Practical Magic | A Shame-Free Year in Review
If there's one gift I recommend you give yourself before New Year, it's this one.
Here is my 6-step method for a holistic and shame-free annual review of your life, work or business, and how to harness the sometimes uncomfortable emotions that arise as a welcome and useful part of the process.
My Shame-Free Year in Review Process
I'm recording this episode in December 2021, and this year in review process is the one I use every year. Despite the challenges that we’ve faced this year and that it was not the ‘back-to-normal’ year we might have expected, I'm still honoring my traditional process. I think that adjusting to long-term change is part of the lesson that we're learning through these times.
I love reviewing my year. I have a lot of reflection practices that are built into my lifestyle and my business. I really value taking the time to stop, pause, get my bearings, and accurately assess where I am: my “location”, my coordinates, my achievements, my skill level, and most importantly, my desires. Am I still pointing in the right direction? Do I need to course correct?
I get so much clarity, purpose and self-approval from this exercise, that I want to share it with you.
Right off the bat, let me be honest. This is not a quick five-minute or even 2-hour exercise. It's not short. It's not snappy. It's not a tick-box exercise, and that's deliberate. I don't believe that deep self reflection, assessment, integration, and processing on an emotional, physical and mental level should ever be rushed.
A deep dive like this – a cathartic integration and harvesting of desires and uncelebrated victories – is the most powerful antidote to any stagnation that has set in in your lifestyle, habits, or work. It’s a great practice for getting in touch with your inner voice of wisdom; your inner compass that can so easily be silenced by the noise of the outside world and by white-knuckling through life.
I invite you if you feel called, moved, and especially if you've never done an exercise like this before, to consider starting now. You can get inspired by this exercise and make liberal edits, or you can follow the exact formula that I use. You might want to give yourself time over several days or weeks to do certain parts of it. It’s up to you.
Maybe you’re dreading this time of year. Maybe you feel overwhelmed by the fact that it's December, a new year is beginning and you're not sure if you're proud of what you've accomplished this year. Maybe you feel behind. Maybe you've been swept off-course. Maybe things have not gone the way you wanted and you're disappointed. Maybe you feel really rushed and overwhelmed that you have to come up with new year goals very soon and it’s too much.
If that's how you're feeling, I especially encourage you to engage with this process and go gently. Remember, a year in review like this one is not a performance review. It's not a scorecard. It doesn't involve an awkward meeting with your manager or boss. This is private; it’s just for you. It’s not a way for you to beat yourself up. On the contrary, I encourage you to use this exercise to harvest any hidden achievements or uncelebrated victories that you've collected that you haven't brought your full attention to.
The Six-Step Formula
I'm going to run you through a six-step formula. It spells out the word SPACER.
S-P-A-C-E-R.
I'm going to walk you through what each of the letters stands for, some questions or exploration points that you might want to bring to that area, and a lens through which to look at it. Of course, you’ll have your own lens whether you're a business owner, an employee, you're not working, or whatever your lifestyle brings.
1. S is for STRATEGY
That word may mean several different things to you, but the way I look at strategy is simply how you decided to go about things this year.
What did you decide to do earlier this year?
What did you decide to not do?
When you chose your areas of focus, whether that was setting goals, setting intentions, choosing areas of focus, setting boundaries, or creating some kind of game plan… how did that go for you?
What was the outcome?
What did the process feel like, relative to your initial intention?
For me personally, the strategy I use to guide my year, work, and life is to choose three words for the year. This is the exercise you'll find in Module Two of my Vision of Success course: the Productive with Purpose exercise. It’s an exercise I've been doing for several years now. Why? Because I commit every year to the process, not the result, I let my desire drive me. I choose three words that stand for how I want to feel as I go about things throughout the year.
My three words for 2021 were: Expanded, Sacred, and Well. I'm not going to go into those personally now, but I will do an upcoming episode on the three words exercise towards the end of this month. I'm just giving my words as an example to show that strategy can mean many different things.
This space is for you to evaluate your strategy.
If you're starting here, and you think, ‘I don't think I had a strategy.’ Well, your strategy might have been to not have one; that's still a choice you made. Evaluate:
How did that pan out for you?
Did you what did you learn from letting go or loosening your grip on control?
What happened?
What were the outcomes?
How did it make you feel?
What did you learn from that?
Did it work for you?
Is that something you want to do going forward?
