7. The New Leader’s Guide to New Year Goal Planning
During the time around the New Year, I take a little time out to celebrate the past year and plan for the 12 months ahead. In this first episode of 2023, I’m sharing the process I use with you, so you can experiment and decide if this is a practice you’d like to implement in your own life.
These are super-simple practical exercises that you can start trying out for yourself right now. This takes some consistency and some goals are going to be easier to set, achieve, and celebrate than others. But if you make what I’m sharing today a practice in 2023, I guarantee you’ll find more things to be proud of come the end of the year.
Tune in this week to discover the simple practices and approaches that you may have never heard before that will help you set, achieve, and celebrate your personal and professional goals year after year. I’m giving you some questions to ask yourself to get clear on what you loved about the past 12 months and decide what you want to do differently in 2023 as a new leader.
Until January 30th, you can book a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me to uncover what makes you unique as a leader, and give you a personalized roadmap tailored to your strengths and needs, so you can fully focus on your leadership goals. Click here for all the details!
What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
Why our brains don’t naturally focus on the things that go well in our lives.
How to find highlights worth celebrating in even the most challenging times.
What it looks like to start truly celebrating yourself and how to decide what that means for you.
Why reviewing the past 12 months and planning the year ahead is vital work, especially for new leaders.
Some specific questions to ask yourself when reviewing the past year.
How to decide what you can realistically take on this year as a new leader and how you want to approach 2023.
Two visualization exercises for planning out and achieving your goals in 2023.
Listen to the Full Episode:
Featured on the Show:
Book a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me to uncover what makes you unique as a leader.
To thank you for being a listener and supporter of The Confident Female Leader, I am sharing a free guided meditation with you! Download your meditation here.
Download my end-of-year retrospective questions here.
Full Episode Transcript:
Today, I'm going to share the simple practices that have helped me consistently set, achieve, and celebrate my personal and professional goals year after year since the beginning of the pandemic. You ready? Let's go.
Welcome to The Confident Female Leader podcast. A space for ambitious women stepping into leadership, who are ready to take control of their circumstances and own their magic. If you're ready to start shedding your self-doubt, come into your new identity as a leader, and stop consistently undervaluing yourself so you can feel more confident in your role, this show’s for you.
I'm Annie Framand; Psychologist, Certified Feminist Coach and Master Trainer. And I'm on a mission to help women just like you stop overworking, overthinking, and overpleasing, so you can start creating success on your terms. Ready to create your dream life? Let's go.
Hola, amigas, welcome to 2023. I hope you all had a great holiday season. I had the best Christmas party celebration at my friend's place. I also went to the beach, and I caught up on some books I've been wanting to read for a while. I also got together with some old friends and some new friends who came to Puerto Vallarta for the holidays and that was so much fun.
All right, now, I have to say this was a really different experience from last year. So, I got COVID last year on December 23rd, and back then, we had to self-isolate for 10 days. So, I basically resurfaced on January 2nd after all of the festivities so I pretty much missed everything. Now, the silver lining is that I'm an introvert, so I had plenty of time to read those books I'd been meaning to read all year and also to journal, so it wasn't so bad.
Every year, I take some time off during the holidays to celebrate the past year and plan the year ahead. So, on this first episode of 2023, I thought I'd share my process with you, so that you can experiment and see if it's a practice that you'd like to implement as well.
So, first off, I want to talk about a practice that I started three years ago, right before the beginning of the pandemic, and I did not know how timely it would be at that time. So, I put a paper in a jar, a physical jar at the end of each week with my highlight for the week for 52 weeks. Now, sometimes during the height of the pandemic, it was a struggle to find even one highlight, I'm not going to lie. And sometimes I cheated and I put two in there because it was such a fantastic week.
Now, it's the best feeling to open up the jar at the end of the year and review all of the highlights because our brains tend to forget everything that went well because they're still so focused on survival. So the negativity bias has us looking at what went wrong and what might go wrong in the future. Now, the jar turned into a Word doc since I moved twice since the beginning of the pandemic, but now I have three years of highlights in a really challenging time, which is absolutely priceless. So, I really, really recommend that practice, and you want to maybe try it out in 2023. You might want to get a fancy jar or just a basic Tupperware, maybe a journal or a Word doc. Pick whatever your writing instrument of choice is and then write your highlight of the week. Maybe every Friday or Sunday or whatever day is easier for you to remember.
