Grow With Soul: Ep. 57 Reviewing the Old Year & Planning The New With Kayte Ferris
This week it's just me thinking about new year energy. Although I’m not under any illusions that the movement of a clock will suddenly make me a different person, but I relish the start of the year as a new clean page and feel empowered to decide what I write on it. I know that not everyone likes to give the new year quite so much magnitude, but for me, it is a really powerful reset so today I thought I’d share my review and planning process for starting to define the shape of 2020. This episode also acts as a companion to my End Of Year Review blog post and to my Goals, Mindsets and Word of the Year blog post.
Here's what we talk about in this episode
Choosing a word of the year
Having a clear vision
Using Tarot cards
Lifestyle, Habits & Goals
Turning goals into tasks
Using The Planning Kit to set out the next quarter
Links and resources we discuss
Grow With Soul Ep. 23: The Answers Are Already Inside You with Susannah Conway
Grow With Soul: Ep. 48 Big Dreams, Daily Joys with Elise Joy
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Read the podcast transcript:
Hello and welcome, not only to episode 57 of Grow With Soul, but to the first episode of this new year and decade.
I must admit to being a bit of a new year junkie. Although I’m not under any illusions that the movement of a clock will suddenly make me a different person, I relish the start of the year as a new clean page, and feel empowered to decide what I write on it. I know that not everyone likes to give the new year quite so much magnitude, but for me, it is a really powerful reset.
So today I thought I’d share my review and planning process for starting to define the shape of 2020. This episode also acts as a companion to my End Of Year Review blog post, and to my Goals, Mindsets and Word of the Year blog posts, which I will link in the show notes if you’d like to read those for some context too.
The first part of my end of year ritual is to do Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year workbook, which is free to download from her site and should still be available if you’re listening to this at the start of January. There are also other free workbooks available, and I’m sure a quick Pinterest search will also garner some good journaling prompts. The reason I like to use the workbook is because it gives me external prompts to think about things I wouldn’t consider on my own – as I tend to tunnel vision into work and business stuff, it’s useful to have someone else set prompts that also cover friendship, health, home and other factors that make up the rounded human existence. It’s good to take the wide birds eye view of your life and see how everything fits together, and how you want it to fit together.
As part of the Unravel workbook, I also choose my word of the year. I’m quite sure that you are familiar with the word of the year concept, but for anyone who isn’t, it’s about picking a word that you want your new year to feel like – perhaps something you want to bring more of into your life, something you want to embody, an attitude you want to embrace. This is my third year setting a word of the year; in 2018 I had Steer as I had just started my business and wanted to feel in control and like I was directing the ship, and in 2019 I had Fulfillment, as I began the year deep in burn out and wanted to find more balance, life and, well, fulfilment into my every day.
This year, my word of the year is Powerful. After a 2019 buffeted by external factors and habitually looking outside of myself for answers (I go into more detail about this in the end of year review blog post), this year I want to draw on and emanate my internal power. I want to feel grounded and aligned, spacious, free and in tune with myself. I have a clear mental picture of this orange light of power inside of me that’s been backed up for a year, and I want to embody that and work from the outside in, in all aspects of my life.
In previous years, I tended to set my word, and then go off and set my goals separately – thinking about it now, I’m not really sure why I did that, but it just seemed to make sense in my head that they were two separate entities. Of course, it’s hard to embody a word if the goals and tasks you set for yourself weren’t derived from that word in the first place. At least I realised it eventually, hey?
This year, as I worked through the Unravel workbook and other goal setting resources which I’ll come onto in a minute, I was conscious of making sure that the goals I set were working towards the embodiment of Powerful. I came at them from a place of ‘will this help me to feel powerful?’, ‘how can I make this part of my life more powerful?’, ‘what do I need to do in this aspect to be more powerful?’ I think it helped to have a clear feeling and almost visualisation of the Word to ground myself in it and truly understand what I wanted it to do for me. This is something, incidentally, which I encourage in my Planning Kit – to have a clear vision of the direction you want your life (and therefore you work) to be taking. My word is very much based in the direction that I envisioned back at the end of the summer.
AFTER REVIEWING AND STEEPING IN THE LESSONS FROM THE OLD YEAR, AND HAVING THEM INEVITABLY SPARK IDEAS FOR THE NEW, I START TO THINK FORWARDS, AND START TO MAKE THE INTENTIONS AND WISHES I THOUGHT ABOUT IN THE WORKBOOK MORE TANGIBLE. I’VE TAKEN A TWO PRONGED APPROACH TO THIS THIS YEAR – PRACTICAL AND WOO.
