Ep. 212 Annual review of 2022

What has gone well? What hasn’t gone so well? What do we want to do differently next year? And why is it so important to do this annual review?

*Resources mentioned during the episode*

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Annual review of 2022

Hello, and welcome back, as we are officially nearing the end of 2022, we’re well into December, just a few more weeks to go. And so what better time to look back over this past year now I ran the business strategy session a few weeks ago for the business accelerator, and I opened that up actually this year to non accelerator members, which was exciting. And we looked at planning out next year, from a business perspective, it was pretty hardcore. I had one client who said she had a nap afterwards, which I take as a positive, and someone else who said that their mind was whirling, but they had all their ducks in a row now and their strategy lined up for next year. So that’s all good news.

But as part of that strategy session, of course, we looked back over 2022, quite briefly, but it is really important to look back in order to be able to look forward.

So depending on depending on how robust your plans were, I suppose for this past year, you can do a more or less robust review, because of course, if you had really clear goals, if you had a big picture theme, if you set yourself frameworks and metrics and so on, it’s much easier, then to see exactly how you’ve done if you’ve been a bit more vague. Or if you haven’t had a plan at all, then of course, it’ll be a bit more subjective in terms of qualitatively assessing how you’ve done but I wanted to guide you today through a little exercise. So if you can grab a pen and paper that will be great. If not, then you know, I always listen to podcasts when I’m running or driving or whatever. So if you’re like me, then by all means, listen to it now. But come back and listen to it again, because it really is a practical session. So yes, of course, you can work through it theoretically in your head. But I do think it’s interesting to write it down and to look at it. And then to see where that takes you. Of course, we’ll be back next week to look ahead to 2023 and a both sessions, I’m going to be here doing it with you sharing very openly what’s what’s gone. Well, for me what hasn’t gone. So well, just to illustrate, you know, how it can look in practice. So without further ado, the first question for you. And I’m going to try not to have too many big silences on this. But I also want to give you the space to reflect. So probably, if you’re listening to it for the second time, certainly you’ll want to pause and then answer the question. But in the meantime, I’ll just give you a little bit of space to be able to answer the question without having hours and hours of silence on the recording because I don’t think that’s helpful. So the big question is, how do you feel about 2022? Right? Just spontaneous gut feel? How do you feel 22 has gone? Whether it’s from a business perspective, career perspective, personal perspective, romance perspective, whatever, right? Big Picture overall. Are you feeling relieved? happy, excited, proud, disappointed. Anything goes? How are you feeling about 2022 Overall, so for me on balance, I feel pretty positive. I’ve put my health and physical fitness and so on first, I’ve been very present with my family had some really lovely trips, and lovely, most importantly, little minutes and moments and excursions, and so on in between. from a work perspective, I’ve almost finished my book, which is very exciting. Hopefully, when this comes out, and maybe even is published. I launched my course earlier in the year. And both of those two things have let’s be honest, been on my to do list for a very long time.

So that feels pretty good. And yet, I can certainly do better, right? But that’s my general, unbalanced feeling. I’m pretty feeling pretty positive, there are things I can do better, and we’ll get into this. But overall, I feel quite positive. If you do, that’s great. If you don’t and believe me, I’ve had years when I felt very negative overall, then that’s fine that the good thing here is that you have the awareness. And that gives you a platform then to look ahead to change things for next year. Right? And that’s why we’re here. So overall, how do you feel? Then if you’ve been a part of my community for a while, you’ll be familiar with my five L’s model. If you’re new, perhaps you’ve just come across this episode, you’ve just started listening. Let me just walk you through this quickly. And everyone else who is familiar, I’m sure you can do with a reminder.

But the five L’s are live love, learn lead, laugh, and I love a bit of alliteration.

I’ll tell you what each of these means. But it’s an overall model designed to help you to think about success. Think about balance, think about goals in a more holistic way. So you’re no longer just thinking about the narrow work domain. So you know, when I answered the overall question, I didn’t just talk about sales and revenue and and only the book and course and clients and so on. Right? I thought about my health and family and so on. So the intention is to move away from just the narrow work domain and to think about the different ways priorities in life that need attention in order to feel in order for you to feel good, happy, fulfilled, successful. So again, love, love landed, laugh. Live is your health and well being. Love is your relationships and belonging, learn development and growth, lead career and impact and laugh, fun and spontaneity. And I’ll say before digging into each of these, if you do want to double click on them and get help in assessing each of these areas, I do have a free assessment that has, I don’t want to call it a scorecard because it’s not about getting a score out of 10. But there are 10 questions on each of the five areas, you can tick the box and then yes, of course you can add them up, but it’s supposed to give you an indication of the kind of things you could be considering. And so you can see quite quickly if there are big gaps or if something’s looking pretty good.

