Touchstone 2025

Every year around the holidays I choose a touchstone for the new year. A touchstone is a single word to serve as my intention for the year. It’s a more expansive, playful alternative to SMART goals, vision boards, strategic plans, and New Year’s resolutions. 

Last year was “alchemist”. This year will be… (keep reading to find out!)

STORY: Touchstone for 2025

READ MORE: Resources and videos to help you speak your mind without driving people away.

BOOK STUFF: We’re reading Primal Leadership and meeting December 19th.

GOING FURTHER: In addition to the FREE Set Your Intention for 2025 workshop on December 19, there’s a FREE in person Women’s Leadership Collective and we are taking applications for the 2025 Heroine’s Journey Women’s Leadership Retreat.

STORY: Touchstone for 2025

For those new to my circle, a touchstone is an intention for the year captured in a single word. Jason Fox calls it a fuzzy contextual beacon. I think of it as a lighthouse or guide post. Rather than a actionable, measurable goal (the “What”), an intention is the feeling or style one adopts in accomplishing those goals (the “How”).

For instance, one of my professional GOALS for 2024 was to cultivate my storytelling skills with a podcast. I’m pleased to report that Season One of the Leaders’ Playground just wrapped up with a total of 18 episodes! 

There is quite a lot of science behind GOAL-setting. 

• Keep goals simple and specific. Complex, muti-dimensional strategic plans are difficult to hold in working memory and useless as a rallying cry to inspire others to join your cuase. Same with vague, hard-to-define goals like “do your best”, “become more confident”, or “eat healthy”. The neuroscience of goal-setting suggests that simple, clear, and specific goals like “launch a podcast”, “exercise five times a week”, or “generate $X in revenue” are far more likely to get accomplished.

  
  

• Focus on strengths and passions. Often people set goals to improve weaknesses or fix faults, but negatively stated goals that draw attention to problems activates the threat response, which releases stress hormones like cortisol, activates the amygdala, and shuts down creative thinking. Instead, the research suggests that building on strengths and passions is nearly twice as effective as fixing faults and patching up weaknesses. 

But GOALS are analytical, intellectual things, situated in the cortex of the brain. Goals can also be limiting or disspiriting since they are end results that you might not achieve. 

Thus, a year ago, in addition to my goal I set the INTENTION of becoming an “achemist”. Intentions rise from the limbic system, where emotions come from, where the brain’s motivational system lies. My squishy, qualitative, subjective touchstone was a counterbalance to my analytical, quantitative, objective goals. With “alchemist”, I wanted to mix science, stories, and leadership coaching. I wanted to mix words, sounds, and research-backed tools. What serendipitous discoveries and transformations might be possible? 

There’s great neuroscience and research behind setting intentions as well:

• Seek self-determined intentions that activate developing facets of your identity. Though it may seem like a good idea to emulate someone else who’s more successful that you, don’t. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex in your brain lights up like Times Square when self-determination, your identity, and/or your core values are involved, but grows quiet when the thing you are aiming towards is someone else’s idea or identity. Your ventromedial prefrontal cortex is the part of your brain that keeps you going, even when the going gets tough.

  
  

• Seek challenging, inspirational, aspirational intentions. If your touchstone word elicits positive emotions like excitement, awe, thrill, pride, love, or delight, then you’re on the right track. All of these emotions are inherently motivating. Stay away from intentions that feel too easy or which trigger negative emotions like fear, anxiety, despair, resentment, or frustration. (Anger is a special case of a negative emotion that can be powerful rocket fuel in certain cases.)

  
  

• Seek flexible, fuzzy intentions with multiple meanings. You never know what the Universe will throw at you over a time span like one year. Thus, a fixed, rigid word will keep you boxed in when the environment changes around you, as it undoubtedly will. Change and uncertainty are a fact of life as the classic book Who Moved My Cheese by Spencer Johnson and Kenneth Blanchard so beautifully illustrates. There’s a part of your brain called the anterior cingulate cortex which you’re going to need. It’s where motivation, attention, and cognition meet and when it’s damaged, animals and people struggle to flexibly adapt to changing circumstances. Thus, a flexible, fuzzy intention that can be interpreted many ways offers a way to keep the anterior cingulate cortex active when you need it most.

How’d it go as an “alchemist”?

I chose that word a year ago because I was inspired by the book, the Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho and the Mirriam-Webster dictionary definition of alchemy as “the power to transform things for the better, real or imagined.” It doesn’t hurt that alchemy is actually a protoscience, not a pseudoscience: alchemy ultimately transformed into chemistry in the 1700s. 

Early in the year, my attempts at alchemy were focused on mixing science and stories in my book, resulting in a complete rewrite of the first 6 chapters and it being placed in the hands of my agent in June. Later in the year, and after a good deal of early experimentation with my podcast, I feel into a groove with taking that mixture of science and story to the stage with a series of keynotes, talks, retreats, trainings, and workshops. In a sense, my focus on alchemy helped me find and refine my “voice” – my unique alchemical blend of neuroscience, personal narrative, and research-backed life and leadership strategies. 