A big part of feeling Powerful for me is connecting with my intuition and working much more from my internal guidance system, and the way I find most helpful to do this is by using tarot. I know it won’t be for everyone and that tarot has a very mystical side, but for me the cards are really a prop to help me journal and connect to what I really want. I tend to find journaling difficult, as I’m too self-conscious about it; my conscious brain is in control, and I end up writing what I think I should write, and have imaginary readers over my shoulder. Using the tarot cards, reading into the meanings and the imagery helps me to circumvent that conscious brain and get to my subconscious, my intuition. They are a catalyst to getting under the surface and finding what I really think or feel about something. If you’re intrigued by tarot, I recommend Biddy Tarot as a safe and welcoming introduction – her mission is to make tarot more mainstream and she approaches it in a very matter of fact and accessible way. Even if tarot doesn’t feel like something you want to do, it might be worth looking up some spreads because the questions they ask are great to journal and think on – even without the cards.
I have the Biddy Tarot book, Everyday Tarot, and used the goal setting exercise in there where you’re asked to visualise your goal and tune in with how you really feel about it, and then draw cards on and ruminate on questions like “what do I need to release to manifest my goal?”, “what do I need to create?”, “what lesson do I need to master?”, “what is possible?”, “what are my next steps?”
By the end of this exercise and spread, I felt I had a more tangible work goal that would serve my Word of the Year – to make £100k from one-to-many projects. I actually started out with a lower number but although it felt very realistic it felt a bit boring and not very motivating, so although I don’t think I’ll quite get to the 100k mark, I feel excited to shoot for it.
AS WELL AS THE TAROT, I ALSO USED MORE TRADITIONAL GOAL SETTING PRACTICES TO COME UP WITH THE LIFESTYLE HABITS AND GOALS THAT WERE SWIRLING IN MY MIND.
A few months ago I had Elise Blaha Cripe, author of Big Dreams Daily Joys, on the podcast, and I followed her approach of refining in from a feeling – so I had sweeping ideas of how I wanted to feel in areas of my life, but then narrowed into how they could be grounded in every day actions. So, for example, the feeling of powerfulness and spaciousness meant that I needed to prioritise time for things that filled me up, and connected me to myself. So I set the goals to do one thing every day that is something I just want to do for myself, to track my energy cycles and to do yoga three times a month.
This all got me to the point where I was ready to write that Goals blog post – I had a list of tangible habits and ideas, I’d been over them all several times in different goal setting contexts to ensure they felt true, and I had a firm hold on what they meant to me and what I wanted them to do. It felt good, I felt confident, I felt excited. But the thing with goal setting is, that it means nothing unless you actually do the work to get to the goal. I needed to zoom in again, and start to turn the goals into individual tasks that I’d do on a specific day. And for that, I turned to my own planning process in the Planning Kit.
Just to fill you in, the Planning Kit is a new product that I brought out at the end of December. It’s essentially a marketing planner, moving from setting the direction for your business, setting goals for your business and from there planning tasks to get you moving in that direction. It’s exactly how I’ve been planning my marketing in my business, only set out in exercises and diagrams that make sense rather than the blur in my head. There are exercises to help you define the strategies you can use, set goals and turn those goals into actions, as well as quarterly, monthly and weekly planning sheets and reflection sheets too. You also get both a printable version and an editable PDF, so you can work through it however works best for you – you can find out more about it and simpleandseason.com/theplanningkit.
As I started to think about the actions I needed to take, I printed out the Planning Kit pages that deal with task planning – the goal setting hierarchy to brainstorm the actions I could take for each goal, the bringing it together grid where I got clear on what strategy was best suited to each goal, and the key tasks that would contribute to it, and the venn diagram where I analysed which of the tasks I’d listed were most efficient, in that they contributed to more than one goal, and that therefore I could prioritise. Finally, I filled out the quarterly and monthly planning sheets so I was really clear on what my focuses are in the immediate term, what action steps are happening first, and which ones I can stop thinking about because I know they’re not happening until later in the quarter.
I only plan to this level of detail month to month and quarter to quarter because too much shifts and changes to plan further ahead – I know what direction I’m heading in but don’t need to plan June out now because there is so much I don’t know about what the priorities will be then.
And really, that’s that. I feel that I’ve closed the book on 2019 and moved on from the lessons from that year, and now feel confident and excited about 2020. I feel clear about how I want to feel in this year, where I want to direct my business and my life, but also how I want to be spending my individual days. I know what I need to work towards, and I know how I’m going to work towards them. All that’s left, is to do it. To write the tasks down in my planner and do each one, one at a time. There’s no magic, no secret trick, just working through, brick by brick. I hope you’ll continue to join me as I do, and more than that, I hope you can start laying your own bricks alongside me too.