We Are SO Back & I Changed My Word of The Year Mid-January 🫣
I had such a year of transformation in 2024. So much of my life changed in so many different ways, in some really big ways and in some small and intentional ways. I just feel like 2024 was kind of the launching pad to 2025. I'm going to start by sharing some things that happened in 2024 that I feel like has really set that foundation for that launching pad. Then I'm going to talk about 2025 and what 2025 looks like. With the understanding that I started 2025 in a different mindset that I have now. I actually changed my word of the year, which I'm going to get into in the middle of January, and I think there are a lot of reasons behind that. I will share what I've reflected on since then, but I'm still uncovering a lot of that myself. But let's first get into 2024.
So in 2024, if you've been around, I really committed to 2024 being a different year than 2023. 2023 was one of the hardest years of my life. I really struggled with my mental health, with postpartum depression, with my ADHD that I had been diagnosed with in 2023 at 29 years old, and really figuring out what I could do to support myself in that season, especially with 2 under 2 at the time, and just figuring out life, business, and all of the things. There was a transformation of going from a version of myself that I felt really uncomfortable in and was feeling really lost in 2023 to the person that I ended 2024 as the most authentic self that I have maybe ever been. It feels really, really good, and so I'm really proud of myself for that.
There's so many different things that I can attribute to that. that whole process. I decided to get ready every single day in 2024. I accomplished that except for four days in September because I was so sick. I had a like stomach infection. It was just horrible. I could not get out of bed. I was in the emergency room twice, and that was the only four days that I did not get ready in 2024. I'm not someone who really sets New Year's resolutions, but I do like to go into a new year committing to something that is going to be really intentional in my growth. I knew that getting ready every single day was going to be something that put me outside my comfort zone. I also knew that it was going to have and create a…transformation. I keep saying the word transformation. That's honestly the only word that I can think of that explains it. If you're curious about my Get Ready Everyday journey, I actually do have a highlight on my Instagram that says Get Ready With Me. And you can learn more about how getting ready really impacted my life in such a positive way.
In 2024, not only did I get ready every single day, but I invested a lot in my business and in my growth, both personal growth and my career. It was actually the first year in seven years that I've been an entrepreneur that I really pushed my chips in on some big investments when it came to coaching, developing, and mastering skills that I was ready to step into. It was scary. It is scary to make investments. It's scary to push your chips in. It's scary to commit to something that you aren't really sure what the ROI is going to be because there's obviously never any guarantee, but I knew for certain that I was not going to see the results that I wanted to see and become the person that I wanted to become if I did not push my chips in, if I did not really commit to mastering specifically sales skills is what I really focused on last year in honing in, and really uncovering maybe some beliefs that I had about sales in the past and learning new beliefs, and adopting new beliefs. It was probably one of the best things that I could have ever done for my business. It definitely was the best investment I've ever made. professionally. Like I said, I've been an entrepreneur for seven years, and besides my OBM, she literally helps me so much in the back end of my business and other contractors that I work with who are incredible, I think it was the best investment that I made. Really diving into sales skills and getting this coaching that's very high level, required me to get outside my comfort zone, and get into rooms where I didn't know anyone. I was in rooms with people who make a lot more money than I do, and challenged me in so many ways and have so many different experiences. It was so, so good. I'm actually still getting coached and for the foreseeable future plan on continuing to invest in my business in this way. I've seen just incredible ROI from it, which kind of goes into what else happened in 2024, which was I did see a ton of business growth.
I think there are maybe a lot of different reasons for that. I think one of them was that I really just really took myself seriously. I really took my business seriously. I, like I said, made those investments to hone in on my skills and really stopped feeling like I had to do it all myself or that I didn't need help. I think I had this mindset of like, oh, I've been doing this for so long. I don't know if I really need coaching. I don't really know if I need mentorship. I don't really know. All this stuff feels fine. But I knew that “fine” wasn't going to get me to the level that I wanted to get in my business. It also wasn't going to allow me to reach the number of people that I want to reach with your Behind-the-Scenes BFF. If you know me, you know that the business means so much to me for so many different reasons. The main reason is that I really believe that women have the skills that they can use to make money from home. You already have them. I also really believe that you don't have to stay doing something in your career or just in your life in general that you aren't happy doing and you don't want to do. That it's always okay to change your mind. It's always okay to dream a little bit bigger, dream differently, and feel like there's something more out there for you. With your Behind the Scenes BFF and helping women become virtual assistants, I really do believe that we are doing really incredible work together to help people realize that you don't have to choose. You don't have to just do one thing. You don't have to go to a career that you don't necessarily love, but you don't hate it, and you're just doing it for the money. You deserve to relentlessly pursue a life you love. That is really the core message of your Behind-the-Scenes BFF and becoming a virtual assistant is for a lot of people, a stepping stone to help them get to what that life looks like. It's the vehicle that helps them get there. It means the world to me and to be able to help women achieve their dreams. Whatever their dream looks like.
