53. Year-End Reflection

Hi all. It’s that time of year again. This is the time of year that I personally take moments to reflect. I reflect back over the course of the year. I like using the calendar year. Um, some people use season, you know, whatever your time scope is. Great, for me, it’s this time. Looking back, uh, right now and as we cross into the new calendar year, I spend some time reflecting forward.

And, um, this podcast is about that. It’s about the practice and the work of learning and growth through active reflection. What I find this does for me is it helps me make more conscious choices by reflecting back and making intentions to take what I’ve learned from reflecting back and applying it to what am I intending moving forward.

I come into a place of, not whether I’m getting the right answer or not, but what are the conscious choices that I wanna make now, with my context now, with where I’m at now, and of course there’s a place here of being curious and open, loving yourself, right? And standing in that place of not berating or judging myself, but instead saying, what have I learned and what now?

And because I know how to hold my journey, you know how to hold your journey, right? The intelligence, the creativity that the idea is there within you, right? So we try and clear out the noise and I invite you into creating your own space to reflect back and reflect forward. Part of what it also does for me, above and beyond the conscious choices, is it helps me craft my stories.

So what do I mean by that? When you’re in it, you’re just in it and you’re like, oh, that didn’t go well and da da da, and you’re in the, I find that I get into this, into the noise of it, and I’m just like on the dance floor making things happen.

But when I come into reflecting and I come and step off that dance floor and up to the balcony to be able to reflect and look over the dance floor, then I can say, Wow. I can piece these things together and see a story that serves my learning, that serves my growth.

I even go back over and I’m like, oh, yeah, now I see why I graduated with my undergrad in 1998. Oh my gosh. With a triple minor looking at eco feminism and, um, looking at Dune ecology and environmentalism and looking at organizational behavior, right? Uh, from, from a stance of commerce. Oh, I see how those things fit together. Now I can thread what I was doing and following my heart at that time versus, you know, what my mom was telling me to go and study.

And I can actually, uh, there’s some things that have happened for me this year that I can see, in my past, stories that maybe hadn’t come together quite right for me, and now wow, because I’m reflecting on 2022 and I’m holding some of these stories, I can look at some of the past stuff that I’ve done and say, oh, some of my story over a longer arc makes even more sense to me now.

So making conscious choices, helping craft and cultivate stories that serve my learning and growth. Sometimes even coming into moments of healing, uh, which, you know, is personal for all of us, but sometimes when I stand in that, reflecting back and, and reflecting forward, there are parts of me, parts of my story, parts of my world that I can take a moment and heal.

When I look back, I’m really trying, this is an active part that I’m working on here everybody is I’m actively trying to acknowledge for myself the accomplishments, the achievements, the places where things didn’t go quite as planned and I had to pivot in some way, and even that, even though it wasn’t what I intended, it is an accomplishment that I moved through that, that I am trying to look back and almost like carve into my dna.

Yeah. I’ve gone through a hundred percent of my bad days, right? I have been able to walk in places of complexity, uncertainty, emergence, things that turned out ways that I didn’t know that it was gonna happen. Wow. I’ve accomplished some things that I set out to do. I accomplished some things that emerged, and I simply accomplished moving through some crap, right?

And moving through some of, some of those bad days that that alone can be an accomplishment. So it’s like I can see this spectrum of what accomplishment means, not just for the point of naval gazing, uh, and patting myself on the back though, that that is part of it. It’s to be able to say, so what did I learn from that?

And, hold on, hold on a minute. As Glennon Doyle says, right, I can do hard things here, and hard things that I didn’t expect that I would’ve had to do. And wow, I have resourcefulness within me to have gone through that. I can do something that complex again. I can tap into my resourcefulness when I need it again.

So part of that reflecting back of making those conscious choices, crafting my stories, having my moments of healing, and being able to acknowledge and actually start to embody some of the joy, um, and, and some of those accomplishments helped with my practice of learning and growth. Again, not just naval gazing, but to be able to see this as a practice for my growth.

And so how do I do that? And that’s what this podcast is about. And I think if you sign up to my newsletter, you can get a workbook that can accompany this. It, it’s a visual workbook to guide you through active reflecting. So go grab that if you like. It helps this podcast and that workbook help me provide you with literally what are the questions that I ask myself?

What’s the framing that I use? Because sometimes it’s just hard to say what’s, what’s my process here for goodness sakes? So I divide it first into two sections, reflecting forward and reflecting back.