And then at the end of the year when you look back, you're going to be so grateful that you did. And then, once you've reviewed your list, you're going to want to celebrate the shit out of yourself. Now, take yourself out to a nice dinner, a lunch or a brunch, or maybe for drinks. Or maybe you're going to want to go out with your love, your kids or the girls, buy yourself a nice gift, or give yourself some time off. Maybe light a candle and make yourself a chai latte. Whatever makes you feel happy and whatever puts you in a celebratory mood. You just got through a hell of a year, you just got promoted during a pandemic, you made it. Now, go treat yourself.
An alternative to this practice, and I do both personally, is to do a retrospective of the year by asking yourself a few questions and jotting down the answers so that you can revisit them year after year. Now, I'm going to shoot them here in rapid fire, but you don't have to stop the car if you're driving or stop walking to write this down, you can just go to the transcript and I'm going to put the link in the show notes, so that you can get the written format of these questions.
Okay, so here it goes. First one, what was the most memorable moment for you this year? What was your greatest accomplishment? What and who were you grateful for this year? What did you struggle with this year? What was your toughest moment and why? What did you learn this year? Did you use your time wisely? Why or why not? How is your financial situation? Is there anything you want to let go of? Are you living true to yourself? And is there anything you want to improve? Now, you can answer any or all of those questions and even add some of your own. Have fun with it and see what really resonates with you and makes you have the best retrospective of the year that you want.
I personally tend to make my answers general. I look at different aspects of my life, not just my business. But for you as a new leader, you might want to answer these questions in relation to your new leadership job specifically, and then you could notice your evolution as you answer these same questions year after year as you grow into your leadership role.
Now, I want to talk about something that has come up in my sessions recently with my clients and that is exhaustion. So, normally at the end of the year, it's normal to be tired, but I want you to keep in mind that the last two years that we've had are not normal. So, if you're feeling burnt out, you're not alone.
A few weeks into the pandemic, most people thought it was going to last a couple of weeks, maybe a month at best, but I was already comparing it at the time to a marathon with an unlimited number of kilometers that we were all running together with pretty much zero preparation. And who would go into a marathon, especially one that we did not know how long it would last for with zero preparation, right? So, it was like, "If they're calling this a pandemic, we're probably in this for a while," is what I was thinking. And here we are two years later. So, if you're exhausted, it's not just you.
Collectively, we've been running this marathon for a couple of years. We got through it, but now we've got a bunch of blisters on our feet, we're tired and we're not running anymore, we're pretty much limping. Many of us have not gotten anywhere near the amount of rest that we needed, and some others did, and they're ready to go.
So, before you start sprinting into 2023, take a moment to assess your level of energy. Where are you on that continuum between completely burnt out and ready to go and sprint into the year? What can you realistically take on this year and this quarter? Do you need some rest? Be honest with yourself.
For some of us, the holidays are very restful. It's the case for me, and for others, it's absolutely not. You may be running around from party to party, especially since a lot of us have not been able to party in the last few years and meet up with family. So, it might have been a really exhausting time of the year for you. So, really take stock of that for you and be honest with yourself.
And then if you do need some more rest, how can you make that happen for yourself? How can you bake that into this first quarter of the year, and what does that look like for you? Does it look like a day at the spa? Does it look like going to bed earlier or getting up later? Does it look like a nap? What does that look like? Does it look like maybe more physical activity? Maybe your body has not been moving enough and that has impacted your sleep, for example. Okay, so be honest with yourself.
Now, the other thing you want to consider is that our primitive brains have been fired up in a way that they haven't been fired up for most of us in this lifetime. So, the amount of fear and anxiety that we've collectively felt is unparalleled and that taxes our system. So, be gentle with yourself, right? You just got through two years of a global pandemic, two years. This is not your regular January.
Now, keeping this in mind, I'm going to suggest a couple of visualization exercises to help you plan out your goals for the year in a fun way. So, play with them and see which one of these two works best for you. Now, before you do any of these, you're going to want to be in a quiet place, but maybe you want to meditate or move or do some yoga before you settle down to reflex. So, I'm going to put in the show notes a link to a five-minute meditation that I recorded for you to help you calm your mind at any time, and you can use that here before you visualize.
