When we reflect on the progress of our goals, it gives us more motivation to keep striving to reach them. At the beginning of this year, I started conducting a weekly reset and audit of my life, habits, and goals

Today I’m sharing why it has impacted my life and how you can create a weekly reset that works for you!

Resources Mentioned:

Renew180 Mastermind: https://ashleyvarner.com/180
The Organized Money on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/OrganizedAlainaMoney
Soul Time App: https://www.soultime.com
Power of Questions Episode: https://ashleyvarner.com/questions/
Weekly Reset Download (FREE): https://ashleyvarner.com/reset

Highlights From the Episode:

When we reflect on the progress of our goals, it really gives us more motivation to keep striving to reach them. And I think whenever you hold yourself accountable to the goals that you’ve set, whenever you keep them in front of your mind, it also creates less stress in your life. And all of this year, I have been conducting a weekly reset and a weekly audit of my life and my habits and my goals. I have definitely seen the impact of this on my life, not only in reaching the goals that I have but also in really reducing the amount of stress in my life.

Today I wanna talk to you about my Sunday reset routine and the way that I do this. It’s not just a task list that I do but it’s actually a mental shift that I make every week. And it really impacts the stress level of my life. And I wanna show you how to do that in today’s video, let’s get started.

Welcome, welcome to The Renewed Mind if this is the first video that you’ve ever seen let me welcome you to this community. My name is Ashley Varner. I am a Christian life coach, but I am also a Bible teacher. And I really enjoy helping women to take their thoughts captive, learn how to control their emotions so that they can get the actions and the results that they really want to reach, so they can renew their minds to transform their lives. And all of this month we’re talking about stress. But today I wanted to talk to you a little bit about how you can live with intention and how that automatically just naturally impacts the level of stress that you have in a positive way. So let’s jump into this idea of a Sunday reset.

Living with Intention

Now, every week I have a weekly reset. This is something I have done now for about 18 months and I really have enjoyed learning how my mind works from week to week and really having an audit of my thoughts. And that really has had an added benefit for me that I wasn’t expecting, and that is the added benefit of less stress.

So let’s talk a little bit about what a weekly reset is. It’s not just the stuff that you do, the tasks that you do but it’s also a mindset shift and kind of a mindset realignment that you do on a regular basis. The first point I wanted to make is to live with intention.

So Proverbs 4:25 says, “Give careful thought to the paths of your feet and be steadfast in all your ways.” I want you to decide where you wanna be. Now it doesn’t have to be where everyone else wants you to be. It’s not about where everyone else is in their life. I want you to think about where you wanna be. Do you want to pay off one of your credit cards? Do you want to find a new job? Do you want to start a new ministry? Whatever it is, decide where you wanna be.

Then I want you to revisit any goals that you’ve set for yourself. You can actually see my vision board in the back here. I have all my goals laid out on a daily basis. I’m seeing that, I’m looking at that and really motivates me to make decisions that lead me closer to those goals. So I want you to revisit your goals, if not on a daily basis, then on a weekly basis. As you’re doing this weekly reset, I want you to look at your goals and say, okay, do these still line up with one, where God wants me too be.

Two, where my life is right now. Because if you have a goal to say, run a marathon and you found out last month that you’re pregnant, maybe a marathon is not in your near future, right? So you have to look at how your goals are aligned up with where you are now.

Then I want you to identify in your life, areas where you feel unsatisfied. So remember that emotions are caused by thoughts. If there are areas in your life where you feel unsatisfied, I want you to pinpoint the thought that you’re having that’s causing that unsatisfied feeling. If you are unsatisfied with maybe the quality of the food that you’ve been eating, maybe you’ve been going out to eat too much, or you haven’t really looked at your pantry and like tried to create healthier meals.

I want you to look at the thoughts that you’re having behind that because changing those thoughts is what’s going to lead to you feeling more satisfied. It’s not any circumstances that are in your life, it’s your thoughts about the circumstances. And then I want you to set yourself up for success for the coming week. This is all part of living with intention. And I like to see this as those tasks that I do every week to set myself up for success.

One of the areas in my life, in my health that I’ve been working on is I want to take supplements as far as vitamins and things that I know I are gonna benefit me. So I have a multivitamin that I take. I have like a probiotic. I have some calcium supplements that I take.