So that’s one step outside.com forward slash success. One step outside.com, forward slash success. But let’s take the first one live health and well being looking back over 2022. How has it been? So it can be of course your physical health, your mental health. It can be how you’ve prioritized it, what you’ve done exercise wise eating it can of course be if you’ve had illness, and so on, you know, some things are in your control some things not so much, in my case, knock on wood over the summer. And then last few months, at least our kids haven’t been so ill and the previous six months, nine months, they were, we were getting the phone call from nursery pretty much every week saying we had to come pick them up and knock on wood, that hasn’t been the case, that’s actually hugely positive, I really want to celebrate that. I’ve also worked with a personal trainer and nutritionist for the last 18 months, almost two years, now, I hit my weight target, which was pretty, you know, I had actually shifted it two or three times, so it was lower than I ever thought I would get back to it was kind of an idealistic, you know, 20s weight target when I was age 20 or so. So that was one thing. And I also ran a half marathon pretty last minute, last month, and I and I got my fastest personal best, by about 20 minutes, even though I didn’t even have a tracker or a timer or watch that work. So that was huge. You know, I also on the mental health piece started therapy actually started a few weeks ago, working with a therapist, which has been an interesting experience for me digging into some childhood stuff, and some things that going on now. And also, you know, just from the experience of experiencing therapy for the first time versus coaching, because they are two different things. And it’s really interesting to see to see that distinction. So that’s briefly for me on health and well being but again for you, how has 2022 been in terms of the results, the outcomes, as it were, but also in terms of the input?

So you know, do you feel that you have put in the effort to take care of your health, I spoke to someone the other day who’s been really prioritizing their physical, no sorry, the other way around mental health, perhaps not physical, often it’s the other way around. So we’re really thinking about those different areas, maybe your emotional well being you know, in terms of, of your social network, and so much we’ll often talk about in the next one, but live health and well being. So again, if you do want to spend more time on this, which I do encourage you to do, please pause and reflect on this. Now we’ll come back later. The second one is love. So relationships and belonging and yes, romance is on there. But it’s not just about romance. It’s whatever that means to you. If you’re single, if you want to meet someone, if you’ve been dating, if you’re going through a divorce, whatever your particular situation, but romantically and but it’s also about your family, whatever your family looks like, and friends and so on. So for me, I was thinking back, I’ve certainly had some challenges this year. Obviously, kind of post pandemic, things have been a bit tricky for everybody still socially. But we have we moved down to Poole Dorset last year, so a year and a half ago, my goodness, almost two years soon. And we have been making friends locally. So that’s exciting. We joined now at the sports club. We’ve got friends from nursery, that’s been really fun. I’m off to the theater tonight with one of my mum friends. That’s great. We’ve had a bit more time with my sister and her kids. We hadn’t seen them so much before. And we’ve seen them at half term. We’ve seen my parents, we’ve seen them in various occasions. So that’s been really special. And professionally I joined the mastermind group actually this year, which was a fantastic community. So I’ve been really valuing that and we’re meeting probably as we speak now I might be having a coffee with them in London. So that’s really exciting too. So in the area of relationships, personal family, romance plutonic professional, engaging in your local community, how do you feel 2022 has gone. The third areas learn development and growth. So this is about personal and professional development. It could be working with a coach maybe you’ve worked through one of my programs that course for example, have you been reading books, audible Kindle, paperback, whatever your preferred format. Have you done courses professional qualifications Have you been learning a lot Language, I’ve got a new one that I can add here I’m seeing it my notes. So I started Duolingo, I think I’m onto sort of day 40 or so of my streak, I never really got into it in the past, because it was far too easy for me. But I’ve managed to jump jump jumping around the Spanish to a point where actually, it’s getting a bit tricky. So it’s becoming more interesting and challenging. So a little bit of Spanish learning, I started tennis coaching, I’m into my second term now, which I’m finishing, I continue that as well. And I did a couple of coaching courses actually early on in the year. And so that was more from the professional development space this year, for me hasn’t been an investment year, it’s actually been more cutting costs and so on. And yet, learning is always such an important priority. So you know, I’ve certainly been reading, listening to podcasts, Audible, attending workshops, and all sorts, right. So there are plenty things there. And you certainly if you’re starting out, hopefully have been been doing a lot of learning, but perhaps you’ve been doing too much learning. So you know, it could also be, you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re doing all these courses, and so on, you’re following lots of experts, but you’re not actually implementing it. So that’s important to bear in mind to lead career and Medpac. Now, this is obviously the big focus that we usually tend to look at. It is your business, that is your career development, and so on. And it can be disappointing in terms of perhaps things like sales and revenue. But again, again, I speak to clients, you know, who feel frustrated, and yet when you actually take the time to look back, they’ve come so far, and I just thinking recently about the metaphor, the comparison of a child, you know, a baby, a toddler, the amount of things they have to learn in terms of walking and talking and eating and the entire universe, right? So is it a bit the same? When we’re starting a business when we’re doing something totally different? That learning curve at the beginning is so steep? There are so many things for me, you know, within a year or so, certainly, if I go back now, years and years, I had no idea what podcasting was, I probably barely knew what coaching was when I first started. So the fact that I now have all these email sequences and affiliate links, and you know, the website funnels, and podcasts and masterclasses and all these things, and, and books, and everything is just you know, the mind boggles. So, in terms of what you’ve learned in terms of what you’ve implemented, even if you’re not yet seeing the actual rewards from that in terms of sales money, and so on, please do you celebrate and look at the impact you’ve made. So for me, there are a few sort of mindset shifts actually, really, I’ve, I’ve also tried to simplify my, my content creation, because it can get very easily you know, that you’re sort of on this hamster wheel of content creation I was doing, you know, we experiment with different models, but lots of reels, and so on Instagram and daily posts, and then also LinkedIn, and the Facebook group, and so on, I’ve tried to pull back on some of those, simplify, and focus more on LinkedIn actually, and more on thought leadership. So we’ll see how that goes. I’ve also been seeing my b2b income stream of the business really growing organically. And I’m interested in seeing where that goes. And I’ve got some ideas for next year. We’ll talk about that next week.