So when I’m reflecting back, what I’m doing is I’m looking at what has happened for me over the course of this year. What have been the implications of what has happened that I planned on? Or what didn’t happen or what happened and I didn’t plan on that. What are the implications for me and how am I gonna take that forward?

And so first part here is when I look at what happened for me I start to literally go through my calendar. I, I use my calendar in this way. Maybe you have a diary of sorts or a journal or a whole bunch of sticky notes all over your desk, whatever it is. But I go through my calendar and say, yeah, what did happen?

What does that look like? I also use a notebook. Uh, like a sketchbook where I use an index that captures, what the main pages are. That’s what an index does, of course. And I, I go through the different workbooks, the different sketchbook that I’ve used, my online calendar and my workbooks, and I just say, what has happened?

What does that look like? And, um, there’s another part, last part is I use something called bullet journaling. But when I set up my bullet journal, what I do is I set up a couple of pages at the very beginning that allow me to, to say what has happened and, and reflect over the course of the year a little bit, or jot notes some of my intentions.

And I just, I try to review that. I don’t keep up with it very well over the year, but I go and tap back into that stuff. So I go back into these artifacts, calendar and journals, and I say, what’s happened? And I start writing that down to whatever degree and detail that you want. I just start capturing what, what did happen, just so I can start to have a remembering of what happened.

And then I start to create. Um, once I do that and I kind of get exhaustive in that I create a highlight reel. And a highlight reel isn’t necessarily all the things that put a smile on my face and I’m like, oh, so glad that happened. It’s not necessarily. It is highlights or significant inflections of what’s happened over 2022 for me. To say these were highlights or inflections or momentous, um, moments along the year for me, and I like to capture that to sort of double click out to what that year looks like for me.

When I have that data, when I have that data where I get to in learning and growth, as I start to think through what are the implications.

So once I see what’s happened, not happened, then I start to see wait, what are the implications for what happened or didn’t happen and why do they matter to me? There is no correct answer here. There is no judgment of myself here. Well, there is a little, and I really work on it, but the aim is to be really curious to what comes.

It’s not just looking at the data that I’ve written down, but it’s also connecting into my intuitive energy into what, why, why do these highlights, why do they matter to me? What am I pulling out here? It’s a, it’s a continued stance of curiosity, and once I pull out those implications, then I can start to say, wow, okay, what does this mean now?

For what 2023 might look like, what my leadership journey might look like for me personally, what holding my entrepreneurial identity looks like. What does it mean for Holon Leadership? What does this mean going forward? And that’s a place of application for me. Uh, you might have other ways to apply it, but for me it’s I’ve reflected on my significant moments, the implications, and now what does that mean for me? I try and capture some commitments that I want to take forward into the new year. I also try and capture some of this for where this can start to land in my business planning where it can, uh, land in my own inner work and development work.

Uh, that’s how I start to operationalize, take into applications some of this. Okay, so that’s how I start to reflect back. In terms of the amount of effort and time, this is really unique to you and what it looks like for you. So, it can be 15 minutes walking your dog thinking through some of this.

It can be, uh, snuggled up on the couch, right? Uh, for two hours in a special journal with your markers and your sketchbook and so on. It can be sitting at a desk just, uh, using the workbook, uh, and, and noting down my answers. Uh, might take me, I’ll give myself half an hour and just note down my answers.

Part of this for me is honoring the time to not just in the moment, like the 15 minutes or the two hours or what have you decide to take, but it’s the, in the time that comes after. Right. So if I take the 15 minutes, the half hour, whatever it is, and I start to unfold in some of these questions, it’s, it’s the weeks after that I know it integrates within me in different ways that I can’t necessarily have clear attribution to, but, It, it integrates within me and I trust in that process that I do not control.

So there’s a part of the process that I control and I’m writing things down and I’m like actioning it and so on. And then there’s a part of this process, all, that I do not control and that I know moves through me and that I trust in that intuitive process in integrating. Okay. So then we come into 2023, reflecting forward.

Now you might do these two things together. You might do them in December or in January, or you might take this whole thing and look at it from the season, from winter to spring over the solstice, you know, whatever it is for you. But here for me, when I come into a place of reflecting forward to 2023, I start by drawing a sideways figure eight, the infinity symbol.