Your strategy: how did you decide to go about things this year and then evaluate. At the end of this exercise, I'll ask you to harvest your year in review so that you can go into next year with more intention having processed and integrated the lessons from this one. Simply evaluate: Did it work for you? Did it not? Why? What do you want to bring forward? What do you want to leave behind?
2. P is for PAY
Going straight for the money here.
If you are a business owner, you may want to consider your personal pay and your business profit.
If you are an employee, you may want to think about your salary or any income streams coming into your life.
This is a space for you to evaluate.
Was it enough?
How does it make you feel?
What worked when it came to making that money?
What didn't?
No matter whether we're self-employed, employed, or not working currently, many of us have internalized this idea that we don't have much control over the money we're making. You might think, ‘No, that's not true. I totally understand how I have control over that.’ But really question your thoughts on a daily level and how those thoughts impact your behaviors. I think for many of us it would be worth us sitting with and realizing the ways in which we unconsciously internalize money beliefs that take us out of the driver's seat.
How am I making money?
How did I make money this year?
Did it work for me?
Did I feel underpaid?
What were the most profitable things that I did?
What were the least profitable things?
And does it matter because they have another benefit…or not?
Especially as business owners, I think it's good to set an intention for an exercise, whether that's launching a new service or making an investment, and decide why you’re doing it. Am I choosing to do this because my expectation is that this will be a really high money generating activity? Or am I investing in this thing right now because it's an experiment that will give me other results, other than a lot of money straight away? Often, we take the time to give each activity a role so we can't effectively evaluate whether it worked or not because we weren't sure what the goal was.
Take some time to look through your money, whether it's your accounts for your business, or doing an evaluation of your payslips, and sit and think about it.
Do I need a pay rise in 2022?
Do I need to raise my rates?
Do I need to change my income streams so that I'm working less hard for the money I'm making?
Are there things I've been doing that are really unprofitable and are not bringing me joy?
Here is your space to take a look.
I understand this topic can be very difficult. It can be triggering, be very emotional, which is why I recommend that you may want to break up this year in review into separate chunks. Give time and space for emotions to arise and sit with them. I'm going to talk a little bit at the end about harvesting emotions, but take your time to really move through this at the pace that feels right for you.
3. A is for ACHIEVEMENTS
Here is your space to harvest all that you are proud of this year.
You probably have quite a few uncelebrated and unprocessed victories, achievements, accomplishments, and things you're proud of that you have not given your full attention to and let light circulate in your system and light you up.
I want you to take loads of time to review the entire year and think about all the things you've done. What are you most proud of? Mine your camera roll and messages for all of those wins! All of the great things you received, all of the things you completed, and all the things you poured your heart into.
Maybe you want to evaluate your whole body of work. The number of clients you worked with, different projects you worked on, content you published, or whatever it is. Write a list of all the things that you've done.
So often during this time of year or we're thinking, ‘Oh, my goodness it’s December! I'm behind on this. What have I done this year? I'm a bad person.’ A great way to get out of that loop is to look at the cold, hard facts.
Where did you spend your time this year?
What did get done?
What are the intangible and tangible things that you've accomplished?
Evaluate your body of work.
If you're listening to this podcast, you're probably already doing too much. If you’re one of those people who's always beating yourself up for not doing enough, take a look at the data and celebrate the hell out of what you did achieve this year.
I encourage you to take two or three of the achievements that you are really chuffed with – the kind of achievements you want more of in your life – and separate them and reverse engineer the process of how you made it happen. What is the recipe for making this happen again? What do you need to do to make this possible again? If you're able to break it down and figure out the specific recipe for success – the habits you needed, the environment you needed to be in, the boundaries you had to set, the energy that you had to raise, etc. – it's far more likely that you can do that again.
Your success is never an accident. Take the time to reverse engineer how you made success happen for yourself this year.
The word “achievement” is whatever it means to you. Think beyond the usual professional goalposts.
What about your social life?
What about your emotional and interior life?
Did you build a lot of resilience this year?
Did you make a lot of new connections?
Do you make mental health achievements that you haven't celebrated?
Did you make good decisions this year?
These are all achievements. Take the time to go there and make a non-exhaustive list of everything you are proud of.
4. C is for CHALLENGES
Here is your private space that nobody will see or grade you on what didn’t go according to plan for you.
I encourage you to try to keep this space free of self-attack.
