There are only 10 days left in the year! As scary as it might seem it is time to close down your to-do-list and to start thinking about the year that past and the one ahead. Christmas shopping is waiting.You might even consider home-friendly activities, like cooking or baking.
I don’t know about you, but for me winding down ahead of Christmas is not easy.The most sensible thing would be to block my last week to reflect on: How did my year go? What was I hoping for and what happened? Did I achieve any of my objectives? What did the past year teach me that I can take forward in 2023?
In this piece I would like to demystify the idealistic vision of the End-of- year reflections. Working-mothers do not have time to reflect ahead of the Christmas break, there is a frenzy of requests coming from all sides. It is the busiest period of the year and…to be fair, all I want for Christmas is…SLEEP.
What can you do to allow your Brain and Body to Wind down and not wind-up before Christmas?
First of all, have a plan with what is mandatory to be completed by the end-of- the-year and what can be picked up later? Make that list really short, to avoid going to the end-year holiday exhausted.
Secondly, make a mental commitment to set time aside to review the previous year and strategize over the new year. You might need as little as an hour and as much as a day if you lead a bigger team and organizations.
Thirdly, you got to actually use that time to review & strategizing time purposely, by splitting your time in 3 huge buckets:
1. Start by giving yourself credit for past achievements in the last year.
- What new practices did you implement?
- What positive feedback did you receive?
- What did your team do well and how did you add value?
- What about family achievements? Start by giving yourself credit for past achievements in the last year.
2. Be honest
- What were some of the disappointments?
- What were the tough moments?
- What feedback did you receive that you need to improve on?
- What about family …?
3. Dream big
- If you had a magic wand and you could only choose one Goal: what would you like to get from the new year?
- What would need to happen for you to feel fully fulfilled at the end of the next year?
- What skills would you like to learn?
- What passions would you like to pursue?
- What difference would you like to make to your clients, team, family, community?
And, to conclude your personal strategizing session, write up a Vision statement for the next year related to your Dream big, magic wand goal. That vision can be a statement or simply one word. What would be one word that you want to guide your 2023 actions. My 2022 word was Beauty.
We recently used this 3-steps approach in our last Mothers as Leaders, Leader Lab group coaching session and after about 90 minutes, all of us came out with a hopeful personal outlook towards 2023 and… some meaty goals.
Steliana Economu is the author of Mothers as Leaders and a leadership coach specialised in emotional and positive intelligence( PQ and EQ). If you liked this article and want to enjoy more of this type of resources do follow mothersasleaders.com