Your birthday is coming up! But in your experience, birthdays suck. You’ve put a lot of effort into some years planning and prepping, and the event still falls through. You’ve begged your partner to throw you a party, and it ended up being miserable. You had to move on your birthday, and it ended up being stressful, exhausting, and you never even got a cake.

This year, though, you want to have a good birthday. You want it to be different and you want to know how to do that. Here’s how:

1. Decide what you want

Take time to choose how you want your birthday to look. Some years you might want to have a big party, but there are plenty of years where you might just want to do your favorite things (which might not include a party). It could just be a trip to your favorite coffee shop, book store, brewery, and cooking a meal at home with your partner.

1. Do it your way

Be aware, while you’re deciding what you want, to stay in your “lane”. Someone else’s giant birthday trip to Cabo probably looked amazing, but that doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone’s birthday every year. People all over, for many years, have this idea in their head of what a birthday should look like. 

Maybe to you it “should” look like 75 people at a bar buy out that your best friend organized. But if you sat down and got quiet and honest with yourself, is that actually what you want? Or do you have an idea in your mind that you are only being celebrated and loved if 75 people show up to a bar buy-out your friend organized?

Don’t judge or compare yourself or what feels good to you when it comes to your birthday (or anything for that matter). If it feels best to you to stay in bed watching The Office all day and ordering take out for every meal, that’s perfect! If it feels best to you to go off grid into the woods with your cousin, that’s perfect!

1. Hold the space to celebrate

Celebrating is important in all aspects of your life. It’s especially important on your birthday, because that is, by definition, a celebration of you and who you are, and that you’re here with us! It’s an investment in yourself, honoring how far you’ve come, and how much you are loved.

Celebrating is different for every person (see above). One person’s celebration won’t look like another person’s celebration, and tha’ts perfect. Even if you choose to stay in bed all day for your birthday, do it intentionally, with celebrating in mind. “I choose to stay home today. I am celebrating my life by resting all day, having the easiest day possible.”

Holding the space to celebrate means to honor the space you want for your birthday. Do you want to take a full weekend off from work? Do you just want to go to work as normal but keep your schedule open after work all week? Whatever you decide, stick to it.

If you allow your time to get taken away by other things, people, or places, you’ll find at the end of that time that you’ve given away your space to celebrate. That probably won’t feel good.

This last birthday for me was so amazing. I followed these three steps above and created the best birthday I’ve had since my early 20’s.

1. Decide what you want

I knew I wanted to go with the flow, take it easy. So I didn’t do any planning of anything.

1. Do it your way

Most people might say your birthday “should” be a party. But I didn’t listen. I didn’t feel like planning anything, so I didn’t.

1. Hold the space to celebrate

Even though I didn’t have anything planned, I held the space. I made sure not to allow any plans to be made the day I was celebrating my birthday (the Sunday before). By doing that, I energetically allowed something even more amazing: my coworker offered to take my shift the day of my birthday! I hadn’t planned on taking the day of my birthday off, not for any particular reason, it just never felt needed. By honoring my space and worthiness to be celebrated, the universe offered up MORE space to be honored and celebrated!

In the end, my birthday was fabulous! I did absolutely all of my favorite things on both days I celebrated! It was fun, easy, flowing, and full of celebrating!

Now, I approach my birthdays every year feeling relaxed and excited. Because I know that I have the tools to create a good birthday every year, not one that sucks.

Here’s a podcast episode where I go into detail about how I followed these steps and created a good birthday for myself.