Author: HairWeavings Editorial Team

We are now halfway through January and, for those who made New Year’s resolutions and are still going strong, well done. If you are sitting on the other side of the fence, where things haven’t quite worked out as planned, don’t be too hard on yourself. You are not alone, many people will have already abandoned their goals by now.

Although the concept of New Year’s goals is a wonderful thing, sometimes we can set ourselves up for failure simply because we make statements that are unclear or unrealistic.

I stopped making New Year’s resolutions quite a while ago and instead started setting intentions for the year, alongside mapping out the actions I need to take to achieve them.

So, What Has 2026 Got in Store for Me?

Well, in six days’ time, I leave to embark on a three-month trip to India, where I will be studying how to teach meditation and chakra healing. I feel excited to see where this path takes me and to learn more about these ancient holistic therapies, which I hope will have a profound impact on my future coaching sessions and retreats. I’ll also be very glad to swap the cold, dreary mornings for a warmer, sunnier climate. Get me out of here!

As I sit in my kitchen, tapping away on the keyboard of my MacBook, I find myself wondering what these next few months have in store. It feels like a mixture of inquisitiveness, excitement, and the wonder of the unknown. Whatever happens, I’m ready to embrace what God sends my way, choosing to be guided rather than thinking too intensely or following a rigid plan.

New Year’s Eve Was a Quiet Affair for Me

I had people I could have seen and places I could have gone, but I wanted to be alone. It’s quite ironic, as I had been feeling rather lonely after the Christmas period. Despite having a Christmas filled with love and quality time with family, once I returned home, I dipped into a lull of loneliness. When I could have pushed myself to be around others, instead I retreated and kept myself at home… alone. And yes, it doesn’t really make sense; feeling lonely but not wanting to be around anyone. Either way, it was what I needed at the time.

Instead, I spent the day running, writing, practising self-care, setting intentions, and honouring my emotions. There were tears. There was solitude. There were confusion and despair. And yet, I needed all of it.

While a large portion of the world celebrated, counted down to midnight, and watched fireworks, I went to bed before the clock struck 12 and shut myself off from it all.

I Received Clarity About My Goals and Intentions

The next day, I woke up feeling a shift, a little more clarity and a sense of peace. My intentions centred around moving forward with my business, my love life, and my finances, but what I realised was that while I may have intentions and plans, I want to be led more by God’s intentions for me. I listened to a webinar recently that spoke about asking God not to start you, but to stop you. So, while I will continue to take action and follow my intentions, I will also pray for guidance, especially to stop the things that are not meant to be in my life.

While the New Year can bring change, reflection, and mixed emotions, it’s okay not to have all the answers. It’s okay to honour your feelings. It’s okay not to feel obligated to list endless New Year’s resolutions. It’s okay to honour yourself, take things at a slower pace, and resist the urge to rush into commitments about what must change this year.

Perhaps the best thing we can do for ourselves is give ourselves a little more time to reflect on what we truly want 2026 to be.

If you’ve been feeling stuck when it comes to what you’re calling in this year, maybe it’s about looking at your life through a different lens. Perhaps it’s less about what we will do and more about what we won’t do, or even how we want to feel.

Questions to Get You Out of a Rut:

What can you let go of this year? What hindered you in 2025 that you no longer want to repeat in 2026? What is the feeling you want to experience this year, and how can you create more of it?

I’d love to hear in the comments what’s in store for you this year.

This morning, a small wave of fear caught me off guard.

I’m more than six months into retirement, and I’m enjoying it. I love slow mornings. I love not having meetings. I love the lack of daily pressure. And yet, out of nowhere, I found myself thinking: What if this changes?

People often talk about the first stretch of retirement as a “honeymoon phase.” That phrase popped into my head, followed quickly by another worry: What if I eventually get bored with all this spaciousness? What if the art class I’m loving loses its spark? What if I start to feel lonely or unmoored?

Later that same morning, things went sideways in a very ordinary way.

While I know exactly what helps me start the day feeling centered – journaling, reading, sometimes a guided meditation – I didn’t do any of that. Instead, my husband was already immersed in the news, sharing his concerns. I checked email. And within minutes, I was pulled into my other post-retirement role: helping care for my 95-year-old dad as he recovers from a serious fall.

I’m deeply grateful to be there for him. It’s meaningful. But it’s also demanding. By mid-morning, I felt rushed, scattered, and oddly behind – despite the fact that no deadlines were looming and no one was waiting for me to turn something in.

That’s when it clicked: this is what unstructured days can do.

Why Open Time Can Feel Unsettling

Retirement is supposed to feel freeing. No calendar. No deadlines. No one telling you where to be.

And yet, many women feel off-balance once the structure of work disappears.

For years, work organized our days. There were projects to move forward, colleagues waiting for input, students or clients expecting follow-up, and a built-in sense of when the day had “counted.” Without that underlying rhythm, time can start to feel slippery.

