#195 - My End of Year Reflection + Reset Process
As we near the end of another year, it's a time filled with joy and festivities that naturally lend themselves to reflection and renewal.
I've managed to create a smooth transition into this season, and while it hasn't always been seamless, I've learned to cherish this time as an opportunity to reset and prepare for the year ahead. Today, I’m sharing with you my process for doing just that.
This reflection process is something I hold dear and has been a key component of my personal and professional growth. Reflecting on past experiences, it's evident that a year-end reset didn’t happen by accident. It’s a meticulous process I’ve cultivated over nearly six years since starting my business, focusing on reflection and resetting to bridge the gap between where I am and where I want to be.
As a business owner juggling various responsibilities, my life is not only about work but also about maintaining harmony between business and personal commitments. Practices like journaling allow me to explore ideas and understand the meanings behind my actions, helping me achieve clarity and purpose. It provides the grounding I need, especially during my reflection periods.
A significant part of my reflection is assessing how well my life aligns with my initial business goals, striving for flexibility and personal satisfaction without sacrificing professional success. I’ve worked diligently to ensure there’s harmony between my work commitments and personal life—elements like attending school events or spending quality time with family are integral to my happiness and balance.
Reflecting back on previous years, I identify areas of struggle or imbalance, such as the enormous guilt associated with taking personal time away from work. In overcoming this, I now permit myself guilt-free joy and relaxation, understanding that personal wellbeing directly impacts business health. This year, I even avoided the pitfalls of past burnout phases by recalibrating my expectations and redefining success metrics to focus more on personal satisfaction and less on rigid, financial achievements.
My mantra, cultivated in my previous career as a litigator, remains that there’s no substitute for preparation. That discipline has seamlessly transitioned into all areas of my life and business. It doesn’t mean adhering to rigid plans, but preparing wisely for the future, allowing for spontaneity and fun. Reflecting on the past year highlights what didn’t work, such as an ill-planned two-week leave, a learning moment that helped redefine future approaches.
My reflection and reset process isn’t a once-a-year exercise but an ongoing series of check-ins, a connection with my soul’s goals and life priorities. I've poured a lot of thought into sharing this process with you, and hope you find it enriching and applicable as you reflect on your own journey.
Thank you for joining me in this reflective space. If you’ve found value in my journey, I encourage you to share this reflection with a friend or colleague, helping to spread inspiration and insight. Until next time!
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Tracey: Welcome back, everyone. Thank you for joining me for another episode of the podcast. I find this to be such a special time of year. I love the joy and festivities that are traditionally attached to this time of year. And I have managed to set myself up for a smooth glide into the end of the year. I spoke about this very topic recently on the podcast with Emma McQueen.
So if you haven't listened to that one, I'd love it if you did, but here I am at this time of year, gliding in to the end peacefully and with joy and in a really calm, relaxed way. It hasn't though, [00:01:00] always been like this. It didn't happen by accident. I want to share with you in today's episode, what I do year after year at this time of year to set myself up for success for the year ahead and so I can end the year like this again, smooth and peaceful and calm, full of joy and merriment, if you like, because that's traditionally what we associate with the festivities. I have a process that I go through and I've adopted this consistently since starting this business almost six years ago.
And it's all about reflection and resetting to set myself up for the year ahead. And I do this at several touch points throughout the year, not going to lie. It's not something I do only once and then everything works because what I find is it's not set and forget, particularly for us as business owners who are wearing all All the hats and doing all the things because things inevitably change through the year.
Priorities change, circumstances change, what requires our time [00:02:00] changes and I used to find that really disconcerting. It would throw me off. I'd feel derailed, even overwhelmed. I would go into overwhelm and I didn't have anything to anchor me back to help me navigate through that without feeling completely derailed and lost. But now I do and the process I go through, which I'm going to share with you in this episode, it's proved to be really grounding for me. And I'm going to explain to you why that is. So I'm a journaler. So I make no secret on this podcast or, or anywhere, socials, or even interacting with my clients that I'm a very spiritual person.
I'm not religious. I am spiritual. And two or three years ago, I discovered human design. And I describe that now to people as a beautiful rabbit hole that I went down that I hope I never come out of. And what that's meant is that I have a different lens when I look at how I spend my time and what I do with my time.