And on a weekly basis, on Sundays, I have a little like vitamin container. And I separate all the vitamins per day that I need. What that does for me, I stick it in my drawer with my makeup. And I know that when I’m putting in my makeup on, I’m gonna take my vitamins and then I don’t miss a day because I’m not looking for all the different vitamin bottles. I’m not trying to figure out and count out however many I need because they’re right there. So I’m setting myself up for success in advance.

And the other thing that I do is I help my younger kids choose what clothes that they’re gonna wear. So I have a three-year-old who is learning how to dress himself and be more independent but I still want him to look presentable right, now, there’s sometimes I’m still gonna let him wear his cowboy boots with shorts because he’s three. But for the majority of the time, I like to plan out ahead of time what he’s gonna wear.

I kind of let him be part of that process but we have these little rings in his closet that have the days of the week and he’ll just put his little outfits, he’ll hang them up on each of the days. And then he has a sense of I dependency whenever he is picking out his clothes. But I have the sense of knowing that he is wearing clean clothes and all of that ahead of time. So that’s something that I do to set myself up for success.

Another thing I might do is empty the diaper pale for our baby. I might choose meals for the week and make sure I have food in the house for those meals, things like that. So if you are not someone who has their closet super organized, then I would plan out your clothes for the week. Just find those things that make going towards your goals that much easier because, and this is where having this intentional life leads to less stress in your life.

Because think of, let’s just use the example of the vitamins. If I had some of my vitamins in our kitchen, I had some in my bathroom and every morning I’m running around trying to find how much I need, or even trying to remember that I’m supposed to take my vitamins, that is added stress, extra time I’m spending, maybe I’m running late or whatever. So if I can do things intentionally to create less stress in my life on a weekly basis, I’m leaning myself more towards success in my goals while also lowering the stress in my life.

Why Reflection is Important

The next thing I wanted to share in my Sunday reset routine or my weekly audit that I like to call it is I want to pay attention to how the last week went. So reflection is really important. I want to clear out what doesn’t work.

And one of the best examples that I can think of with this, and this is something that watching this person really changed my mindset on this. There is a woman, her YouTube channel is The Organized Money here on YouTube, I’ll leave a link to her channel. But she is like a paper planner person. Now I am not a paper planner person but I like to watch her methods of planning each week. And one thing that I really like that she does is she’s not just married to one type of planning. If there is something that did not work for her in the previous month or the previous week, she shifts it and changes it. And I have taken that lesson to say, if there’s something that’s not working, don’t just keep beating a dead horse, right, make changes. It’s okay to realign your goals.

Now at the beginning or at the end of 2021, my friends and I did a vision board party. And we had all this fun creating our boards and we had this fun breakfast thing and everything. But then back in June, we also did kind of a halftime party is what I called it. We all got together and talked about our goals and where we were but we also talked about maybe things that weren’t working, things that we tweaked and what we were doing to improve for the future six months.

So I want you to do the same thing in your weekly resets. I want you to reassess and reset your daily routines. So if one of the things that you wanted to put on your list is to just meditate on God’s word every day, but you’re not there yet. Maybe you’re not like, it’s just not coming together for you, then take it off, right? It’s okay to kind of pair down any routines that you need down to like the bare essentials.

If you haven’t watched the video on routines and how they impact your stress, make sure that you watch that because I really share one of the keys to the power of routines, especially in regards to stress. And that is to be consistent. So if that means you have to pair down the things that you’re doing, reassess and then change things you can change your daily routine, right? You don’t have to just keep trying and missing. You can pair it down to maybe two things that you know, that you’re consistent on versus 10 things that you’re not doing anything, right?

Weekly Audits

So then let’s talk about this idea of reflecting and auditing your past week. So I want you to divide your life up into some categories and they might look different for everyone else. Some really general categories might be money, family, work, hobbies, your marriage, friendships, kids, your home, whatever, whatever categories that work best for you. Then I want you to reflect on each of these categories. I want you to reflect on four things in each of these categories.

The first is, reflect on what you’re thankful for. So what went really well, what are you so thankful for? Then I want you to look at the strengths. These would be the things that you accomplish, that you were really proud of. Then I want you to look at the struggles. So where are some areas that you maybe missed the mark, maybe are some weaknesses for you? And then the last one, and this is I think the most life-changing of the four is where are you going to improve? Give one thing that you’re going to do to improve in this category for the following week.