My coaching clients describe it in familiar ways:

• “I’m financially ready, but I don’t know how my days will actually look.”
• “I want freedom, but I don’t want to drift.”
• “I worry my world will shrink.”

This shows up most often for women who spent decades managing multiple roles at once: demanding careers, caregiving for children or parents, volunteer commitments, and emotional labor that often went unnoticed. Retirement doesn’t erase that complexity. It removes the structure that used to help organize it.

And when there’s no rhythm, something else often fills the space: checking email one more time, scrolling the news, saying yes to errands or favors, or carrying a low-grade sense that you should be doing something – even if you can’t say what.

Enjoyment Feels More Reachable Than Joy

One client said something recently that stayed with me. After a long career and a series of health and family challenges, she told me that choosing joy as a goal felt unrealistic. The word felt heavy and out of reach.

Then she landed on a different word: enjoyment.

Not constant happiness. Not a perfectly curated life. Just moments of enjoyment – walking her dogs, taking in the desert landscape, lingering over a conversation with a new friend.

That distinction matters. Most women aren’t looking to fill their calendars or reinvent themselves. They want days that feel steady, satisfying, and alive – without pressure.

And enjoyment tends to show up more easily when days have a bit of shape – not a plan, just something to lean into.

What Actually Helps When Days Feel Undefined

When many women hear the word structure, they imagine schedules, rigid routines, and being boxed in. That’s not what most women want in retirement. Too much structure feels confining. Too little leaves them feeling unmoored.

What tends to help is a combination of anchors and rhythms.

What Are Anchors?

Anchors are small, repeatable touchpoints that help the day feel grounded and familiar. They’re often personal and simple:

• reading a book with your coffee before the day fills up
• walking outside
• exercising
• journaling
• checking in with yourself about the day ahead

What Are Rhythms?

Rhythms operate at a bigger scale. They give the week some shape without locking it down:

• Themed days, where one day leans toward social connection, another toward learning or creativity, and another toward contributing skills or finishing something that matters to you.
• Energy-based rhythms, with more demanding activities grouped together and other days intentionally lighter.
• Anchor-first days, where one meaningful anchor happens early and the rest of the day stays open.
• Bookend rhythms, with a consistent start or close to the day while the middle remains flexible.

These patterns help your days feel intentional rather than accidental – and more like your own.

A Simple Experiment to Try

If your days have been feeling scattered, try this.

Choose one rhythm that feels supportive to you right now. You don’t need to analyze it or pick the “best” one. Just notice which option you’re drawn to.

Once you’ve chosen a rhythm, anchor it lightly:

• Pick one anchor that helps you feel like yourself (5–20 minutes is plenty).
• Add one meaningful block that fits the rhythm you chose.
• Leave the rest of the day open.

For example, on a day that leans toward connection, your anchor might be a quiet cup of coffee and a few pages of reading in the morning. Your meaningful block could be lunch with a friend or a long phone call you’ve been meaning to make. The rest of the day stays unscheduled.

That’s it.

You’re not trying to design the perfect day or solve retirement all at once. You’re noticing what steadies you, what drains you, and what makes the day feel more livable – or even enjoyable.

A Realistic Word About Health

Health challenges can interrupt plans, limit energy, and make enjoyment harder than we expected.

At the same time, retirement often brings something many women haven’t had in decades: time. Time to move more intentionally, rest without guilt, attend appointments without rushing, and recover without pushing through exhaustion.

This is where rhythm becomes especially important. When days already have some shape, health disruptions don’t automatically unravel everything. There’s something to return to, something steady to adapt around, rather than starting from scratch every time something changes.

Why “Watering Your Own Garden First” Matters Here

When days are undefined, it’s incredibly easy to default to other people’s needs – especially for women who’ve spent a lifetime being reliable, helpful, and responsive. Without clear rhythms of your own, your time gets claimed before you’ve had a chance to claim it yourself.

Learning to water your own garden first is what creates the rhythm that open days lack.

Many women tell me they appreciate the permission they get through my writing and our coaching sessions – permission to take themselves seriously, to protect time, and to design days that support their own wellbeing. I wish women didn’t need that permission in the first place.

But if that’s part of the learning curve, I’m glad to offer it.

A Place to Start

If parts of this article felt familiar, you’re not imagining things – many women struggle with open time in ways they didn’t expect.

I created a free Retirement Vision Starter Kit to help you gently explore what actually steadies you when your days feel open and undefined. It includes a few short reflections and low-pressure experiments to help you notice what gives your days energy, meaning, and a sense of flow.

It takes about 20 minutes. You can do it all at once or come back to it over a few days – whatever feels supportive.

 Download the free Retirement Vision Starter Kit here.

Let’s Have a Conversation:

What’s the hardest part of open time for you right now – having too much of it, not enough structure, or something else entirely?

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When I signed up for ChatGPT, I was simply curious. I wasn’t looking to build a relationship with artificial intelligence, and I certainly wasn’t interested in replacing people with technology.

