thing.
Sure, dramatic changes and huge effort both have their place but small adjustments and incremental efforts are just as important.
And those little tweaks, those tiny changes can have a great impact on how you think about your plans, your activities, and yourself.
Those small, deliberate actions are a wonderful message to send to your future self, a great reminder that you care about your own needs and your own comfort and that you are willing to take care of yourself.
In case I have been too subtle here (HA!)…
SMALL ADJUSTMENTS = GOOD IDEA
So, Team, today and everyday, I invite you to take good care of yourself in little ways, one thing at a time.
In fact, I DARE you to choose a time to make a small change this week.
It will be totally worth it.
And, as always, here’s your gold star for your efforts:
image description: a drawing of a smiley-faced gold star on white paper with small black circles drawn in the background.
Okay, Team, here we are at the end of February and I, for one, have not made a lot of headway with my goals.
There are lots of good reasons for that but I have been feeling a bit frustrated and down about the whole thing.
But I don’t want my frustrations to get in my way though and I don’t want to waste time feeling bad about something that I can keep adjusting until I get more momentum.
So, I am digging into some RE words.
Return to my ideas.
Review what I want.
Revisit what I have tried.
Reassess my systems.
Rework my schedule.
Revise my plans.
Reinvigorate my practices.
Restart as needed!
You see the pattern here, right?
I am starting over but this time I have a bit more experience.
I’m checking what new information I have gathered since I started last time.
I’m figuring out what worked and what didn’t work.
I’m exploring how to adjust what needs adjusting.
I am going VERY easy on myself about the whole thing.
And I’m inviting you to do the same thing.
So, Team, if you have also been feeling a bit frustrated about your progress, can you take a look at your habits, your plans, your ideas, and your practices and choose some RE words to help you find your next steps?
And whether your practices have been puttering a long just fine or whether you have been kind of going in circles (and not in a fun way), or whether you are into the RE words like me, I offer you this gold star for your efforts.
Your hard work counts, no matter what!
Go Team Us!
Please be kind to yourself out there.
Image description: a small painting of a gold star with a background that’s a large green spiral with black stripes in between the spiral’s layers.
This is the last of the daily Go Team 2025 posts* and I wanted to write something meaningful and profound and so very, very, very helpful.
And you know what happens when you start with those kind of intentions, when you try to do something perfectly?
Yep, you’re right. It was EXTREMELY hard to start writing.
So…
I ditched the plan to be meaningful and profound and super helpful and I am wishing you magic instead.
I mean, I wish I *could* actually work some magic, make this all very easy for you, and then wave a wand that made self-kindness the default.
But, alas, I am an ordinary person with ordinary powers so I’m going to ask you to use your imagination to work some magic instead.
As I have mentioned before, I try to be realistically optimistic when I write these posts. Sometimes things will be easy, sometimes they will be tricky, and sometimes they will seem impossible and I aim to reflect all of that over the course of these daily posts.
We know that pretending change is easy doesn’t serve anyone well and pretending that it is a never-ending slog can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, it’s much better to address the changing nature of the process of change. There will be good parts and hard parts, you will need to make adjustments as you go, and that variability isn’t a flaw in your approach, it’s just how change works.
So, with all of that said, let’s get back to the magic and the imagination.
Let’s step away from reality and the variable nature of change and let ourselves imagine that it is easy to add new habits and to expand our lives.
Imagine that we can wave that wand and put ourselves into the middle of a system that is already working well and supporting our plans.
What could it look like if things were easy?
How would it feel?
What kinds of things would we have in place?
What would our systems be like?
What would they include?
Try to imagine as many details as you can for this magically perfect situation.
Ok, now, I’d like you to consider if you have any of those elements available to you at the moment or if you could arrange for them to be available to you.
Are there things you can tweak or change or just start doing that could bring you closer to your imagined situation?
It might be something small and symbolic like closing a door or using a particular pen or it might be something larger like ‘in my magically perfect situation, someone is taking care of my kids while I journal.’
The small symbolic things could be dealt with quickly, the larger things will likely take some extra work but it definitely is worth considering how they might be able to happen.
See, for me, the appeal of this imagined magical perfection is that it can lead me to realize some specific things that could support me as I move in the direction I want to go.
I know that, thanks in part to my ADHD, I sometimes don’t realize what kind of obstacles and annoyances are in my way in a given situation. My brain will just toss up a big subconscious wall of NO! when it comes to certain things and unless consciously choose to pick that wall apart, I won’t actually know what the problem is.
Choosing to imagine a perfect situation can highlight the things I may be able to adjust in my actual life.
And the same can be true for you.
Imagining magical perfection could be a way for you to see things you hadn’t noticed, to realize things you want to adjust, or to recognize an obstacle you hadn’t previously identified.
For example, in the situation I mentioned above, it may not have occurred to you to have someone watch your kids while you journal.
I’m not suggesting kids are automatically an obstacle to journaling but perhaps you are only just realizing that you find it difficult to get into the right headspace while listening to your kids in the other room.
Now that you have identified that challenge, you can seek times and ways to journal when your attention is less divided. That may mean getting child care, journaling in the car when waiting to pick them up, journaling when they are asleep, or changing the type of journaling you do so your divided attention is less of an obstacle.
So, Team, on this last day of January,
And here is your gold star for today’s efforts.
It’s not perfect and it doesn’t have to be – it’s doing grand, just as it is.
And the same goes for you.
No matter how much or how little progress you have made this month, no matter how many plans you have made or not made yet, no matter how you have approached this whole project of creating the life you want, you are doing just grand.
You are doing the best you can with the resources you have and I hope you are being kind to yourself throughout the whole thing.
I wish you ease. 💚
Go Team Us!
A photo of a small painting of a large gold star against a black background with faint gold dots. The painting is in a coil notebook and is propped against a dark green surface on a white desk.
PS – I have recently read a bit about Best Case Scenario Journaling and watched a video from Body Brain Alliance called A New Way to Make Visions Boards That Changes Everything. I’m sure that I churned some of the concepts from both into my thinking process for this post (and probably some others) and combined them with stuff I already knew and other things I have heard about. I’m definitely not pretending to have invented everything I talk about, I’m just writing out my thoughts on them. Also, please be aware that discussions of Best Case Scenario Journaling can have a big ‘manifesting’ vibe to them which I am wary about so proceed with caution.
*Yes, I will be doing Go Team 2025 posts throughout the year, just not on any particular schedule and definitely not daily!