To see the business growth that we saw last year, and it was honestly really unexpected in a lot of ways, which has an obviously huge positive to it, but there was a downside to it, which I I'm going to talk about next. It was really cool to see what happens when you not only focus on your professional development, but when you do focus on your personal development as well, and your personal growth. Because I was getting ready every day, I really started to refocus on my health, prioritizing my workouts, eating whole foods, drinking water, not skipping lunch, then wondering why I have no energy in the afternoon, or drinking coffee on an empty stomach. These things were habits that I really tried hard to break last year. I'm not perfect by any means, but I think that a lot of the growth that we saw last year had to do, yes, with the professional growth, but it also had to do with the personal growth that I went through. Then the confidence that I had with the business and really in our mission, the belief in our mission. Along with surrounding myself with so much community. Last year, I met so many incredible women who challenged me, and they push me and peers who are just so supportive. I don't need to pretend to be someone else around them. That has been one of the greatest blessings of 2024. I think all of that combined was a catalyst for the business growth. I will also say that I did start to outsource a lot more. As someone who definitely doesn't take her own advice very well when it comes to delegating. I did start to delegate a lot more last year, and that came because of necessity.
That's kind of what I'm going to talk about next is kind of this valley that I went through at the end of the year, where the business had exploded and was doing really, really well. I was totally unprepared for it. This is something where I talk to a lot of women in business, and we talk a lot about how we want results so quickly, we want things to happen overnight, we want not to have to be patient, and we want things to happen faster. But questions that I've had to ask, clients or women that I'm mentoring, is if you were going to achieve the thing tomorrow, you were going to get the followers that you want tomorrow, the clients that you want tomorrow, or the sales that you want tomorrow…would you be prepared for it? Oftentimes the answer is no, because you don't even know what you would do. What would I do? If all of a sudden I had all these new people, and I'm like, okay, now what do I do with them? Or you don't have the systems in place to support the business as it grows. And that is something that I really struggled with towards the end of last year. We had this incredible growth, and I did not have the systems and processes in place that supported that kind of growth. I was really playing defense more than playing offense at the end of last year, which is just part of business. It really is. Being in business now for over seven years, there are just different things that happen. There are these valleys that happen, and they always turn into a learning lesson. You always learn something from it.
For me, I learned number one: hiring before you feel like you really need to. Hiring in preparation is huge because, like I said, I was kind of on defense of now I need someone to come in and help me on the OBM side. Then now I'm going to outsource my accounting and my bookkeeping, and do stuff with wealth management, and website rebrand. We did a rebrand at the end of last year. There were so many things happening that I was doing in a defensive mode, trying to keep up and not fall behind in my work, that it really led to this hamster wheel at the end of the year. I won't say that I fully hit burnout, because I've been burnt out before, and I don't think it was that. I just felt like I couldn't catch up. At the end of last year, I also still had my own OBM and virtual assistant clients. I was helping a lot of other women build their businesses and supporting in the back end of their business while also trying to support my own and grow my own. Because of the growth of not only my clients, my OBM and VA clients grew so much last year in their own businesses, but combined with Your Behind the Scenes BFF and that growth, it was just it was too much for me to handle by myself. I needed more help. I needed to ask for help. I needed to delegate. I needed to do all these things. So we made it through. We made some hard decisions. I did make the decision to actually step away from client work myself. That is kind of the biggest change coming into 2025 is I don't have my own OBM and VA clients anymore, which is very strange in a way. because I have had my own clients now for like three years at this point. Almost three years and have been holding that side of the business, and also the coaching side of the business, our programs, this podcast, and all that good stuff. I just knew going into 2025, something had to give. I really needed to be all in with Your Behind the Scenes BFF and figure out how to balance that, especially with being a mom and having part-time childcare. Just needed to reevaluate our priorities coming into this year. So it's a really bittersweet thing because I would have loved to be able to stay with those clients. A lot of them, we had been working together the whole time that I had been a virtual assistant. But also, I think that it has allowed me to have a lot more balance. I don't really love that word, but a lot more harmony in my life with work and motherhood and all of that stuff. It's been exciting because this is actually the first year that I am solely focused on coaching and mentoring other women who want to become virtual assistants and who are virtual assistants who want to take their business to the next level. That's been really fun and really exciting so far. Just a month and a half-ish into the year, but also we have exciting and fun things happening this year with our personal life.