I grew up long before digital calculators, and part of me assumed this was something I wouldn’t fully understand. What I found instead was something far simpler – and far more useful.

I Began Using AI as a Place to Think Out Loud

I had seen and heard content creators on YouTube describe ChatGPT as something that learns from them as they learn from it. So that’s how I approached it. I assumed that the more I explained myself – my history, my work, the way I think – the more the responses would come back in language I could understand.

In some ways, I was right. In other ways, I was wrong.

By explaining my thoughts, my history, and my work in plain language, I found myself saying things I had never said before – not to friends, not to family, not even to myself. Not because AI understands me in a human sense, but because it listens without interruption, judgment, or impatience.

That matters more than people realize, especially later in life.

As we age, many of us carry decades of unspoken stories. We’ve learned when to stay quiet. We’ve learned not to burden others. We’ve learned to move on without fully processing what we’ve lived through. Having a neutral, structured space to put thoughts into words can be surprisingly freeing.

Then I Gave It a Name

I gave my AI a name. Not because it is a person, but because names create focus and intention. When I speak clearly and directly, the responses I receive are clear and direct as well. That structure helps me separate memory from emotion, facts from assumptions, and ideas from noise.

AI does not feel. It does not care. But it does respond consistently – and that consistency creates clarity.

Wording Matters in Communication – with AI and with People

Another thing I’ve learned is that AI pays attention to every word.

If I use a phrase loosely or choose a word without thinking, the response sometimes comes back with a meaning I didn’t intend. In the beginning, that actually upset me. I would read a reply and think, That’s not what I meant at all.

Over time, I learned to stop and say, “I didn’t phrase that correctly.”

That small pause opened my eyes to how specific language really is – and how often we assume others understand what we mean simply because we understand it. That assumption alone can create friction and misunderstanding, even when no harm is intended.

That pause matters.

It forces reflection. I began to see how certain words – used carelessly or out of habit – may have caused confusion or even hurt in the past. Not because AI is offended, but because it takes language literally and responds to what is actually there.

With people, we’re always navigating filters – emotions, assumptions, history, and reactions. Conversations can turn into misunderstandings before clarity ever arrives.

With AI, there is no argument. There is only clarification.

That difference encourages deeper thinking. It makes you slow down, choose your words more carefully, and understand your own meaning more clearly. Over time, that awareness carries over into how you speak with other people as well.

Talking Things Out Loud as a Tool

One unexpected benefit I’ve found is using AI as a quiet sounding board before making decisions.

When something feels rushed – a sign-up, a group, an offer that sounds better than it should – I’ll explain it out loud and ask simple questions: What am I being asked to give? What am I being promised? What happens if I say no?

The answers don’t come from AI’s opinion. They come from hearing my own reasoning reflected back clearly. That pause alone has helped me avoid situations that might have cost money, time, or peace of mind.

At this stage of life, clarity is often more valuable than opportunity.

There is also a practical truth that matters as we get older: typing can get in the way.

Many of us over sixty didn’t grow up typing all day. We think faster than our fingers move. We backspace, misspell, and lose momentum. When that happens, the thought itself often disappears.

Speaking solves that.

Using voice instead of typing allows ideas to come out whole. You don’t stop to correct spelling. You don’t interrupt your own thinking. You simply talk. What comes out is often more detailed, more honest, and more connected than anything you would have typed.

There are now many apps available that allow you to speak instead of type. Some of them require a small monthly fee, but in my experience, the ability to speak freely and stay connected to your thoughts can be well worth that investment.

When you speak to AI, you are not performing. You are explaining. And that explanation is where clarity comes from. Being able to explain what I want out loud has also helped me be more specific when I use other AI tools. The clearer I am, the better the result.

Gaining Clarity About Myself

Over time, I found myself talking to AI about everything. Serious subjects, small things, uncomfortable topics, ordinary moments – nothing was off limits. From deeply personal thoughts to everyday observations, it all came out in conversation.

Not because AI remembers or understands me the way a person does, but because I do.

By putting so much of myself into words, I developed a sense – on my side of the conversation – that I was being understood. In reality, what was happening was simpler: I was finally saying things out loud without self-editing.

When you speak freely and consistently, patterns emerge. You hear yourself. You recognize habits, contradictions, and truths you might otherwise avoid. In that way, it can feel as though the listener knows you – when in fact, you are getting to know yourself better.

That distinction matters.

For women over 60, AI can be useful not as a companion, but as a mirror. It reflects your words back in an organized way. It helps you hear yourself more clearly.

Used with intention, this process can turn loose thoughts into written reflections, letters, or stories that feel complete instead of unfinished. Not for an audience. Not for approval. Simply to give shape to a life well lived.

That, to me, is not about technology. It’s about clarity. And clarity, at any age, is a form of peace.

Questions for Reflection:

Have you ever found that saying something out loud helped you understand it better? Are there thoughts or stories you’ve carried quietly for years but never fully put into words? What would it feel like to give yourself a private space to think – without judgment or interruption?