Happy New Year, Ninjas! 🥷
Whether you’re someone who charges into 1st January with a planner and colour-coded pens or you’re still nursing a hangover from the celebrations, the New Year creates a mental “reset button.” A little timestamp if you will.
It’s a chance to reflect, reassess, and decide: who do I want to be this year?
Confession time: I usually hate public accountability. My rebellious little brain doesn’t like the idea of people watching me, expecting me to hit my goals—it makes me want to do the opposite 💁🏼♀️
But in the spirit of shaking things up, I’m starting a new tradition: an annual blog post declaring my goals for the year. What could possibly go wrong? 😬
Before we dive into 2025, let’s recap 2024. Spoiler alert: it was… a lot 😒
2024: The Year of the Pause
The year was spent recovering (mentally, emotionally & financially) from a shitty relationship breakdown/betrayal, and I honestly felt like I wanted to make myself as invisible as possible. I didn’t grow, scale, or thrive—instead, I paused.
And honestly? I needed it.
But some amazing things happened too:
• I celebrated 10 years in business 🥳
• Spent a whole month exploring Brazil.
• Lost 8% body fat, after a stressful and unhappy 4 years had piled it on (yes, nutritionists are human too).
• Hit running and CrossFit PBs.
• Built a team to help with Lifestyle Ninja.
• Launched a second business as a fiction author and published 3 books!
So while it wasn’t a year of bold moves, it was a year of building a stable foundation.
2025: The Year of Being BIG
Last year I was happy to just let things wash over me, without any real direction – I just wanted to survive the year without anything else shitty happening to me.
But this year is significant for me – I’ll be 50 in March (yes, I know, you can hardly believe it, I look so young etc etc 🤣), so I feel like time is slipping away and I still have so much to do!
And it feels like a milestone year such as this should be lived intentionally….OUTSIDE of my comfort zone, to stop me festering!
My Process
I’m sure that, as a coach, you think I have some fancy convoluted process for setting my goals. So I can trademark it, package it up, and sell it to you.
Well I don’t. I just like to keep things simple.
1. I define the areas of my life that are important to me, aligned with my values:
Health & Wellness (physical, mental & emotional)
Business Growth
Family, Friends, Relationships
Lifestyle & Adventure
2. I visualise where I’d like to be in each area by 2026, and write a detailed description of each, as though I’m actually living that life right now.
Once all the lovely head in the clouds stuff is done, I bring myself back down to earth with a bump by moving on to step three..
3. Where am I now in each of these areas (usually backed up by data, obvs 🤓)? Assess the gap between the current, and the desired future, and adjust my goals accordingly.
It’s important to do this as a whole. It’s no good deciding that although you have a big gap between your current fitness level and your desired one you’ll throw everything at it and achieve it. Cos that probably means you won’t have the time, capacity, resources to achieve anything else.
We’re looking for balance here. Pursuing one goal to the detriment of all others is rarely a nice feeling (speaking from bitter experience 😬)
4. I break down each goal until I have daily and weekly behaviours that will get me to where I’m going.
And that’s it. With a caveat.
I’ve done A LOT of work on identity. In terms of imagining the identify of the person I want to become.
What qualities and values do they have? How do my current and future behaviours align with those?
If you haven’t done that 👆🏼 I suggest you start there. Otherwise you could waste a load of time doing behaviours that feel shit, or are hard to persevere with. When that happens it usually means you’re doing something that doesn’t align with your values.
An example: One of your big values is FAMILY. You love spending time with your family, eating together, going on bike rides etc.
But you choose to pursue a goal of doing a bodybuilding content. The behaviours include eating chicken & broccoli out of Tupperware six times a day, and spending family time in the gym on your own.
That’s gonna feel pretty shit.
So, that’s my process. And what did it yield this year? I’m not gonna go super detailed, but here are the highlights:
Health & Wellness
One good thing that happened last year, is I lost fat so that I now have a healthy & easily maintained body composition. Which means that, for physical health, I can focus on performance 🙌. I love CrossFit, and am learning to tolerate running, so my performance goals are in that area:
- 100kg back squat
- Double body weight deadlift
- Body weight squat clean
- 5 strict pull ups
- Compete in some CrossFit comps
- Improve gymnastics (this is a bit vague, but a decent handstand hold and unbroken Toes To Bar would be a good start)
- Run 500km in 2025 (2024 was 202km, but I only started running in September)
- Possibly a half marathon (depending on my knees 😬)
- Do 5 million steps in my 50th year (2024 I did 4,519,738, so not a huge jump)
I get this seems A LOT 🤣 BUT….a lot of these goals are gonna bring me bigger benefits. I also already do 5 Crossfit sessions and one run per week so this isn’t a huge increase in volume.