The fun surprise was that I’d completely forgotten that I wanted to test the theory that “the key to me becoming an alchemist was to deeply understand what makes me come alive, and then go do that.” That must have stuck somewhere deep in my subconscious because a huge part of this year was experimenting with drawing out my own aliveness in the form of writing, travel, and my own personal development supported by the Conscious Leadership Group. 

So what’s your new word for 2025?

My touchstone word for 2025 is Gardener.

Erica Schreiber, a coaching mentor I met through CLG has two children’s picture books behind her desk. She keeps them there because they remind her of her purpose and calling. Sometimes she invites her clients to find a children’s picture book that resonates deeply because those books often contain a reflection of the leaders’ purpose in story form. 

The Gardener by Sarah Stewart, is one of those favorite books for me. It’s about a girl who loves to garden but is sent to live with an uncle in the city when hard economic times hit her family. In between working at her uncle’s bakery, she fills abandoned window boxes and containers with dirt. She prepares the soil, plants seeds and cuttings, and transforms her uncle’s bakery, apartment, and rooftop into a blossoming green wonderland. In the process, she makes friends and helps all the people around her thrive. 

So, what if 2025 is my year to be a gardener of people? In my own leadership 360, it was said that one of my greatest gifts is creating and holding space for others to grow. So I’m going to build upon that strength and create nourishing spaces for people to thrive.

Three principles around my touchstone

“I encourage fellow Questers to identify three Principles to adopt for a year… If your Word serves as a kind of ‘North Star’, your Principles are like the constellations clustered around it. Your Principles are what you turn to when at a loss as to what to decide or do. Life dishes up plenty of perplexity, ambiguity, paradox and doubt in any given year… Your Principles ought be simple statements that evoke a certain quality of guidance, which in turn might influence the kinds of decisions you make in the year ahead.”

-- Dr. Jason Fox

My three principles this year are three approaches to gardening that I plan to adopt.

1. Prepare the soil - Albert Einstein said: “I do not teach, I only create the conditions in which students can learn.” This quote perfectly sums up my approach to “preparing the soil”. It’s all about creating a safe, nourishing, enriched space for people to grow. Just as a gardner needs to prepare each planting space with the right mix of silt, sand, gravel, organics, minerals, irrigation, and drainage, I’ll need to carefully “prepare the soil” in different ways for different audiences – sunny windowboxes for team development, one-of-a-kind glazed ceramic pots for individual clients, raised garden beds for family and friends, a protected secret garden for my leadership retreats and circles, big wide fields for keynotes, and more. 

   
   

2. Plant lots of seeds - One of the things I know best about how people learn from 20+ years in education is that people grow best from their own hands-on, minds-on experiences, not from being told. That means, my role as a gardener is all about planting seeds – questions that make people think, stories that make people feel, and experiments that make people see themselves and the world differently. Many seeds will not sprout and that’s to be expected, but some will. So the more seeds I plant, the more will grow. 

   
   

3. Sunlight, water, and time - I can be impatient and want results right away. But growth takes time. I can’t write a book in a single day. I can’t change someone’s life in a single conversation. But gardeners know that once seeds are planted, sunlight, water, and time will do the rest. I may not ever know the impact of the seeds I plant but, as the saying goes, “Blessed are people who plant trees knowing that they shall never sit in the shade of their foliage.”

So what’s your touchstone for the year? If you don’t know, please consider joining me at noon December 19 with my best friend and fellow executive coach Tutti Taygerly for a free online workshop to find your intention for the year.

READ MORE: Resources and videos to help you set an intention.

I started on the “one word” for the year journey because of philosopher-wizard Jason Fox. You should definitely check out all of his incredible resources on how to create an intention for the year.

If intention setting isn’t your cup of tea, consider creating a vision board. It has the same limbic system activation as an intention, but may be better for visual learners.

This article about the neuroscience of goal setting by Elliot Berkman is surprisingly accessible. Check it out!

And if you want a TED talk that explains just how dangerous goals can be, and how an intention (what he calls a Possibility) is so much healthier, watch this by Emmanuel Acho.

BOOK STUFF: We’re reading Primal Leadership and meeting December 19th.

We had a fascinating conversation about emotions in leadership on Monday. We explored topics like how to deepen the source of your identity, open loops in emotional resonance, and how every culture has it’s own emotional personality. I do hope that you can join us on Thurs, Dec. 19, 2024 for our final conversation about Primal Leadership and to help us choose our next book for Jan and Feb 2025!

GOING FURTHER: Three upcoming events

I’d love to invite you or someone you know to join me and fellow executive coach and my best friend, Tutti Taygerly, on Thursday, December 19, at noon Pacific Time for an intention setting workshop! We’ll guide you through a process to create your 2025 touchstone. In the busy-ness of the holidays, wouldn’t a peaceful pause feel like the best gift for yourself?

In addition, I’m facilitating a FREE imposter syndrome workshop, in person, on Wednesday, December 11, at 5 pm in downtown Redding alongside the amazing Hope Seth. 

Finally, we have dates set for the 2025 Heroine’s Journey Women’s Leadership Retreat amidst the crashing waves and stunning trees of Mendocino.