Rules Of Engagement

Oh, good morning, Cadre. Good morning. It is Tuesday, December 30, 2025. That is quite a sentence to say. I am in the middle of doing some resting and reflecting on 2025. I did my full retreat around Thanksgiving, which is what I usually do, but. But in the last month, I've auditioned some goals and such for 2026. Like, we have a storage unit. I'm glad we have a storage unit. I'm not one of those people who's like, oh, no, I'm just paying to park my stuff. It's like, you know what? This apartment doesn't have enough room for the two bins of my journals.

At the very least, we'd need someplace to store those until I need them to do some writing. And there's other things there that I want, but I was like, there's a lot that doesn't need to be in there. It's too crowded to be useful space. And I know there's a lot to get rid of in there. So I just did a test run. I went and after my 12 step meeting a few weeks ago, I just went and practiced going. I just remembered what the code was, opened it up, took a look, brought one box home with me, went through it.

You know, most of that box is going to be donated. So that's the sort of thing I do between the time I do my retreat and January 1st. Now, I want to be very clear about one thing. January 1st is not some magic day. There's a lot of energy around it. There's a lot of. There is a lot of magic and energy in new beginnings, either ones that we make ourselves or, or that nature makes for us or that we decide as a community. Right? There's a lot of energy in endings, and there's a lot of energy in beginnings.

And then there's a lot of creativity in between those two things. Good morning. Speak Wonder. And I don't mean in between the beginning and the end. I mean in between the end of one thing and the beginning of the other. If you've read the book Transitions by William Bridges, he is very clear that that is a very fecund, fertile creative time and that most of us are so eager to get to the next beginning that we don't really delve into the gift. And I, you know, a lot of good things I don't allow because good things just given and, you know, work I have left to do.

I guess it's a little bit scary to allow the good things. So I did some practice of that this year I did a lot of practicing. I did a lot of test runs and auditioning. This year I had to learn a lot of new skills to take my business to a new level. And I had to practice a lot doing various things. And I can tell that in 2026, all that practice means, okay, I'm going to do that. Only more now that I have some proficiency, I got to allow myself to be a beginner. I got to allow the world to be exactly as it is.

That's part of allow. Like just allow. Allow, allow. I know Mel Robbins has the let them theory. My word, allow is a little bit like that. Just allow the world exactly as it is. There's not, you know, Grammy, the serenity to accept the things I cannot change. Just things are the way they are. Courage to change the things I. I can. One of the things I could change is I could allow more of the good into my life. Both by noticing the good that is already in my life, noticing the places where I resist to let it get even better, and then pursuing things that I believe would be great and pursuing them full throatedly, full heartedly, which is what I did with this, you know, this fellowship opportunity.

So the word allow has been very potent this year. I still have my allow ring on. I'll have it on until Thursday. I'm not trying to flip any one off, but I have my allow ring on. Allow was a really, really potent word for me. Who will I allow myself to be? Will I allow myself to be the best version of myself as often and as frequently and as long as I can? Maybe, maybe not. Well, you know, but I think I got to practice allowing myself to be who I am as best I can in as many moments as I can on any given day.

So allow, what a great word, is a muscular word. Even though it seems very passive to, you know, it seems very passive. Something's being done to me. I'm just allowing whatever it's. It did speak of sort of relaxation and acceptance. And I have to center here because if I'm allowing everything out there to be exactly as it is, then I can allow myself to be exactly who I am. There was a relaxation and a centering that happened, but even so, it's a very muscular word because for me it felt very risky.

It feels very risky to let go of pretending to control the world. There's no controlling the world. There's no control. You know, I got to let go of this illusion of control as much as I can, as much as I could practice. So Allow. But I have a new word for 2026. I'm not sure I've told anybody what this word is, except the company that makes the small business. These people in Texas who are on Etsy, who I buy a ring from every year, and I tell them what the word is. I have the ring ready to go. So the word of the year for 2026 for me, Betsy Hodges, is magnetic.

Oh, I even wrote it down because I'm going to do a little video with it. Magnet is my word of the year. And my word of the year, I've learned, just kind of is a natural outgrowth and outcropping of what I've learned from the previous year. So as I was working on Allow, and as I was allowing more into my life, I realized there were some things, things that I really choose, that I actively choose, that I also actively resist. Because earning money, earning, like significant money, is one of those things.

I've had money in my life. I've been married to people who had it or earned it. I have earned various amounts of money over time. It's not that. It's that really earning money that will facilitate the fun that I choose to have in life because I. A lot of my fun involves travel and then will really solve some problems in my life because money. Money doesn't buy happiness, but it can solve problems and facilitate fun. That's my take on it. And I would like to facilitate some fun, real fun in my life in 2026.

But I actively resist that as well, because I have all these beliefs about, oh, well, the people who earn money like that are kind of. So I've had to part. I'm in the process of parsing through all that and deciding to earn money anyway, while I'm parsing through. So there's some things that I really choose in my life. Money will be a catalyst for those things. It's not required, but for some of them, it will really be a catalyst. That's just an example. You know, there are kinds of friendships I want in my life.