Some people call this an eco cycle, panarchy cycle. There’s a bunch of different names. It’s all the same thing, and it’s drawing a sideways figure eight. Why do I draw sideways figure eight? Because it is simply a framework that prompts questions in me to be able to have a conversation around what I want to keep, what I wanna let go of, what little seeds I wanna plant in 2023, and what seeds from 2022 I wanna start growing in 2023, I want to cultivate further in 2023, right? That I want to tend to with more intention.

Here’s how it goes, all, and it’s described further, uh, in the workbook. But if you draw that figure eight and you come up to the right, uh, upper right quadrant, I’m literally moving my right hand trying to track myself here, uh, to the upper right, right quadrant.

This is where, I start to lay out for myself, what is it that I want to keep, that I wanna maintain, that I’m pulling from 2022 and saying, yeah, this stuff I want to conserve, I wanna continue to keep these patterns, keep these practices, keep this stuff, whatever it is for you. So I start jotting some of that stuff down in that quadrant.

Might be keywords, might be sentiments, whatever it is. This is some of the stuff that I wanna keep. Beautiful. And then on that figure eight, when I stay on that right hand side and I come and I curl down and around to the bottom right hand quadrant, this is a process cue for me to say, what do I wanna let go of?

What do I wanna come into creatively destroying? Composting, unlearning, releasing. What is it that I want to, I wanna let go of, and this might even show up for you as patterns or that, that you wanna start releasing, that you’re not just gonna let go of right in that moment, but it’s gonna take time. Or like, Hey, I no longer want this project.

I’m gonna, I’m gonna bow out of it. I’m putting it under the creative destruction quadrant, right? Like, it, it, it depends on where you’re at. Might even come in the form actually of what I’m gonna start saying no to, right? Those no lists help us provide room for an intention for our yes lists. So they’re very important.

The point here is when we come down and around to that bottom quadrant, it’s what do I wanna let go of and come in into that releasing place? I’ve learned from 2022 and these patterns, this work, this paradigm, these pieces, they, they’re not working for me. They’re not serving me. It’s time to let that go. Time to say no to these things. Times I start seeing patterns and I need to unlearn these things. There’s gonna be deep practice here for unlearning, whatever it might be. Those are kinds of the prompts that happen in that bottom quadrant.

And then for me, there’s a prompt to come on up and through that figure eight, through that infinity loop up to the left hand quadrant. And here it’s sprinkling the seeds of possibility for me, when I look over and reflect back on my 2022 and I’m coming into 2023, what are some of the seeds that I wanna sprinkle into the earth. What is it that I wanna start sewing, embracing? What is it that, that I, I, I may not even have the clear words for it.

Maybe it’s essence, energy, but that if you can imagine some seeds that you’re sprinkling into fertile soil, what are those for you? What are those for you? And you might not have complete clarity, or be super articulate about it, but that’s okay. You’re sprinkling the seeds of intention here. And so where this can look is it, it may feel a little bit not as clear.

That’s okay. That’s all right. It’s not supposed to be right. You don’t know how those sprouts, those seeds are gonna sprout, right? Putting in what serves you here to get into this intention. And when we come down and around the other side, uh, the, the down and around, that left side, down to the bottom here, it’s about taking that, that next step into a place of growth.

Growth in this quadrant is about looking at the seeds you’ve planted in 2022 and before, right? And looking at what’s taken root. What am I tending to further? What am I making space so that it can start sprouting or growing further? Part of what comes up here for me is where do I wanna put my energy into further?

I’m not totally maintaining something. I’m not just sprinkling the seed, but there’s a pattern, a project, a piece of work, there’s something about what’s going on for me that I wanna grow, to take deeper root, to tend to further. This is not necessarily a kumbaya moment, cause part of the reflection here is what am I avoiding or fearful of in this moment of trying to choose what I grow deeper, sometimes fear is our ally in trying to direct us towards what do I need to be putting my attention to and tending to because fear is telling me can’t do that, or whatever the voices are that come up for you. Right. Oh, too scary. Okay, well, what is, what is the intelligence there and is it calling you forth to say, hold on a minute.

Is it too scary? Is fear trying to hold me back? Limit my beliefs, keep me small. What here is in this quadrant of growth? That I wanna tend to and make space for that might be uncomfortable, right? Might not be all love. Lovely, right? It might be uncomfortable. And that’s how I go through this framework, this flow.