And of course, again, I must celebrate, again, my book and my course.

So that’s for me, in brief the area of lead career and impact to how have you done in that area in terms of doing meaningful work, career progression, making progress with your, with your business, sorry, the book is clearly on my mind making progress with your business. And by the way, if you have faced redundancy, if you have had to go back to a job because your business hasn’t been working, again, we’re not judging here. We’re just assessing. You truly, it can be disappointing, but we know where we are. We know where their baseline is. And then we can look ahead to next year what we’re going to do differently. And often some of these things are out of our control as well. Right? So it’s important to be empathetic with yourself compassionate. Finally, laugh fun and spontaneity. So this is what Eve Watsky I think calls unicorn space. It’s that creativity, having fun being yourself. It could be hobbies and all sorts, right? So for me, I think tennis comes back into that again. I had my birthday dinner out which was exciting. I think it was my first night out. We’ve had a couple of kinds of weddings and 80th birthdays and things away from the kids. But this was sort of my first just for me. Dinner out at a really lovely restaurant here in pool with friends. I had a day out with one of my mum friends if I can call her that, but she’s a real friend. And when we went to Swanage, we had this gorgeous, sweet Cornish pasty with like Apple rhubarb and custard. It’s so good. I don’t like savory corners, pasties but this one and went to this incredible seafood restaurant with a view and wine. It was such a dreamy day and what a luxury, something that you take for granted back in the day I just haven’t done in so long. also been to Sweden a couple of times and we went to Spain. Lots of little fun things. It’s always about the little moments, right? It’s not just the big things. And recently I’m going to add that to the list too. I’ve just started picking up my ukulele again because I learned that in Hawaii years ago, during my hippie dippie Nomad phase.

So I’ve brought that back as a reminder of my three kids and pre settling down life. So those are the live love, learn the love, how was 2022? For you a couple more questions for you. The first one is, what do you want to celebrate? So, you know, I’ve sat graded that course it feels like a long time ago now, and I don’t really celebrate it anymore. But it was huge. It’s taken me years to want to have that course there. Not to mention years of coming up with the content and the frameworks and the thinking that’s gone into it, the tech and so on was a massive barrier, creating the content, recording it all getting it up there, we’ve moved to a different membership site as well. So that was a huge endeavor. So that’s massive. My book again, I’ve really gone from blank page to 250, whatever it is pages now, I’m hugely proud of that. And it’s such an amazing resource, it’s going to really fill a gap in my business model, and really provide an incredible kind of business card and resource for people who don’t necessarily can’t necessarily afford to work with me directly. And why not celebrate my fastest half marathon as well, I think, you know, again, it was just kind of a relatively last minute endeavor. And, and you know, at the end of the day doesn’t matter. But that was huge. I’d been running consistently, it was a really fun day, and it went really well. So I’m really glad I committed to that. So really important. What do you want to celebrate? In terms of outcomes if you can, but above all, in terms of input, which is the effort you’ve made, the things you’ve done, shifting your mindset, signing up to learn things, making an effort, putting yourself out there getting out of your comfort zone?

So what do you want to celebrate?

And by the way, I would love it if you actually did celebrate, meaning, get yourself a massage, go out for a drink with a friend, buy something you wouldn’t normally buy, have a indulgent chocolate pie, whatever it is that that feels for you, celebratory, but make sure it’s specifically for that achievement. And then finally, I’ll leave you the question. And we’ll segue nicely into next week’s episode, what I want to do differently. So if you want a different outcome, you’re going to need to do a different input, right? You’re going to need to change things in terms of the actions you’re taking, where you’re prioritizing what you’re spending your time on how much time what you’re doing how, when, and so on, right? So you can’t just keep doing the same things and expect a different outcome. That is the sign of madness, as we know. So what do you want to do differently? What results do you want next year? What different results do you want? And what do you want to make sure doesn’t happen? I guess looking ahead a year from now, if you’ve had disappointments overall, if you’ve had disappointments in one of the five areas one or more, then where do you want to make sure you’re really putting your focus next year to get different results. So I’ll leave you that for now. I hope that was helpful. Again, do go back grab a pen and paper, work through it properly. It’s one of those episodes that’s not just for listening, but actually for doing implementing. And then we’ll be back next week to look at 2023 I’ll see you then bye for now.

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