The first visualization is one that I did on January 1st, 2022. This is inspired from one of my coaches, and so, I'm going to describe this one to you as a first option. I pictured myself a year later on January 1st, 2023 when I did this last year. Now, as I pictured myself, I visualized myself in the space that I would wake up. So, where am I a year later? Who am I with if anyone? What does it smell like? What do I see as I open my eyes? How do I start my day, and how do I feel throughout my day? What does it look like or feel like throughout the day? Who do I interact with if anyone? What am I doing? What food do I eat, and how do I end my day?
And this works because the more specific you get, the more you can see your future actually unfolding before your eyes, and then the clearer your goals get and the more your brain gets to work to make it happen.
What was shocking to me was that I pictured myself living in Mexico, speaking fluent Spanish and hosting a podcast. I mean, sure, I was spending the winter in Mexico at the time, but I had only been here for three weeks, and I certainly had not planned on living here. But in April, when I saw the opportunity to stay here all year, I quickly seized it because it felt right. I had already imagined it happening.
As for the podcast, it took me many months from the moment I had the idea to the moment it came to life, actually 11 months. But that seed was there and here we are exactly a year later after that seed was planted. And now it's your turn to dream.
The second visualization I have for you is one that I played with this year, and that one is inspired by another one of my coaches. So, I just did this. We're going to see the results next year. I pictured myself in a year at the end of 2023 as if it had already happened. So, you'll see the wording here is a little bit different. My visualization sounds something like this.
So, in 2023, I moved into a house in Mexico. I started a community for female leaders, and I hosted a retreat for female leaders in Mexico. Now, you'll notice I'm speaking in the past tense. If I take my current situation, January 1st, 2023, I live in a condo in Mexico. I work one-on-one with female leaders, and I haven't hosted any retreats. But when I look at myself in the future and I speak to myself in the future, I will say that I've moved into a house, I've started a community, and I hosted a retreat.
Now, the magic here is that if your brain thinks it's already happened, it will see it as a done deal, which reduces the cognitive dissonance or the gap between the current reality and the future reality, and without us realizing it, cognitive dissonance causes a lot of friction and reduces the traction we need to accomplish our goals. So, the more cognitive dissonance we have, the harder it is for us to reach our goals because it's an uphill battle to believe that we're the kind of person who can accomplish our goals.
So, if for example, you're working more hours than you'd like to right now, you could visualize yourself saying, "In 2023, I left the office or shut my computer off at 5:30 every day and I didn't work on weekends." You start to see yourself as the person who did that already. You get a glimpse of how it feels instead of seeing yourself as the person who still struggles to say no to your boss, your employees, and your colleagues, and just can't figure out how to leave by 5:30. Our human brains tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. Am I right?
If you're anything like my clients, you get to the end of the day and you've barely moved the needle on your to-do list, and all you did is go from meeting to meeting and add the other tasks you got assigned from those meetings. That's why you want to be really clear on what you want and why, and very deliberate about which goals you want to achieve and then take consistent action towards achieving those goals.
Now, 15 minutes a day of consistent practice of anything is going to get you much further than you think. Yesterday, I was at a cafe, and this lady who seemed like the owner's mother said hi to me in English. Her English was actually quite good.
I responded in Spanish and I proceeded to order my coffee in Spanish as well, to which the mother looked at me stunned and asked if I was Mexican or Canadian, which is the best compliment for me because I've been learning Spanish for a year now. And she wondered, she said, because my Spanish is so good, and she just said this to me in Spanish, and we proceeded to have a conversation all in Spanish.
Now, of course, I was delighted because this is the testament to consistent practice, 15 minutes a day every day on Duolingo for a year. Now, I'm not going to lie, finding 15 minutes sometimes is a struggle. Now, I study Duolingo in the evening, and when I have plans, I end up doing it in the taxi, sometimes on my way there or on my walk there. But I find a way to bake it in because I'm committed to my goal of speaking fluently in Spanish by the end of 2023.
What goal do you want to spend your 15 minutes a day towards? Imagine it, and then go and make it happen. I'd love to hear from you. What are some of your best practices for a 2022 retrospective, 2023 future forward thinking? And let me know what you're loving about the podcast and what you'd like me to talk about next. Have a great week, everyone.