In Episode 20, Be More Scientist, I talked about the importance of cultivating a scientist mindset – of seeing everything that you do as an experiment by setting a hypothesis and parameters, and then embracing a sense of play and curiosity to see what happens.
One of the key tenants and values of having a scientist mindset as you go through life is that it helps you see mistakes and failures as evidence of forward movement that is essential for your success. If you're not making mistakes or having failures, how will you be able to assess where you are and what you're capable of? It's simply a process of locating yourself accurately and figuring out what you do need to succeed in the future.
Here is a place for you to document your challenges, struggles, mistakes, and disappointments, and to bring that scientist mindset to this reflection exercise.
What did you learn from these experiences?
What did you learn about who you are, what you're capable of, and what you didn't have to succeed?
What was missing in your environment?
What skills, information, support, energy was missing?
What did you learn about?
Do you still want to pursue this thing?
What did you learn about other things that you're good at that you weren't aren't aware of but learned in the process?
What did you notice about yourself about others?
Inside challenges and failures are the keys to working out what our next steps might be. I encourage you to document what didn't work and celebrate that you took those steps. Celebrate that you took those risks, and don't hide from what didn't go right. Hiding simply means that without this process of integration, understanding, and learning, the same challenges and lessons will keep coming up for you again and again until you start to notice what's missing.
5. E is for ENERGY
This section is often missing from many other year in review exercises, which is why I've added it here. Evaluate:
How were your physical, mental, and emotional energy and health this year?
Was it related to the achievements and the challenges you faced?
Did it make the strategy you chose possible or not?
Is your pay at the right level for you?
How was your energy this year?
What did you do that successfully raised your energy?
What drained your energy?
Did you do enough of what really lights you up?
Did you honor your cyclical nature?
Were you compassionate with yourself as you naturally move through expanded and contracted states of energy, like a normal cyclical being?
I encourage you to look at both Episode 7, Energy Raising, and Episode 19, Everything Has Its Season. If this process makes you realize that your energy was not your ally this year, you felt drained, you were ill a lot, you had to drop things because you didn't have the energy to hold it, then maybe this is a big area of focus for you next year. Both of these episodes may have lots of useful tips for you.
This might be a perfect place for you to start before you set your goals for next year.
Evaluating our energy is really important because even our greatest achievements become irrelevant over time if they make you feel terrible in your body.
6. R is for RELATIONSHIPS
This is another area that I find is missing from a lot of review exercises.
Our ecology, the soil in which we are growing, is the number one factor in whether we're going to be able to meet our desires or not.
Take a look at the landscape of your relationships from 2021.
How were you supported? And was it enough?
Who really showed up for you?
Where are the places where you felt isolated, cut off or unrooted?
When I say the landscape of relationships, I mean look all over the place. Your colleagues, business collaborators, team, mentors, clients, friends, your partner, and your family.
Think about any new relationships that you created this year.
Are you proud of them?
What are you celebrating?
Think of any relationships that you're proud of for letting go of because they were not supporting you or in alignment with the direction in which you're trying to go. They were not contributing to your ecology.
When you've done this exercise of evaluating your landscape of relationships and the names of all the people who contributed to you this year, then harvest those. I really encourage you to write and thank those people. What a beautiful gift to receive at this time of year: a short message of acknowledgment from someone who's thanking you for contributing to them this year.
Think about places where you contributed to others.
Where did you spend your energy?
Did that feel good to you?
Are you investing a lot of your personal energy into other people's successes, other people's businesses, other people's projects, other people's work priorities?
Is that right for you?
Who contributed to you and who did you contribute to?
How is that balance feeling?
As soon as we start to see our success as being rooted in our ecology – as being a systems outcome and not an individual outcome – it becomes easy for us to make more connections as to why relationship building is probably the absolute number one factor in determining whether we get our desires or not.
A Word About Uncomfortable Feelings
Uncomfortable emotions are likely to come up for you as you're doing review. Those uncomfortable emotions might be the reason why some of you might have avoided this kind of exercise for a long time.
I want you to know that your emotions are neutral, they are valid, and they are worth engaging with. The emotions that arise contain important messages for you, and I invite you to question how will you use those emotions. Here are some examples:
1. Sadness or Disappointment
As you’re doing this exercise, sadness or disappointment might come up. Instead of tamping it down, I encourage you to sit with the sadness and see what it's trying to show you.
Sadness often points us to the tender spots in our lives in our bodies that need attention. Places that we have neglected, things that are important to us that we have diminished, where we are exhausted, alone and unsupported.