And I do one iteration of it and then I go and I flow further and I’m like, oh, well that’s interesting. And now I come back up to the upper right hand quadrant. Going through this once now, Is there something I want to change about what I’m nourishing and maintaining and keeping? Okay. And is there something I come back around and is there something that I wanna, uh, note down further about what am I, I’m unlearning.

Maybe that’s not what I’m unlearning. Maybe that needs to go into a different quadrant and so on. So I do a few iterations of it to be able to, again, not get something perfect or correct, but to be able to tap in my own interpersonal development, to be able to tap into what I’m intending and what new ideas come up for me by doing a few.

A few flows of it. Once I’ve done a few, then I stand back and I try and, and this is hard for me, I try and look at what I’ve done and look at what’s missing. Look at, okay, if I try and widen my perspective or stand in different places of myself to address some blind spots that I may have that have prevented me from seeing in full.

I just try and test with that a little bit. If you have someone that you want to test it with, that’s a good, good way to try to see if you’ve had blind spots here or fears holding you back in different ways. It, it really is just a place to try and, and stand in a different place of observance.

Right? And then, trying to come into a place of intentionality is, is a bit of my next step around taking it that next step further. So when I’ve, I’ve looked at what I’m trying to learn and carry forward into 2023 and I’ve adjusted some blind spots so I can stand in that place of courage and confidence.

It’s a time for me then to set some intentions, you know, I’m, I’m, I’m stuttering a bit cuz it’s not smart goals, right? It’s not, um, uh, a detailed work plan that I’m doing here. It really is balancing that, that rational data intelligence with that intuitive knowing in my gut intelligence to set intentions of what I want to carry into 2023.

Sometimes, I’ll just like burst out a bunch of different ideas that I write down on a piece of paper that looks more like a mind map. Sometimes I’ll be scribbling as if I was writing in my journal and I’ll actually just pick one word that actually sits with me after scribbling all of that. Might come in the form of a mantra or a statement that I, I literally put on a, a, a post-it note and stick up on my mirror. But it’s being able to say, okay, from what I’ve been working on in terms of reflecting into 2023, addressing those blind spots, is there at least one intention that I want to capture for myself that I can hold?

Right? If we try and write down five, 10 different goals, it’s really hard to hold all of those. But if we have some kind of keyword that lands as our intention moving forward that can be a way of capturing it, right? It’s however it comes up for you. However, intentions come up for you.

And I also couple this with just trying to understand the stance that I wanna hold, because some years I wanna stand in a place of real deep power. And other years I’ve noticed that I want to hold something that has the power and lightness and ease. And in other years I’ve noticed that joy is simply my word, and it’s a really hard practice for me to actually cultivate joy and the stance I wanna have is a joyous stance for me. That’s really hard.

And so the stance that holds your intention, that has been illuminated to you through this rich reflection process allows you to, to start to embody part of what you’re reflecting. That’s the, that’s the idea anyway. So this is what it means for me. This is part of my process for me to reflect back, to reflect forward.

Now, this can go in a multiple ways, right? Like you can start crafting a leadership practice out of this. You can start crafting a business plan out of this. You can, like, this starts to be a place of data and intelligence for you to now go and prepare for your performance management conversation that you’re gonna have.

Like there’s a lot of places where you can lift this from, but part of the purpose of this is to actually not worry about that business plan, that performance management meeting, or any of that stuff. What I’m offering here is a moment to clear the noise of everybody else and everything else to tap into your journey and your moment of saying, what has 2022 been for me?

What are highlights and moments for me? What am I taking from 2022 and bringing forward into 2023 around what I want to conserve and maintain? What do I, what I wanna unlearn and compost? What seeds start to energize me that I wanna start to sprinkle in the soil? What different places of growth I want to tend to?

What does it mean for me and getting that right for me, from me, for me first is the place that I wanna start before I then go have other conversations, create other plans, and so on. So that’s my invitation to you all. Reflecting back from the here to reflect forward into the brilliance you are going to create in 2023.

Warts and all, crappiness and all, greatness and all. This is a time to make conscious choices, to craft stories that serve you, to take those moments of healing and to know not only have you made it through all your bad days, not to not only know that, wow, have you ever accomplished things, but to know that the world needs you to stand in your full self as you work through the world in whatever ways that that is, that you work through the world with your own beautiful brilliance. You’re a limited edition of one. And we need you. We need you in all the form that you are.