There are kinds of health goals I have in my life. And so what does matter magnet mean that, okay, now that I'm allowing the good stuff, what am I pulling in and what am I rejecting? Right? Because magnets reject the things that have the opposite energy and they pull in the. Or, you know, however magnets work. I'm not a scientist, but you know what I mean. Some magnets reject things that they're not compatible with, and some things come right to them that they are Compatible with. So Magnet means both things to me.

It means I'm letting go of some things that actually the energy doesn't match up with mine, and yet I still allow it in my life. That means people, habits, belongings. Because I want to have a word of the season for every season this year. So I chose my winter not word theme, not the word of the season theme of the season. Because I practiced in summer. Gretchen Rubin invites people to, like, have a theme for your summer. And so this year, I said my theme is going to be country music. I want it to be the summer of country music because I used to listen to a lot, a lot of country music, and then it went through a fallow period and I didn't listen as much.

For me, for my tastes, there's a lot of bro country, which is not my thing, but it's come back to be a better mix between, you know, there's still some bro country. There's some people are going back to the 90s, which I love country. And a little bit of the more old school, Chris Stapleton, Teddy swims, that sort of stuff. It's got some more R and B inflection and some more rock inflection. There's a lot going on. And so I just listened to country music in the mornings on my walk to my workouts.

And then I found all this music that I liked, and so I'm listening to it more, and I continue to listen to country music in the morning again. So. But I like to have a theme for the season. So my theme for winter is releasing what does not serve me. Releasing what does not serve me is my winter theme. It's my winter of release, basically. And that's part of magnet. It's like letting the things that are pushing at me to. To leave, that I keep hanging on to anyway. Just letting them go, just letting them float away creates a lot of space.

I don't want to fill the space. I want to. I want the. I want my to naturally. I want to magnetize what fills that space. Magnet means I've chosen some things, but I don't have to chase them. What I want to do is become the person who allows them, right? That they naturally come to me because I am the person who allows them. Now, that doesn't mean I don't take action. It's actually going to involve a great deal of action on my part. It's just. Wearing the world loosely as I do it. Applying for this fellowship was practice for choosing something going all out and then holding it with an open hand, trusting that whatever lands in my hand will be that or something better.

And clearly it's going to be something better. So I will become the person who allows something even better than what I had chosen there. I don't know if this is as coherent as I would like, but I do know this is. This is exactly where I am as I'm previewing my 2026. I won't know what magnet means until this time next year. I won't fully know what it has meant until this time next year. But I can know what I think it means when I start my intention. And I also set a bunch of intentions. That was another thing I have added to my planning, you know, in my review is that I've never set an intent.

I set a bunch of goals, right? We've talked about that. I set a lot of goals. But what are my actual intentions? Why am I setting those goals as opposed to others? And I have a set of six or seven intentions for 2026. Like who I want to be at the end of 2026. That's the intention, right? I want to be a person who earns X amount of dollars, right? I want to be that person not even who earns it, who attracts it, who magnet. And yes, my actions lead to earning that money, Right? So that's one of my intentions.

And I have, you know, I have these goal lists that I created and I just did a review of and I. The ones, some of them I auditioned, I'm like, no, that doesn't work. Putting an ice pack on my neck in the middle of the afternoon to keep myself lively at like 2 o'. Clock. They say that'll help the dip at 3 o'. Clock. I tried it. I didn't feel much difference. But really what happened was I tried to try it and it didn't work. So that goal is out the window, right? So I rearranged and readjusted the list.

That's where I'm going to start. I can, I will do that again throughout the year. Some of these things that I think are going to work aren't. And it's fine with me to let things go. January 1st is not magic. You can start on February 3rd if you want to, whatever day. July 17th. You can take my sobriety date as a good start date, whatever you want to do. But you know, there's a lot of energy and a lot of company right now in this new beginning. So I set intentions, I reviewed my goals. I set intentions for the first time.

But that's going to now be an ongoing part of this. This plan. You better believe this is how it evolves over time. It's like, oh, that just kind of came to me. Or I read it somewhere and I was like, oh, that would be. That's a good idea. That struck me and now's the time. And so I'm doing that. And then magnet I. What I know it means now is to release the things that aren't serving me, to become a magnet for the things that do serve me. A center of gravity where things will land on me that are the right, you know, that are for my highest good and the highest good for all.

That's usually where I land. What is. What is my for my highest good and the highest good for all? Because if it's not the highest good for all, it's not my highest good either. So there you go. Last. Last Cadre Live of the Year for Rules of Engagement. I want to end on a thank you. I want to thank Cadre. I want to thank Luke and the whole team at Cadre for giving me this opportunity. JC gets a special shout out because he's the who knew me and invited me to be part of a Cadre many. These many, many moons ago.

Or what's a better phrase, many, many months ago. So thank you. But I really want to thank the Cadre community. Speak Wonder. You are regularly here, which I appreciate very deeply because I appreciate you and your thinking and your particip. Appreciate you a great deal. So thank you for showing up and for sharing yourself and for being an example of what it means to really share yourself. And I'll be back in 2026. I love it here. I'll be back. But until then, have a great end of year and, you know, I'll see you next year.

Cadre. That never gets old.