Goal Setting, Touchstones, Brain Hacking, Frequent Flyers, and the “New Year” (January 2025 Guest Tipper Anjali Bhimani)
In January of 2025 we were thrilled to welcome Actor / Producer Anjali Bhimani to Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You. Here’s a roundup of all of her tips for you to enjoy.
Subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen, and get all of our links at https://DailyTipsPodcast.com.
Learn more about Anjali at https://linktr.ee/sweeetanj.
You can listen to our full interview with Anjali on your favorite podcast app, or on YouTube at https://youtu.be/RqNsuQBdSc0.
Her tips this month were:
A Tip For Goal Setting in 2025 (January 1, 2025)
It’s the first Wednesday of the month, which means we’re welcoming Guest Tipper Anjali Bhimani onto the show to share her knowledge. She starts us off with a strong one — how to set goals for this new year.
A Tip For Morning Touchstones (January 8, 2025)
Guest Tipper Anjali Bhimani is back with another start-of-the-year grounding tip. Listen in for a new framework around touchstones and setting goals.
A Tip For Hacking Your Brain (January 15, 2025)
Anjali Bhimani is back with another guest tip that may or may not help you get your January started off right.
A Tip For Maximizing Your Credit Card Points (January 22, 2025)
January Guest Tipper Anjali Bhimani is back with a tip about credit card points, travel miles, and turning every day purchases into faster free flights!
A Tip For Choosing Your Own New Year (January 29, 2025)
Guest Tipper Anjali Bhimani is back for one last tip this month about helping yourself with those pesky resolutions now that we’re a month into the year.
Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You is hosted by Arielle Nissenblatt and Ned Donovan.
Music is by Marcus Thorne Bagala
Find us on Social Media at @DailyTipsPod, or at https://dailytipspodcast.com.
Transcript
Ned: [00:00:00] Happy New Year, Tippendales. It’s New Year’s day, 2025, and it is Wednesday which means it is a guest tip day. Our January guest tipper is none other than actor, producer, all around kick ass human being Anjali Bhimani.
Anjali, welcome to Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You. Happy January 1st, 2025, and please, would you hit us with the tip of the day?
Anjali: Absolutely. So I feel like on January 1st, everybody freaks out about setting goals, right? Everybody’s all excited about their New Year’s resolutions. What I have found over the years is that I am less interested in setting goals based on hitting a thing so much as hitting a feeling. And that helps me figure out what I really actually want and allows me to kind of spread my wings in terms of how that goal can be completed. So for example, if I was gonna say “hey I wanna lose 10 pounds.” Okay, well really what do I want? It doesn’t matter if the 10 pounds come or goal out that that would be awesome. What I want is how that’s [00:01:00] gonna make me feel. So let me tap into that feeling and think about all the different ways I can have that feeling along the way to losing that 10 pounds. And what ends up happening is that now that I am moving forward on the course to feeling that way I find all of these other ways that also support that goal and support that feeling in my life, so I sort of get a two for, or a three for, or four for, um, because I’m constantly cultivating that feeling in my life.
And it’s way more fun than making a list of to-dos.
Ned: I love this.
Arielle: Yeah, too many of us are focused on the numbers, but that’s a really great tip to start us off for the year. This is Daily Tips That May or May not help You. I’m Arielle,, that’s Ned and Anjali’s here for the rest of the month on Wednesdays. We’ll see you tomorrow for an Arielle and Ned tip.
It is Wednesday, so that means we have a guest tipper. We’ve got Anjali Bhimani here on Daily Tips that may or may not help you. Anjali, what is today’s tip of the day?
Anjali: Today’s tip of the [00:02:00] day is about having your morning touchstones. A lot of people love to talk about “win the morning” and “you have to do all these things in this particular order and have a morning routine and meditate and do this and write and all these things.” I can’t be bothered.
If it doesn’t take me five minutes or less, it’s not gonna get done in the morning ’cause I got too much stuff to do. So I like to have at least one thing every morning that I know is going to give me a little bit of joy. I have a mug collection, a very extensive mug collection of cities and countries that I have been to in the past that I have fond memories of. So like today, I decided to use my Vancouver Island one, because on my last birthday, I went to Vancouver Island.
And every time I do that, I say to myself, where do you wanna go today? So it’s not just about the place, but it’s also about the memories that are attached to that. I also have different touchstones, like these little candles that I use, um, from a company called State of Being that all are about a state of being, Um, and that have a little affirmation that goes with it.
So like this is the I Am Loved candle. I [00:03:00] actually worked with them together to put an I Am Inspired candle out, but I have them lined up on the front of my desk, like little soldiers. And every morning if I’m gonna go up and write, or if I’m gonna go up and work, I pick one of them to say like, what do I wanna feel today?
Or What do I feel like I’m lacking today? And I’ll light one of those. I’ll take in the scent. I’ll read the little affirmation. Takes 30 seconds. It starts me off in the right direction.
Arielle: Ned, what I love about this is that we have a bunch of tips from the past about mugs and about collections.
Look at that.
Ned: In fact, I have a mug collection, so Anjali, this touches me deeply, I love it
Anjali: Oh my goodness, look how connected we are.
Ned: Yeah. Well, this has been Wednesday, January 8th, 2025. We will be back with Anjali next Wednesday, and we will be back tomorrow for another Arielle and Ned tip.
Arielle: A little birdie once told me that what you appreciate appreciates, and that’s going to start us off for today.
