A gentle start of my workday in our farmhouse in France

bonjour everyone welcome back to the channel I am filming this on what was my first official work day of the year it was rainy and stormy outside it wasn't too cold but it was a lovely day to start my year with intention and in a gentle and slow way as you may know I am a coach a life career and business coach I don't do this full-time anymore but this has been my work since 2007 and I still coach a handful of private clients each year and with them I always focus on being intentional so that you create the life you want rather than life just happening to you and it's so easy to live life by default as I call it and last year has felt very hectic and overwhelming to me so I wanted to start this year with a very intentional slow morning where I spent time to look back on my past year and set my intentions not goals but intentions for the new year and as you can see here I have many notebooks it's always a bit funny I feel disorganized when I see these but but actually I'm very organized because each notebook is for a specific work activity or a specific part of my life so for example one is where I track health and my plans on my health Journey one is for my French Classes one is for coaching one is for our rentals ideas and marketing ideas and this big one actually really makes me feel so warm inside to look at because this is the journal that I keep when I really take time to sit down reflect on where I am how far I've come and what I want to attract more of in my life and as I was going through this I don't open this one very often and as I was going through this I actually saw that it starts in January 2015 and that's about the time where we were starting to dream about another life uh initially thinking we wanted to buy a holiday home in France but in January 2015 there was no way we could do this not financially Olaf was still employed fulltime I was growing my business but we we certainly weren't in a position to afford a holiday home but it was just so fun to see that I started dreaming about that and doing the things that I do and that I teach and that allow you to actually make these things happen even though they feel Out Of Reach and so I wrote this early 2015 and only a few years later this was actually our life isn't that incredible even though this is my job I do this with my clients I really felt that I want to sit down and do this with myself but instead of using my own materials it's pretty pathetic but I actually use my own online courses that I've created sometimes my own meditations even but this year I really wanted to be guided by someone else and so I turned to skillshare you've heard me talk about them quite a lot in the recent months I've been turning to the classes on skillshare quite a lot to be inspired and learn new skills and they are also the sponsor of today's video now if you're new to skillshare it is the largest online learning community for creatives they offer thousands of classes on all kinds of different topics from design art illustration photography music writing marketing and business all kinds of crafts but also personal development and this is actually actually the section that I haven't really turned to yet because I was more interested before in learning other skills but now I was like let's go on there and see what they have and what I like about skillshare is of course you can find a lot of things on YouTube but I find that I get so distracted with all the other things going on the ads and the other suggested videos and on skillshare I find it is a very focused environment where I pick this class that I want to do it is very structured it has worksheets and there is no distraction so I feel I get into this very focused flow way more easily and I found a really beautiful class about setting intentions and the class is designed by a musician she plays the cello and she composed music that she plays while we do the journaling exercises and I found it so wonderful to just have somebody take me by the hand and guide me through the prompts writing about my past year discovering what I want to change going forward and then setting my intentions for 2025 this is just one of the many things that you can find on skillshare and if you are looking forward to developing new skills you can now actually do it for free because the first 500 people to click the link in my description get a month free trial of skillshare [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] la [Music] [Music] for [Music] wow I'm so happy because for some reason my milk frother didn't work or it didn't work with the milk I always have the same oat milk that I get in the Netherlands for some reason that one Foams best and for some strange reason that same milk wouldn't foam and I've tried it for several weeks and it didn't work and I was really getting frustrated about it so the things you get frustrated about when you like your food and coffee a certain way anyway so it it worked just now so I am really enjoying my coffee oh one of the things I wrote down uh during the ritual I did was how grateful I am for my taste and smell being restored gosh and just being able to taste this coffee instead of it tasting like burnt chlorine or whatever it tasted like and I thought I'd share a little bit about my intentions and my plans for this year so my intentions I will probably keep for myself cuz they're very personal but uh they translate to um certain projects and plans and as you know I really really enjoy creating these videos so I definitely want to keep doing that I have a lot of plans and a lot of homes that I'll be filming this year I am also seriously working on my second book this year so many of you have asked about it it will be a different book than the first one because this one is going to be about interior French homes interiors and I hope that I can have it finished um like in the fall early fall and of Summer other than that uh we will be welcoming many wonderful people in the cabin and cottage I'm in the cottage we don't rent that out during the winter so that will start around March April and I'm teaching French Classes to a couple of students that I really really enjoy and then I'm doing a handful of one-on-one alignment coaching clients and I just want to spend this year in a Joyful Way and being creative in many different ways I've also I've talked about this before and I'd like to mention it again uh open the patreon that is um a platform where you can support your favorite creators and so I'm planning to create some extra content on there that's exclusive for the patreons and I really enjoy doing that and I'm really grateful for the little group and the little community that we are there but of course I will always continue creating videos here so don't worry if if you can't join us there I will not be leaving YouTube and yeah I mean it's already almost February it feels like time's going so fast but you know I am looking forward to Spring to be really honest so I never mind when January February and March fly by to be completely honest so yeah that's it I just wanted to share that with you in this video and I hope you're well I hope you're doing the things that bring you Joy and I hope we'll be in touch here in the comment section and yeah I'll be back next week with a new video