Let the sadness point you to where there are desires for you to do things differently next year: to source yourself differently, to get supported differently, or to rush less.
Ultimately, sadness in its most useful form can be turned into connection with others. It can be turned into an energy of hope.
2. Anger
Anger might come up for you as you're doing this exercise. Anger that things didn't go your way, you weren’t supported enough, or you had to struggle alone.
Anger is a valid emotion. Let it come up. Let it permeate your system. Let it run through your circuits, cleansing them.
Anger is also going to point you in a direction. It’s going to show you what you love that’s worth protecting. We don't get angry about things we don't care about. Any anger you feel is an efficient way to learn about what you care most about and what are you currently not protecting enough?
3. Worry
Worry might come up. Worry about the future, worry that you don't have enough time, worry that you're not going to have enough money.
Worry is simply a flavor of care. These are places that are important to you and are worthy of more of your attention.
Note the places where you feel worried. Note that there are places worth investigating to see if you can source yourself better. You need more resources, you need more energy, or you need more support. Currently, the worry is there because you don't feel like you have enough resources to make it happen.
Worry is simply an invitation that you need more resources in this area before you take another step.
4. Fear
Fear may come up. Fear that what you want is so big and it's scary. Fear that continuing on this path will bring up even more uncomfortable feelings! You might face rejection. You might face more sadness and disappointment.
Fear is the opposite side of desire.
Fear simply reminds us that the things we want are scary because of how much they mean to us. Because of how right they are for us. If you don't feel fear, it isn't a sign that you're fearless and successful and you've done all your inner work. No, it simply means that you don't care that much about that thing.
Fear and desire are dual energies, so celebrate where fear comes up in your year in review, because it's a sign you're on the right path.
Emotions Are Messages
Tricky emotions that we’re encouraged to dismiss, erase and get rid of, are just messages from you to you. They are trying to get you to see something. They're trying to get you to feel something. Harnessing them in this process is the most efficient way for you to figure out what to put your attention on in 2022 for success.
Do not exclude your emotions from this process. They are just as valid as looking at the cold hard facts and making rational evaluations.
Harvest Your Year in Review
Now you have done your year in review. You have taken the time you needed to take, whatever that is to you. You have engaged with the emotions that came up. Maybe you decided to engage for several days, letting that emotional wave move through you until you arrived at a place of clarity.
The last step of this process is now to harvest your year in review. What is this all for if it's not informing how we to make our next moves?
Harvest Your Desires – Big and Small
What desires that have emerged?
What has your sadness and disappointment shown you about what you actually want more of next year?
What have your challenges shown you about what's missing from your life that you need for success?
What have your victories and achievements shown you about what you want more of?
What victories were barely celebrated and did not receive the attention they deserved?
Maybe you worked on some of those victories for months or years, and because you were busy at the time you just moved on to the next thing. I don't want any of your victories to go uncelebrated. Harvest your victories and have a celebration party for yourself where you get to bask in the glory of everything that worked for you this year.
Harvest Your Tender Spots That Need Care
Where are the places you feel sore?
Where are the places you feel that there's a lack of care?
Where did worry show up for you?
Put those to the side and note them down because I want you in 2022 to bring more deliberate attention to nourishing yourself in those spots.
Where Is There Gratitude to Be Extended?
Who is part of your ecology?
Who helped you?
Who guided you?
Who mentored you?
Who resourced you?
Who encouraged you?
Who opened doors for you?
Share thanks. Send out messages of gratitude.
What Is the Medicine You're Getting From This?
How is this process helping you integrate all that has happened on an emotional and physical level?
How are you getting closure from different things?
Feel the satisfaction of finally getting an insight, understanding why something happened a certain way or getting closure on a topic you've been spinning your wheels around.
There will be plenty more things that are worth harvesting depending on how you've approached this, so make sure you pull out all of those bits that you want to bring into next year. The lessons, the medicine, the victories, or the relationships you want to bring with you. This is the foundation from which your year next year will be able to fully flourish.
As I said at the beginning, this is NOT a quick and easy process. It's not a tick-box exercise. It’s deep. It deserves time and attention. Now you now have a month or more to spend on this process.
I would love to hear from you if you do undertake this process using the SPACER formula with emotional engagement and harvesting of desires afterward.
How did it go for you?
What did you learn?
Does it work?
I wish you a beautiful end of this year.
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