Push yourself towards your most outer skin… Do you even know what that means? I don’t, yet I just wrote to someone that that is a 2014 goal I set for myself.

I just couldn’t come up with other words to describe it.

Since most of us only know each other online, let me fill you in on a little secret. I talk with my hands. I know. A New Yorker who talks with their hands. What’re the chances? But truthfully, I REALLY talk with my hands. As a kid this often meant getting excited while speaking and accidentally knocking something out of the hands of the stranger standing within arms reach. (Who am I kidding, this still happens as an adult.)

And when I was working as an art director in the fashion industry, I’d often give direction by illustrating the feeling I wanted a product to have by moving my hands, arms, shoulders and whole upper body (Sometimes legs too— if I really wanted it to kick butt) in a way that spoke the words my mouth couldn’t find…. though it tried….. (My best artists and assistants understood what I meant when I sometimes just used sounds— “that’s too arggg,” I’d say while making some pycho looking motion with my hands. “I get it” she’d say and boom- she’d get it. God, I miss having assistants…)  I’ve also been accused of speaking to people like they are 4 years old, repeating the same thing 3 times just using different words to say it. That’s just the way I process…. especially when I’m on the phone and the other person can’t see my less than gracious but very expressive body motions.

I am totally off track here. 

As I mentioned, I didn’t set New Years resolutions. They just feel like a recipe for disaster. You create a platform of routine and then the minute you slip up, you fall right on down that slippery slope. It’s been the same way since second grade when I made a resolution to always do my homework and have a sharpened pencil in my backpack. As my most frightening teacher of all time, Morah Golumbeck can attest to- I didn’t, in fact, follow through on that resolution.

But, as the second week of 2014 rolls in I’ve been thinking about day-to-day choices I need to make in order to get where I want to go and feel the way I want to feel…. and frankly, I want to get to some crazy-ass places and feel like a bad-ass Muchness machine.

Those are big wants.

And they are not going to happen if I allow the parts of me that are shy, insecure or afraid to fold me up into a protective shell and let myself play small. I need to hold my arms back like a clichéd woman in a commercial for some pharmaceutical drug with horrible side effects, and instead of just taking in the beauty of nature that surrounds me in a field of daisies, I need to push my own light out from my core towards my outer most skin and beyond.

This entire post was written with me stopping every few words to hold my hands in front of me and then extend them, trying to find the words to really describe what I’m trying to convey. Is it working?

So this year, my wish for youand for myself is that you are able to reach in to your core and find all the muchy goodness that resides there, and then make choices that help you pull that towards your outermost skin so other’s can see it too.

It’s exactly that which you are put on this planet to share.

Isn’t she lovely?

Pushing yourself means not hiding from what you really want, so lets start here. How are YOU gonna push yourself to your outermost skin this year and pull your Muchness to the surface? Inquiring minds wanna know!