Whew! And this is just the tip of the iceberg. January is the month I feel most overwhelmed, when Imposter Syndrome is at its peak and I feel most afraid to get the year started. This coupled with the neverending messages to, “Start the year strong!” “No days off!” “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” I am overwhelmed and tired!

If you work in the creative space, especially, it’s easy to feel bombarded by the content girls who woke up on January 1 and was hitting us with content left and right…and haven’t stopped yet. I saw people who I hadn’t seen post in months roll out new content on the daily, but I had to quickly remind myself that I deserved the break and slow pace, because when I do show up for my audience, I show up!

That’s why this year, I’ve decided to ease my way into January, ease my way into work and life and rid myself of the pressure to be “on!”

So here’s what I did this month as an ode to self-care, pacing myself and running my own race.

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Signed up for 6am gym classes – I am not a morning person! But my evening gym classes were constantly clashing with school pickup, family dinners, meetings and other events. So I bit the bullet and finally signed up for the early morning sessions. It was hard at first, but now, I’m in love with the new time. I have my entire day ahead of me after my workout and it’s helped with me get an earlier start to my day.

Got back to journaling and planning my day – The early mornings have some trickle down effect, too. After the gym I head home and plan out my day, literally and physically. I’m one of those people who have 10 planners and never use them. But these days I’ve been able to use early morning hours to set and prep.

Strategized, planned and batched new content – After a coaching call last year, I decided to shift the focus of my social media content to focus more on my strengths as a media coach and trainer. So I mapped out this pivot, wrote down topic ideas, produced them and saved to drafts for the roll out.

Also read: Here’s How + Why I Ghosted Everything and Everyone in the Name of Self-Care!

Launched my YouTube Money Map tooklit – It’s something I started working on late last year, so I used this month to finalize the content for this and launch it to my eager students who are excited to get their channels started. The course outlines what I’ve done over the past two years to bring in an extra $1,500 to $2,000 a year from my YouTube channel. The YouTube Money Map toolkit teaches students the strategy I use, as well as my step-by-step guide to starting and optimizing your channel, learning what kinds of videos to create, the actual steps you need to take to monetize your channel and the apps, programs and tools I use to edit videos and other graphics for YouTube. Sign up here!

Completed my 2022 vision board – It’s something we do as a family every new Year’s Eve, but we’ve missed the last two. Even though we didn’t gather with poster boards, markers, spinach dip and meatballs (yum!), I still wanted to visualize what my year would look like, so I created a mini vision board with all the 2022 dreams, goals and aspirations I’m manifesting and praying for this year.

Restarted books I neglected in 2021 – I’ve always loved to read. But over the past few years, life, business and…life has forced me to put down one of my favorite pastimes. I started several books last year and only made it through a few pages. I used this month to jumpstart my love for reading again and would lose myself in a few pages after my early morning gym sessions.

How did January look for you? Did you dive in head first or slowly eased in? Tell me in the comments.