Q1 2020 Quarterly Review
It was always my plan that this year I would share my quarterly reviews on the blog, although I hadn’t expected to be publishing the first one in the midst of a global pandemic. While it is not my intention to spend this whole post discussing tragedy, as a planet Q1 has been destructive and traumatic: Australia on fire, devastating storms and floods and now a global lockdown and millions of lives irreparably changed by a virus.
These things have been so dominant in our lives so far this year that as I sit down to write I’ve struggled to remember what actually happened to me, in my business – in fact, I’ve had to go and get the folder with my review sheets from the previous months to remind myself. We are not separate from the world we live in, and it is natural that shudders through the planet turn into shudders through ourselves. So for myself and for you, we must not apportion blame if it turns out that Q1 did not live up to January’s promises.
But now I will zoom right in and look at the quarter from how it was experienced here with me. If I had to describe Q1 in a word, it would be ‘change’. Which is ironic because I thought that was the thing I’d set up my plans to avoid this year. After 2019 was filled with huge life changes and indecision, I was determined that this would be a year for stability, for certainty, for making a plan and sticking to it. Yet sitting here now, my original plan for 2020 is in tatters, but not just for coronavirus, or even negative reasons. Yes many changes were forced on me by external events, but in lots of ways they were changes I felt really good about making. While there is a part of me that worries that perhaps I am simply incapable of sticking to just a 3 month plan, I also know that a plan is not the boss of me, and not to be followed above all else.
In January, like so many of us, I started with a plan that felt like IT. I felt almost reborn, and that I was unleashing a plan that was me “playing big”. I had huge financial goals and an almost desperate intention to make this the year I “made it big”. I unveiled my most expensive programme to date and set about the business of creating content and making things happen. Only, things didn’t happen. People weren’t leaping at the chance to buy the programme, and I began to realise that I didn’t really want to do it either. I didn’t know what to say to sell it because I didn’t really want to run it. And I panicked, because those huge financial goals revolved around the programme selling.
I realised that my plan was structured in such a way that the programme would make or break my year, and I needed to make the decision of whether I was going to let it. Throughout January I was proud of myself for sticking with my intentions and not taking on extra 121 clients, and I truly felt that in The Playbook course content I had created some of my best work to date. There was enough good going that there was some momentum I could jump aboard. January ended with me needing to regroup and already start to change up the plan.
In February, I called it and postponed the programme, intending to reshape it into something that both I and you would actually want to do later in the year. February was a real limbo month, where the knocked out plans hadn’t quite been replaced. The Playbook course finished, and I realised that that project had been filling most of my time for the previous 5 months – and suddenly I didn’t know what to do with all this time. Coming out of this big project, I really struggled with structure and routine. I was sleeping a lot, with nothing really to get up for. Days passed by unmarked, with nothing really happening.
I suppose I was casting about for a project when I landed on a book idea and fell in love with it. I’ve had book ideas before that really turned out to be more of a blog post, but this one had legs. It was something that I would want to read, and something that I would want to write. I immersed myself in the book proposal, reading up on all the how to’s, making plans and structuring the chapters, ordering piles of comparative books and putting on audiobooks every time I cooked. I’d found the thing to fill my project-shaped hole, and got ready to get stuck into writing my sample chapter.
And then it was March. Looking back at the sheet where I wrote down what I was worried about coming into the month, I can’t help but have a kind chuckle at my naivety. My parents visited in the first week and then Dan was due a week off in the middle of the month, so I was worried that with all this fun gadding about time might get away from me. My prescription to myself was ‘rigid planning, no procrastination’. Of course, we know what happens next – by the middle of March the world was a different place. As I talked about in this podcast episode, business survival became my sole goal and focus.
My beloved book project fell to the wayside as I moved through the phases: disbelief to blind panic to morbidity to hysterically ok to general underlying discomfort. The product launch I’d started at the beginning of the month took a big pause as I wrestled with whether or not it was “right” to be selling, even though as a family we were staring down the barrel of having no income for many months. There was no rigid planning and there was lots of procrastination. I did the bare minimum towards my business every day, and then gardened, or sat, or watched Midsomer Murders to take my mind off of things. And I found that actually, doing ‘enough’ wasn’t so bad.
And now we are in a new quarter, albeit one with a huge hangover from the last quarter in the form of lockdown restrictions. In fact, it still feels like we’re not in April at all, that time has stood still and it will just be March until all this is over. But no, we are in Spring now (or you may be in autumn), and life is still going on. I find it helpful to mark the time in these timeless weeks by doing these reviews and check ins, to know that while so much is out of control, so much still is. I still have so much agency over my life, and can still recognise the good.
When forced to by my review sheets, I can list my wins of Q1: “I advocated for myself. The Playbook was great. I made £10k. I came to realise more what I wanted.” Amongst all the false starts and changes of the quarter I did work I was proud of, I made good money, and most of all I kept promises to myself. The changes in the last month, in particular, have also helped me to feel more positive about the goals that are changing out of necessity, and to feel that I am letting them go myself, rather than having them wrenched from my grasp.
We do not know what this next quarter has in store for us, and I have not set myself huge goals. Instead, my focus for Q2 is “simplify everything”. I want less pressure, more peace, fewer launches. I want to turn over every stone in my existence and see what I have left to fester unquestioned – and then simplify it. I want to restructure my business model. I want to change the financial goals I made at the beginning of the year to some that have no pressure. While I know that the striver that lives inside me will push for more, I also know that by keeping in touch with myself and this intention I will able to drown out that voice. And hopefully, be speaking to you in July in a more peaceful, simple existence.
Just a quick note: the review and planning sheets I refer to throughout this post are in my Planning Kit, an undated planning and review resource that you can start at any time. Find it here.