Ned: I’ve heard that as [00:04:00] well. Hey Anjali, would you happen to have a tip that aligns with that concept?
Anjali: Why, yes, yes I do, but first I want to clarify, because the world keeps taking words and turning them into assignments, and I don’t like it. And one of those words is gratitude. I hate it when people are like, you have to have a gratitude practice. You have to write, you have to write down your gratitude lift. No, I don’t. I don’t have to do anything. Don’t tell me what to do. I’m gonna immediately do the opposite thing. So I use a lot of brain hacks and emotional hacks to like sneaky sneak around that part of my brain that digs its heels in and gets grumpy. And one of my favorites is rather than a gratitude list I just sit in the moment and sit there thinking about the sensations that I am appreciating in the moment. For example wake up first thing in the morning, I even if i’m tired. Oh my god, this bed is so comfortable. I don’t wanna leave this bed. Oh, there’s my adorable dog. Oh, he’s so much. I have to get up and walk him, but he’s so adorable when I have to [00:05:00] walk him, so I am gonna get out of bed because I really love him so much. And you start snowballing that way in a way that you’re not like well, I’m grateful for this and I’m grateful for this, and I’m grateful for this.
And that to me feels like school. I don’t wanna write down immediate things.
Plus they’re almost always like the same five things. So being able to sit in just the basic sensations of The moment kind of takes you out of the circumstances of your life and puts you right there to those little things that can gradually snowball into big ones.
Ned: Well, we are all about small things that grow to the big ones here on Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You. It is Wednesday, January 15th, 2025. This has been a guest tip from Anjali Bhimani. We will be back here tomorrow with another tip from me and Arielle, and next Wednesday for our next guest tip from the wonderful Anjali.
We are back. It’s Wednesday. It’s guest tip Wednesday with our tipper [00:06:00] of the month, Anjali Bhimani. Anjali, what is today’s tip?
Anjali: Okay. I am gonna do a curve ball from the last few that we’ve done, because I do frequent flyer points and hotel points and miles and all of that stuff, like most dudes do fantasy football. It is my jam. It is my lane. I love to do it. So here’s one of my favorite tips for people that doesn’t cost you a penny more than you are already going to spend, and here it is.
Every frequent flyer program, especially with the big airlines, has some kind of a shopping portal, So, if there’s a particular airline that you love to fly on the reg, go to that airline, find their shopping portal, and anytime you need to buy something online, check if the outlet that has that item is one of the partners of that airline. The cool thing about this is a lot of these portals, you can actually type in the item that you’re looking for. So say Nike shoes, whatever, it’ll show you the Nike store, but then it’ll also [00:07:00] show you specific products that are Nike’s at a bunch of different retailers, you can decide which one has the biggest points value, the biggest rewards value.
You can figure out which one you wanna do. So it’s one or two extra steps as you’re going online to buy it, but then you not only get the item, but you get frequent flyer miles or points or, uh, hotel points or whatever it is for your purchase. So your $1 goes a lot farther.
Arielle: Ned has been aggressively nodding his head for the last few minutes. Ned, does this resonate with you?
Ned: Uh, I love, I have a spreadsheet. I track all of my points. I have all of what card do I use when and for what I, I love — Anjali, I do this religiously and it brings my heart so much joy that you do as well.
Anjali: I don’t know how we haven’t figured out that we both did this together uh, sooner now. Okay. So this is what we’re gonna have to do. We’re gonna have to come over to each other’s house where we can appreciate the mug collection,
and then we can talk frequent flyer miles and points.
Ned: [00:08:00] Yeah, especially because we live on opposite sides of the country, so we’ll have to use those frequent flyer miles to pull
Anjali: Exactly. To get there.
We’ll bring, I’ll bring a mug. I’ll bring at least one mug with
Ned: Yes!
Arielle: good. And we will bring a mug tomorrow for the next episode of Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You with Arielle and Ned. Anjali won’t be here tomorrow, but she will be back next week with another guest tip.
Arielle: It’s the last Wednesday of January and by now, some of you Tippendales may have fallen off of your goals, fallen off of your resolutions. But Anjali Bhimani is here to give us a guest tip that will bring you right back into it. Anjali, what do you have for us?
Anjali: Hello! Okay, so this is something that I cultivated in my own mindset because I really hate New Year’s resolutions. So I like to say “you choose your own New Year” because the new year can start anytime you want.
Birthdays are a great time to start a new year. Also, if you go to the National National Days calendar, you can pretty much find a [00:09:00] reason to start anything on any day of the year. Um, you know, I’m, I’m gonna start being sweeter to my family. Oh, look, it’s National Praline Day. What a perfect day. So you could really find an excuse to start something on any given day of the year. I like giving myself
an excuse to do things right, rather than a mandate.
Ned: It’s also a permission that it’s okay to do things wrong because you can get yourself back on the horse faster than waiting for New Year’s next year.
Anjali: Absolutely. Don’t mandate it. Don’t look at the calendar say, I have to do it by then. Give yourself that reason and then give yourself the grace to know that not every day you’re gonna be great at it, as long as the majority of the time you’re consistently moving in the right direction you’re gonna get there.
Ned: Well, Anjali, thank you for being our guest tipper for January 2025. It has been a joy having you on Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You. And you better believe we’re going to call you again in a few months to see if you’ve got any new tips for us. In the meantime, Tippendales, you will see myself and Arielle Nissenblatt [00:10:00] tomorrow here on Daily Tips That May or May Not Help You for Thursday.