Now that you've dreamt up your goals for the year, if you'd like some support to make them come true, or if you'd like some help to apply any of the skills that you're learning on the podcast, I have a special offer to help you kickstart your year and create some traction towards your goals.
Now, normally the only way to work with me is in my three-month coaching container, but until January 30th of this year, you can also have a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me. Now, at the end of the 90 minutes, you'll have uncovered what makes you unique as a leader, and you'll have a personalized roadmap tailored to your strengths, so that you can focus on the goals that you want to achieve.
Book your free consult on my website at annieframand.com/getstarted to learn more and see if we're a good fit.
Thanks for listening to The Confident Female Leader podcast. Ready to dismantle the patriarchy with me? Come say “Hi” at annieframand.com to learn more about how you can take this work deeper and apply what you're learning.
Welcome to The Confident Female Leader podcast. A space for ambitious women stepping into leadership, who are ready to take control of their circumstances and own their magic. If you're ready to start shedding your self-doubt, come into your new identity as a leader, and stop consistently undervaluing yourself so you can feel more confident in your role, this show’s for you.
I'm Annie Framand; Psychologist, Certified Feminist Coach and Master Trainer. And I'm on a mission to help women just like you stop overworking, overthinking, and overpleasing, so you can start creating success on your terms. Ready to create your dream life? Let's go.
Hola, amigas, welcome to 2023. I hope you all had a great holiday season. I had the best Christmas party celebration at my friend's place. I also went to the beach, and I caught up on some books I've been wanting to read for a while. I also got together with some old friends and some new friends who came to Puerto Vallarta for the holidays and that was so much fun.
All right, now, I have to say this was a really different experience from last year. So, I got COVID last year on December 23rd, and back then, we had to self-isolate for 10 days. So, I basically resurfaced on January 2nd after all of the festivities so I pretty much missed everything. Now, the silver lining is that I'm an introvert, so I had plenty of time to read those books I'd been meaning to read all year and also to journal, so it wasn't so bad.
Every year, I take some time off during the holidays to celebrate the past year and plan the year ahead. So, on this first episode of 2023, I thought I'd share my process with you, so that you can experiment and see if it's a practice that you'd like to implement as well.
So, first off, I want to talk about a practice that I started three years ago, right before the beginning of the pandemic, and I did not know how timely it would be at that time. So, I put a paper in a jar, a physical jar at the end of each week with my highlight for the week for 52 weeks. Now, sometimes during the height of the pandemic, it was a struggle to find even one highlight, I'm not going to lie. And sometimes I cheated and I put two in there because it was such a fantastic week.
Now, it's the best feeling to open up the jar at the end of the year and review all of the highlights because our brains tend to forget everything that went well because they're still so focused on survival. So the negativity bias has us looking at what went wrong and what might go wrong in the future. Now, the jar turned into a Word doc since I moved twice since the beginning of the pandemic, but now I have three years of highlights in a really challenging time, which is absolutely priceless. So, I really, really recommend that practice, and you want to maybe try it out in 2023. You might want to get a fancy jar or just a basic Tupperware, maybe a journal or a Word doc. Pick whatever your writing instrument of choice is and then write your highlight of the week. Maybe every Friday or Sunday or whatever day is easier for you to remember.
And then at the end of the year when you look back, you're going to be so grateful that you did. And then, once you've reviewed your list, you're going to want to celebrate the shit out of yourself. Now, take yourself out to a nice dinner, a lunch or a brunch, or maybe for drinks. Or maybe you're going to want to go out with your love, your kids or the girls, buy yourself a nice gift, or give yourself some time off. Maybe light a candle and make yourself a chai latte. Whatever makes you feel happy and whatever puts you in a celebratory mood. You just got through a hell of a year, you just got promoted during a pandemic, you made it. Now, go treat yourself.
An alternative to this practice, and I do both personally, is to do a retrospective of the year by asking yourself a few questions and jotting down the answers so that you can revisit them year after year. Now, I'm going to shoot them here in rapid fire, but you don't have to stop the car if you're driving or stop walking to write this down, you can just go to the transcript and I'm going to put the link in the show notes, so that you can get the written format of these questions.
