It’s a new year and I’m looking forward to being a better version of myself in 2023.
Happy New Year! Happy 2023. What a year 2022 was! For me, it was a survival year – it was basically the twins’ first year of life and me trying to navigate motherhood with 4 kids. Roma turned 3, Luca turned 5, and the twins turned 1!
I published my fourth cookbook with Feeding Littles which became a New York Times best-seller! It was a beautiful year with your typical ups and downs.
It was the year we finally found reliable babysitters so Lu and I could focus on date nights, which I’m so grateful we did. Our marriage strengthened because of it.
It was a year, however, filled with a lot of hesitance over my work.
The future of Inspiralized
Over the holidays, I really thought a lot about how I want to continue on with this brand and my life in general. How did I reflect? JOURNALING. I had never tried it before, but I had so much going on in my mind, it was so helpful (and therapeutic!) to start writing. Once I started, it all spilled out.
I’ve been in limbo for about 2 years (basically during my twin pregnancy and the first 15 months of their lives) and now I’m ready to make a decision on how I want to move forward. I think over the years, I stopped blogging as much and stopped sharing as much about my life. There were trolls, sure, but the landscape of blogging and the life of an online social media person changed. It got a bit more vicious, a bit more calculated, and less organic. There are rules and games and algorithms. I fell out of love with it.
However, I still had this community that I’ve built (or that we’ve built together) that I kept going back to. I love this community so much – you’ve been such a support to me over the years, and I love connecting with you all. Over on Instagram, most of you said you’re here now for the lifestyle content. The least popular content request was recipes! Thinking a lot about that, I’ve realized that that’s just a reflection of my own life. I’m cooking less new things as a mother of 4 young kiddos. I cook from my cookbooks, the blog, and I really like grabbing inspiration from other recipe spots – magazines, my friends’ cookbooks, and other blogs.
So what I’ve decided is this: it’s time to go back to basics and get back to sharing the raw process with this community. Connecting with you and sharing what I’m going through, instead of spending so much time and energy on new recipes, I’m going to focus more on the content that you want and that I want to share. That includes:
- Fitness
- Fashion
- Kid activities
- Parenting/mom life/hacks/real life moments
- Balancing it all
- Marriage
- Easy family recipes
Now, I’m not going to become a full blown lifestyle blogger, but as for the recipes part, if I’m so inclined, I will definitely be sharing new, original recipes made by me. However, I am going to focus on sharing recipes I’ve found that I’ve made my own changes on and have enjoyed. For instance, I’m dying to try a seafood version of this Lemony Chicken and Potatoes with Feta. You can watch me go through those trials on Instagram, always.
If you don’t like this new direction, I completely understand. Honestly, I can’t keep trying to share the things I *think* this audience wants, because it doesn’t reflect what I’m going through, and I think I lost touch of what the community wanted! So, I’m going to give this a year and if it’s still not sparking my joy, I’ll reevaluate. Thank you for being along for the journey, as always!
My 2023 Mindset
There’s something special about a brand new year. Now, a new year can start whenever you want – there’s no better time than the present. However there’s something refreshing about a calendar new year! It’s the little push you need to start a new goal, intention, or mindset.
For me, in 2023, I want to be a better, more focused and intentional version of myself.
Now, after reading James Clear’s book Atomic Habits, I know that it’s not enough to just say “I want to be a better version of myself.” You have to put the mechanisms in place to form those habits. And the best way to figure out the better version of Ali is to ask, “What does a better Ali look like?”
A better Ali is:
- A better friend, sister, and daughter.
- A better wife.
- A better mother.
- A better entrepreneur.
I’m going to do another blog post on breaking these down further (ie: what does a better wife look like?), but after thinking about it further, I broke this down into words. Words that I’ve written out in bold, big letters and pinned to the cork board that’s adjacent to my computer so I stare at them every day and internalize. Below are the words to apply to different parts of my life that in turn, will help me become a better friend, sister, daughter, wife, mother, and entrepreneur and ultimately, a better me!
- Life: DECLUTTER
- Business: EXECUTE
- Kids/parenting: INTENTIONAL
- Marriage: AFFECTIONATE
- Friendship/Relationships: SUPPORT
For example, the overarching word for my life this year is to declutter and simplify. This permeates everything in my every day. But I think that by decluttering and simplifying, it will be easier to accomplish the behaviors and habits I want to adopt in the different areas of my life.
I hope this is inspiring for some of you. I’ll be doing many more follow up posts to this! Cheers to a year that’s hopefully better and bigger than the last!
Photos by Karla Korn Photography.
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