The lifting goals will help my mental health – as a woman of a certain age, I’m a little bit pissed off being bombarded with messages in the media that I’m in decline and am far too delicate to be running, jumping, or lifting heavy shit. Fuck them.
The 5 million steps means I’ll spend a lot of time outside, which is great for my mental health. And both the walking and CrossFit will be done with friends….yes my social life is essentially just exercising 🤣
Daily/Weekly Behaviours to achieve this:
- 2 strength sessions per week
- 1 skill session per week
- 3 runs per week
- Usual 5 CrossFit sessions per week
- Eat well to support immune system and prevent injury/encourage muscle growth
- Stretch daily to prevent injury
Business Growth
This is a biggy. My confidence tanked last year, and I had huge issues with being visible, or promoting myself in any way. It was also a tough year financially, so I need to make inroads there.
I now also have two business to run – Lifestyle Ninja, and my fiction writing business, so need to be aware of juggling both.
- Double my revenue…this is a stretch goal 😬 but I have a detailed month by month breakdown of how that can be achieved.
- Set up Fit for Business community and grow to 50 by the end of the year
- Record and publish 50 podcast episodes
- Create new (secret 🤫) programme and launch in May
- More video content – at least 3 TikTok/IG videos per week 😒
- Get Nutrition & Performance Challenge in more gyms/corporates
- Get 4 paid speaking gigs
- Write and publish 12 books in my current genre and 2 in a new genre
I think these are a good mix that’ll bring me financial stability, business growth, personal growth and opportunities to get outside my comfort zone (particularly speaking gigs 🙈), and also aligns with one of my values – leaving people in a better state than you found them.
Daily/Weekly Behaviours to achieve this:
- Do something to promote my business daily (a post, a conversation, a podcast, networking event etc)
- Write 2500 words of fiction daily
- Eat well to support mental clarity and prevent sickness
- Daily meditation to build resilience
- Use Asana and time blocking to stay organised
- Weekly planning session on a Sunday
This is intentionally simple, as there are underpinning strategies already defined to support this.
Family, Friends & Relationships
This is super simple.
- Say YES more
- More visits to see my family
Although I love being with friends, the actual process of getting myself to a social event involves a lot of second guessing and overthinking. I’m not a natural extrovert, although I’m working on a lot of mindset stuff to overcome this 😬
Especially important as I’ll be living on my own for the first time in five years, so a conscious effort to not turn into a hermit is needed.
The more observant among you will see there’s no goal around romantic relationships. This is entirely intentional 💁🏼♀️
Daily/Weekly Behaviours to achieve this:
- Save a small weekly amount to go towards visiting my family, who live an expensive train ride away!
- See or speak to someone every day
- Daily meditation to help the mind monkeys
- Journal & CBT every day to work through unhelpful thought patterns.
Lifestyle & Adventure
I’m about to achieve a big goal in this area – I’m moving to a new flat, where I’ll be living on my own for the first time in five years, so that’ll tick a lot of boxes re stability and security. I also have a huge list of things I’d like to do in my 50th year, but they’re very much dependant on finances and business growth!
- Go on holiday
- Have 5 weekends away doing various activities for birthday celebrations
- Make my new home somewhere I love being
- Reduce unnecessary spending (cancel subscriptions etc)
I haven’t defined daily/weekly behaviours for this one. What this area looks like is largely dependant on how well I do with my business and financial goals, so fingers crossed for a good year!
From coaching women just like me, I know that tracking data is important so you can course correct quickly, so of course I’ll be tracking my goals in various ways.
Some of the tools I use:
- My infamous ‘spreadsheet’ 🤣 – all of my clients fill this in, to varying degrees, and I also have a version I run my life off too. If you don’t know where you are, how can you improve?
- Garmin watch – I love seeing my steps, workouts, VO2 Max and all the nerdy stuff
- MyFitnessPal – I wanna know I’m getting a decent amount of protein every day
- Headspace – daily meditation keeps me sane
- CBT resources – I use the same resources I’ve created for my clients, to help me work through and mind monkeys
- Beyond The Whiteboard – for tracking my CrossFit progress
- Asana for keeping track of my work
Wow – that was a long read! Thanks for sticking around!
I’ll do a quarterly review to let you know how I’m getting on
What About You?
Enough about me—what are your goals for 2025? Drop them in the comments or message me—I’d love to hear them!
And if you need help staying healthy, happy, and sane while smashing your goals, check out the ways we can work together here.
Here’s to a BIG, bold 2025! 🥂