We are moving to Idaho! If you missed it, there is a highlight on my Instagram and some posts talking about the move. We are moving to Idaho next month, which is crazy. We don't have an exact date, but we are going to be moving from Arizona to Idaho by the end of March…the first week of April, the latest, latest. And that's crazy. That's crazy. So right now, not only are we ramping up for this year in 2025 and refocusing stuff on the business, but we are also packing up our house and moving out of state. My husband is transitioning careers. He is going back into law enforcement, which is what he went to college for. It's what he did before we became parents, So, he's going back into that, and it's just a lot of transitions. It's really good. It's really good for our family, but it's a transition nonetheless. So the next couple of months are going to be wild. We are building our home, and our actual home won't be finished until July-ish. I'm kind of saying August because with building, you just never know. So we will be in a rental for a couple of months and just be able to enjoy the summer in Idaho. It's just the growth that both my husband and I went through personally, we just started looking at what do we want our life to look like. What do we want our boys' childhood to look like? Where do we see us raising our family? My husband specifically was looking at his career and what he wanted to do. He started his master's degree, and this was something we landed on. We're really excited for the adventure because it is going to be that. That was one of our things, one of our solutions that we came up with when we started reevaluating our priorities, and the life that we want to live and the things we want to accomplish. It was not having to deal with 117 degree summers, among other things. So we're just really, really looking forward to it.
With that being said, 2025 is looking like another year of real transformation, but I think it's going to be…I don't know. I want to say I think it's going to be less dramatic because the jump from the end of 2023 to the end of 2024 was a jump scare. But at the same time, I think this year is going to be just as wild because there's the move happening, the career transition for my husband is happening, and the business is going really, really well. There are a couple of things that I'm doing to really focus and hone in, but now that I'm thinking about it, I'm like, actually, it might just be it might be as dramatic. It might be just as much of a jump scare, however, like I mentioned earlier, I went into this year thinking it wasn't going to be. I went into this year thinking I'm just going to nurture what we built in 2024 and all of that. There's nothing wrong with that by any means. My word of the year, I actually had decided was going to be the word nurture because when you nurture something, you're taking care of something so that it can grow, but about halfway through January, I listened to a podcast episode by the Sales Girl podcast. Kat was talking about becoming a rich mom. This episode is so, so, so good. Something she said in there really struck me. It was this idea of we have this idea of maintenance. And that's kind of how I came into 2025, feeling I'm just going to maintain what we have established in 2024. As I listened to this podcast and I started to uncover why I felt nurture or maintain was actually important, I realized that it was not because that's actually what I wanted, but because that was what I felt like I had to want.
I think so often we go through life adopting what other people think we should want, how we should feel, and how we should act. After such a great 2024, I figured, I'm just going to coast. I'm going to nurture. I'm going to maintain. I'm going to not make any waves. We're just going to cruise through 2024 because we have all this stuff going on. We have this move. Both of my sons are going to start a new school for preschool. There are just so many things happening. I almost let that be an excuse as to why I would not continue this process of becoming the person that I want to become. Because truthfully, you need more than a year oftentimes to become really who you want to become. It's not a short process by any means. I just felt like because we were going to be “so busy”, and this year is going to be so full with all of these other things happening that I should just maintain. That's actually the worst thing that I could do right now. Especially with the momentum that we have coming into this year with everything. I started to really uncover this and unpack this, and I started to think of what I wanted my word for the year or the theme that I wanted for this year to be. I landed on the word becoming. I actually asked ChatGPT what the definition of becoming is. The definition is the process of coming into existence or changing into something else. The process of coming into existence or changing into something else. When I think of the first part, coming into existence, it's like I already exist, right? Kate is already here. Hello, it's me. But I don't think the version that I am today is going to be the version of who I'm going to be next year or the year after or in five years from now or 10 years from now. I think that's okay. I actually think that's good because there's the quote that says, if you're not growing, you're dying. I really do believe that to an extent, we are constantly growing. We are constantly learning. We are constantly unlearning beliefs or releasing limited beliefs that we hold over ourselves, or releasing expectations of others. I'm just finding that as I get older, the more I am becoming who I really think God's created me to be, because I am releasing these expectations of what other people want me to be. I'm really figuring out who I want Kate to be, and the version of myself that is the best version, so that I can show up well for the people in my life. I think that it just changes with our seasons.
