Ditch the “New Year, New You” Resolutions: Pick Up a Notebook, Not a 75-Day Challenge

If “New Year, New You” makes you want to throw your phone in the sea, this one’s for you. In this episode, Monique van Tulder – author of A Grown Up’s Gap Year – calls time on the standard New Year resolutions and 75-day “transformation” challenges. Instead of treating yourself like a renovation project, she invites you to treat yourself as the project and turn January into your own creative test kitchen. Monique shares how notebooks, scribbles, walks, paint, and “making something with no outcome attached” have pulled her through turbulent seasons – and why a cheap notebook can be more powerful than any 12-week program. She nods to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (Morning Pages and Artist Dates) and to research showing that everyday creativity is linked to better mood, more energy and clearer thinking. If you’re a midlife woman who’s done everything for everyone and is tired of being told to fix herself every January, this episode hands you a different brief. Perfect to listen to while you’re wrapping presents, hiding in the car with a hot coffee, or quietly planning what your January notebook might hold – with zero before-and-after photos required.

Episode Resources & Links:

• Your SPACE Prescription
• Free Weekly Newsletter
• Dear Blokes Downloadable
• Setting Boundaries That Stick - checklist
• Julia Cameron: Living The Artist's Way
• Wild With Sarah Wilson Podcast with Julia Cameron
• Remarkable People Podcast with Guy Kawasaki and Julia Cameron

📚 Get your copy of A Grown Up’s Gap Year the book, from Amazon, moniquevantulder.com, bookshops and libraries, subscribe to the podcast, and take the first step toward your own A Grown Up’s Gap Year.

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• Monique's Instagram