So I actually got this idea from the monthly assessments that my husband and I do for our foster care. Every month I would look at this for each child in our home that was part of the foster care system. And I would look at it and say, okay, what were their strengths? What were their struggles? But what’s one thing that I can do in the next month to improve in this area? When you do that, it gets you proactive.

It gets you to say, all right, this is one thing I’m gonna change. It doesn’t have to be a lot but one thing I’m gonna change to improve this area. I think it’s great to do this on a weekly basis rather than a monthly basis because you can see the impact that that one change makes. And whenever you have that impact, then you can do the next and do the next.

Plan for obstacles

Really consider this and then go from being, maybe it takes you from being discouraged to being motivated to grow. Now that you know exactly what you wanna work on and the improvements that you want to make, I want you to be asking yourself; what obstacles would stop you from doing this?

So this means that if you are planning for obstacles, you can come up with kind of an offensive plan to deal with those obstacles. You can come up with new thoughts that you wanna practice. You can come up with verses that empower you and motivate you to go through those obstacles. You can make a list of action steps to get you to where you wanna go. And really, I think that being proactive, that’s what living with intention is all about, right?

You are having this weekly reset where you are on a weekly basis, sure, you’re doing all those tasks like putting out the kids’ clothes or planning your meals. But also you’re saying, I am going to reflect on what happened last week. I’m gonna make some plans for next week but also, I’m gonna plan for obstacles, and then I’m gonna arm myself to accomplish and to overcome those obstacles.

And I think that whenever we do that we have more of a realistic plan because we realize, okay, if one of my goals is to eat dinner more at home, what is an obstacle that’s gonna come up? I can look at my calendar and say, okay, well I have a late meeting here. We have church this night. And so what do I need to do to overcome those obstacles? So maybe on those two days, I need to have a slow cooker meal there. Maybe if we’re gonna eat out one day of the week, it needs to be one of those days. I just can plan accordingly and make action steps to get there.

Now, if my goal is to do better at reading my Bible, what’s gonna be an obstacle? Well, I have a baby that’s maybe not sleeping through the night yet. If that’s you, you can say, okay, that’s gonna be an obstacle for me. Maybe what I need to do is move my prayer time from first thing in the morning to the first nap of the day.

See, you can look at those obstacles and say, okay, how can I tweak my plans? How can I have different thoughts about this to accomplish the goals that I wanna accomplish? And as you go through this audit every week, it reduces the stress in your life because what you’re doing is you’re planning ahead.

So you’re not leaving your goals to chance. You’re not just hoping that they’re gonna work out. You are coming up with solutions, you’re reflecting on what has already happened and having that kind of control, or really just that kind of intentionality in your life impacts your stress because you can think, hey I have this like, or you know this didn’t really work out but I know on my weekly reset, that I can tweak things.

You can, it changes your perspective on your goals and on your daily routines because you’re saying, I’m gonna do this on purpose. I’m gonna live on purpose instead of just letting life happen to me. And so often a lot of our stress comes from just trying to just go with the flow and not having a plan.

Whenever you have a plan, it actually creates more freedom in your life. It reduces the stress in your life because you know, this is what we’re doing. You actually have a little bit more grace for yourself because you know, hey, yeah, I have some struggles here but this is what I’m doing to work on them and all of these things together.

I really wanna remind you to just be honest with yourself and not gloss over things that are weaknesses but also not be overly critical of the things that you need to work on. So there’s really that fine line of grace there that says, I know that I’m struggling with these things and I wanna work on them but not to the point where I’m just beating myself up because I’m not accomplishing what maybe everybody else thinks that I need to do. That’s where the real stress comes in, right? Whenever we’re thinking that we have to please other people or we have to accomplish all of these other things.

All right, that is all that I have for you on my Sunday Reset Routine. It is a little bit different than the average YouTube video of a Sunday routine where it’s all about specific tasks. I like to have a routine that really changes my thinking and really aligns my thinking back to where it needs to be.

I hope that this helped you because remember that all of your actions flow from your emotions, which come from your thoughts. So if you wanna change the actions that you’re taking, start with the root of it, which is changing your thinking, changing your mindset and that’s gonna naturally lead you where you wanna go.

All right. I will talk to you guys next week. Thanks so much for watching. I did want to mention that if you want to get a free download of my weekly reset routine, just go to Ashleyvarner.com/reset, and you can check that out. And really just, you can also see the link in the description, but I really just wanna encourage you that you can make progress in your goals without adding stress to your life. It is possible. You just have to have some intentionality. All right, I will see you guys next time.