Okay, so here it goes. First one, what was the most memorable moment for you this year? What was your greatest accomplishment? What and who were you grateful for this year? What did you struggle with this year? What was your toughest moment and why? What did you learn this year? Did you use your time wisely? Why or why not? How is your financial situation? Is there anything you want to let go of? Are you living true to yourself? And is there anything you want to improve? Now, you can answer any or all of those questions and even add some of your own. Have fun with it and see what really resonates with you and makes you have the best retrospective of the year that you want.
I personally tend to make my answers general. I look at different aspects of my life, not just my business. But for you as a new leader, you might want to answer these questions in relation to your new leadership job specifically, and then you could notice your evolution as you answer these same questions year after year as you grow into your leadership role.
Now, I want to talk about something that has come up in my sessions recently with my clients and that is exhaustion. So, normally at the end of the year, it's normal to be tired, but I want you to keep in mind that the last two years that we've had are not normal. So, if you're feeling burnt out, you're not alone.
A few weeks into the pandemic, most people thought it was going to last a couple of weeks, maybe a month at best, but I was already comparing it at the time to a marathon with an unlimited number of kilometers that we were all running together with pretty much zero preparation. And who would go into a marathon, especially one that we did not know how long it would last for with zero preparation, right? So, it was like, "If they're calling this a pandemic, we're probably in this for a while," is what I was thinking. And here we are two years later. So, if you're exhausted, it's not just you.
Collectively, we've been running this marathon for a couple of years. We got through it, but now we've got a bunch of blisters on our feet, we're tired and we're not running anymore, we're pretty much limping. Many of us have not gotten anywhere near the amount of rest that we needed, and some others did, and they're ready to go.
So, before you start sprinting into 2023, take a moment to assess your level of energy. Where are you on that continuum between completely burnt out and ready to go and sprint into the year? What can you realistically take on this year and this quarter? Do you need some rest? Be honest with yourself.
For some of us, the holidays are very restful. It's the case for me, and for others, it's absolutely not. You may be running around from party to party, especially since a lot of us have not been able to party in the last few years and meet up with family. So, it might have been a really exhausting time of the year for you. So, really take stock of that for you and be honest with yourself.
And then if you do need some more rest, how can you make that happen for yourself? How can you bake that into this first quarter of the year, and what does that look like for you? Does it look like a day at the spa? Does it look like going to bed earlier or getting up later? Does it look like a nap? What does that look like? Does it look like maybe more physical activity? Maybe your body has not been moving enough and that has impacted your sleep, for example. Okay, so be honest with yourself.
Now, the other thing you want to consider is that our primitive brains have been fired up in a way that they haven't been fired up for most of us in this lifetime. So, the amount of fear and anxiety that we've collectively felt is unparalleled and that taxes our system. So, be gentle with yourself, right? You just got through two years of a global pandemic, two years. This is not your regular January.
Now, keeping this in mind, I'm going to suggest a couple of visualization exercises to help you plan out your goals for the year in a fun way. So, play with them and see which one of these two works best for you. Now, before you do any of these, you're going to want to be in a quiet place, but maybe you want to meditate or move or do some yoga before you settle down to reflex. So, I'm going to put in the show notes a link to a five-minute meditation that I recorded for you to help you calm your mind at any time, and you can use that here before you visualize.
The first visualization is one that I did on January 1st, 2022. This is inspired from one of my coaches, and so, I'm going to describe this one to you as a first option. I pictured myself a year later on January 1st, 2023 when I did this last year. Now, as I pictured myself, I visualized myself in the space that I would wake up. So, where am I a year later? Who am I with if anyone? What does it smell like? What do I see as I open my eyes? How do I start my day, and how do I feel throughout my day? What does it look like or feel like throughout the day? Who do I interact with if anyone? What am I doing? What food do I eat, and how do I end my day?
And this works because the more specific you get, the more you can see your future actually unfolding before your eyes, and then the clearer your goals get and the more your brain gets to work to make it happen.
What was shocking to me was that I pictured myself living in Mexico, speaking fluent Spanish and hosting a podcast. I mean, sure, I was spending the winter in Mexico at the time, but I had only been here for three weeks, and I certainly had not planned on living here. But in April, when I saw the opportunity to stay here all year, I quickly seized it because it felt right. I had already imagined it happening.