We are coming into, I would say, our raising babies season because we are done having babies. This transition of no longer having a newborn or little, little babies or being pregnant and newly postpartum. Now my kids are at the time of this blog 4 and 2.5. So it's a different season of life that calls for becoming someone new in a lot of really cool ways. I think it's really awesome. Then when I think of the second half of that definition, which is changing into something else, I don't think of it as becoming someone you're not or changing into something you're not. Actually, when I first read changing into something else, I thought of like a butterfly, you know. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly it changes into something else, but it was always destined to be a butterfly. Its destiny is to change and become what it's always meant to become. I think of that so much with ourselves and us as people and us as women and us as moms and us as entrepreneurs and just all of the things. I think sometimes we focus so much on the outcome, so much on the goal, or the thing we want to achieve, but it's actually the act of becoming that is truly transformational. It's the process of figuring out who you are, what you like, what your dreams are, what your goals are, trying something new, deciding you don't like it, letting go of something you thought you loved and don't anymore. It's this whole process that is the whole point. The process is the point. I think becoming the person that you want to become instead of achieving the thing that you want to achieve is because, truthfully, even if there is something that you want to achieve, you have to become the person who is able to achieve that. Likely, if you haven't achieved it yet, you haven't become the person that you need to be to achieve it. I think this becoming of the person is actually more important than achieving of the thing. I hope you're tracking. I hope you're with me. Because I really believe that the only thing standing in all of our way from living the life that we have now and really getting to living the life that we want to live is the person that we have to become in the middle. I think that it can get really messy. As humans and with human nature, we don't want to be in the mess. We want things to happen quickly. We want things to be perfect. We don't want to have to go through discomfort. But that's the whole point, because that is how we become the person that we need to become.
So there are a few things that I'm personally focusing on in 2025. A couple of those things are really simplifying a lot of things in my life, like simplifying my business, simplifying my routines, “trimming the fat” on a lot of stuff so that I can actually turn up the heat and really pour gasoline on the fire. I think about that with this concept of diluting. If you have a black iced coffee, as you start to add more to it, you dilute the strength of the coffee. So as the ice melts, it's getting watery. You add some milk, you add flavoring, all that kind of stuff. It's really diluting the strength of the drink. I'm not a black coffee girl. Let's make that very, very clear. Those of you who are, are very adult. I wish that I could be that person. But I also know that when I'm adding in all this other stuff, it's diluting the outcome. It's diluting the product. When I think of my life and I think of my business, if I have like all these things going on all the time, it's actually spreading me so thin that it's diluting the things that are actually really important. It's all about this intentionality to really keep the integrity of whatever the thing is, whether it's your offer suite, services you offer, your calendar, over over-committing to things, etc. It's just diluting the mission. I'm obviously also really prioritizing whole foods still. I'm prioritizing sleep. My goodness. My kids are finally sleeping. Shout out to Lauren from Sleepy Beginnings on Instagram. She helped us so much with sleep and it's been really, really good. It's been really good for our home. I'm also really focusing on time management. I'm actually about 40, 42 days into 75 hard, which is this is the third attempt I've attempted 75 hard. The last time or the longest time that I had done it, I had made it 33 days. So we're almost 10 days over that. At this point, it feels like a part of my day. These tasks that you do for 75 hard have now become just habit, which is really great. But I have to be so intentional with my time management. I'm having to get up with my alarm. I am having to make sure I'm not dilly-dallying, scrolling on my phone, or not doing things with intention. Just trying to use all of the time that I have to really be in this process of becoming. The Kate and the version of myself that I want to be at the end of the year, or whenever I want to achieve whatever goal it is, like what is she doing? I've been really making these decisions from that outlook. The Kate that I want to be, the version of myself that I want to become, what decision would she make in this situation? When I don't feel like working out, I don't feel like getting up in my alarm, thinking how would future Kate show up? What would future Kate want to do? How would she want to feel? How would she make this decision? 9 times out of 10, maybe even 10 out of 10 times, I go work out anyway, or I get up my alarm anyway. I think that like looking at it from that lens has been really helpful for me.
With all that being said, I know that this blog was really just a brain dump and a catch-up with your bestie vibes. I also want to leave you with this kind of prompt that if this is landing with you, if you're like yes I want to also become the best version of myself, I also want to go through this process. There's a couple of questions that I think are really helpful to journal on and think about. When you look at your goals that you set for 2025 or the life that you want to live, whatever your dream is, when you look at what you want to achieve or even the life you want to live, who do you have to become to achieve that thing? What does she need to do? How does she move through the world? What habits does she have? How does she prioritize her health, her important relationships, her business, her family, everything? How does she show up? Because when you think about that, then you have the roadmap to becoming that version of yourself. I think it's really, really cool to think about. I think it's hard. I think if you haven't done work like this before, you might feel stuck. You might feel like I don't actually know. Staring at a blank page in my notebook, wondering what do I have to do? And I would just break it down. I'd break it down. What goals do you have? What kind of life do you want to live? Cool. Write all those down. Then in order to do that, instead of focusing on the outcome or focusing on the things you have to do, focus on who you have to become to do the things that you have to do. Right? Because that's where the magic happens. That's where the transformation really comes to the forefront. I'm so excited for you. I'm so excited for you to experience the art of becoming because it's really rad. I can't wait to go on the journey with you!
If you enjoyed reading this blog post, check out our podcast!
We release new episodes every week to help you grow and scale your business! 🎧👩🏻💻