As for the podcast, it took me many months from the moment I had the idea to the moment it came to life, actually 11 months. But that seed was there and here we are exactly a year later after that seed was planted. And now it's your turn to dream.
The second visualization I have for you is one that I played with this year, and that one is inspired by another one of my coaches. So, I just did this. We're going to see the results next year. I pictured myself in a year at the end of 2023 as if it had already happened. So, you'll see the wording here is a little bit different. My visualization sounds something like this.
So, in 2023, I moved into a house in Mexico. I started a community for female leaders, and I hosted a retreat for female leaders in Mexico. Now, you'll notice I'm speaking in the past tense. If I take my current situation, January 1st, 2023, I live in a condo in Mexico. I work one-on-one with female leaders, and I haven't hosted any retreats. But when I look at myself in the future and I speak to myself in the future, I will say that I've moved into a house, I've started a community, and I hosted a retreat.
Now, the magic here is that if your brain thinks it's already happened, it will see it as a done deal, which reduces the cognitive dissonance or the gap between the current reality and the future reality, and without us realizing it, cognitive dissonance causes a lot of friction and reduces the traction we need to accomplish our goals. So, the more cognitive dissonance we have, the harder it is for us to reach our goals because it's an uphill battle to believe that we're the kind of person who can accomplish our goals.
So, if for example, you're working more hours than you'd like to right now, you could visualize yourself saying, "In 2023, I left the office or shut my computer off at 5:30 every day and I didn't work on weekends." You start to see yourself as the person who did that already. You get a glimpse of how it feels instead of seeing yourself as the person who still struggles to say no to your boss, your employees, and your colleagues, and just can't figure out how to leave by 5:30. Our human brains tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. Am I right?
If you're anything like my clients, you get to the end of the day and you've barely moved the needle on your to-do list, and all you did is go from meeting to meeting and add the other tasks you got assigned from those meetings. That's why you want to be really clear on what you want and why, and very deliberate about which goals you want to achieve and then take consistent action towards achieving those goals.
Now, 15 minutes a day of consistent practice of anything is going to get you much further than you think. Yesterday, I was at a cafe, and this lady who seemed like the owner's mother said hi to me in English. Her English was actually quite good.
I responded in Spanish and I proceeded to order my coffee in Spanish as well, to which the mother looked at me stunned and asked if I was Mexican or Canadian, which is the best compliment for me because I've been learning Spanish for a year now. And she wondered, she said, because my Spanish is so good, and she just said this to me in Spanish, and we proceeded to have a conversation all in Spanish.
Now, of course, I was delighted because this is the testament to consistent practice, 15 minutes a day every day on Duolingo for a year. Now, I'm not going to lie, finding 15 minutes sometimes is a struggle. Now, I study Duolingo in the evening, and when I have plans, I end up doing it in the taxi, sometimes on my way there or on my walk there. But I find a way to bake it in because I'm committed to my goal of speaking fluently in Spanish by the end of 2023.
What goal do you want to spend your 15 minutes a day towards? Imagine it, and then go and make it happen. I'd love to hear from you. What are some of your best practices for a 2022 retrospective, 2023 future forward thinking? And let me know what you're loving about the podcast and what you'd like me to talk about next. Have a great week, everyone.
Now that you've dreamt up your goals for the year, if you'd like some support to make them come true, or if you'd like some help to apply any of the skills that you're learning on the podcast, I have a special offer to help you kickstart your year and create some traction towards your goals.
Now, normally the only way to work with me is in my three-month coaching container, but until January 30th of this year, you can also have a one-time 90-minute deep dive with me. Now, at the end of the 90 minutes, you'll have uncovered what makes you unique as a leader, and you'll have a personalized roadmap tailored to your strengths, so that you can focus on the goals that you want to achieve.
Book your free consult on my website at annieframand.com/getstarted to learn more and see if we're a good fit.
Thanks for listening to The Confident Female Leader podcast. Ready to dismantle the patriarchy with me? Come say “Hi” at annieframand.com to learn more about how you can take this work deeper and apply what you're learning.
Enjoy the Show?
Don’t miss an episode, follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts.