And that feeds in really nicely to the reflection that I [00:03:00] do. So I journal a lot and I get so much clarity from just thinking things through and writing things out and playing around with ideas and just trying to understand what something might mean. And I do that through journaling is my primary practice and it delivers such clarity.
So when I get to this time of year, I have a bit of a process I go through. Which I'll share with you now. And hopefully some of it will resonate and some of it's helpful for you, but like all of my podcasts, take what resonates, leave the rest. And hopefully I'm sharing value for you.
I always start at this time of year carving out some pockets of time for my reflection and reset process. It's not something I do in one block of time. So I don't do it in an hour or a particular afternoon. It's just not set and forget.
And I find that when I start, thoughts pop up or I think on things and I get clarity a little while later. So it really is a bit of a process, which requires some time and I'm kind to myself and I allow myself the [00:04:00] time. So I start carving out pockets of time, an afternoon here, an hour there, so that I know with intention that I've got space to sit and just be whilst I'm doing my reflection. There'll always be other times that I can manage to squeeze in a bit of journaling or think through a concept or a thought that I was having. There's always other times, but at least if I have a few little pockets of time, I know that's my time to just be, and I'm going to be able to do this.
And I really look forward to it. And as you've probably gathered, I've started, I have absolutely started this process already a couple of weeks ago, because that's how long I like to give myself to really get clear on my thoughts and my intentions going forward. So carving out some pockets of time as a start is the first thing I do.
And then I sit and really think about how is life working in the context of business and personal? [00:05:00] Because they are connected. They're not separate. We can't pretend that they're separate. We're people, we're humans, and we need to make sure they work together. And like many of you listening, I built this business to give myself flexibility in terms of what I wanted to do with my business, with my clients and how I wanted to spend my days in business mode, but also to give myself flexibility and freedom of choice.
So what I wanted to do in my personal life and they cross over. So when I started the business, I knew very well, I didn't want to be one of the parents that I saw always at the kid's school, really stressed at drop off and pick up. I didn't want that. And I knew that this business model could, if done well, could lend itself to the flexibility that I wanted.
On that flexibility, I like to be able to take time out to go to soccer games or footsul games, or to go along to assemblies or sports days and things [00:06:00] like that. Those things are important to me. And I have managed to create some harmony between the business and personal life that allows me to do that.
What I've also managed to layer in this year is time for me, which isn't with one of the family members. It's not with the kids. It's not with my husband. It's just with me for some gym work or some walking or some other form of exercise, or just to read, just to do little things that I really enjoy. This year has served me really well in focusing on that connection between my business and my personal life and the harmony there in terms of the flexibility. So I've sat and thought about business life and personal life anchored back to the reason I started the business in the first place. And I have a look and see, how's it going? How is it really going? I can't say that the previous years have sounded so glossy and lovely.
They haven't, [00:07:00] they have been knee jerk reactions. It's been a struggle. It's been a tug of war. I have felt between the time in the business and the time out of the business. And a lot of that, to be honest, I've discovered through my interview processes and my constant reflection points through the year was around mindset because I carried so much guilt when I wasn't doing something actively in the business, I felt guilty.
And heaven forbid that I'd take time out regularly for things like acupuncture or a massage that felt so completely self indulgent that it was just taboo. Don't do it. Selfish. And there's negativity attached to the selfish. Well, there was in my mind. So this year is different. So if I was having this discussion with you, if I was sharing this with you a couple of years ago, it would have sounded very different. Because I would have been tired and frustrated and even on the point of burnout a time or two around that tug of war, push and pull and the guilt that is attached to taking time out to do [00:08:00] things that bring joy or to just be peaceful. Fast forward to now, though it's a very different story. So, when I sit down to do my interview reflection and I ask myself, how's it going in terms of the business, connecting in with the personal life, it's going really well.
Hand on heart, it's going really well. And I'm so grateful to be able to say that for the first time, it's going really well. So that's the first thing. Previous years, of course, when it wasn't going so well, I'd sit down and nut out, well, what's not gone well and what disappointed me? And what was I hoping for?
Because that would give me clarity on how I wanted to feel now, fast forwarding to 12 years so that I could work towards that throughout the year. So here I am sitting here reflecting on how's it going, it's going well, great, more of that please. I just love the simplicity of that, but more of that please.
Then I dive into the year that's [00:09:00] been, what worked and what didn't. But I do this on a personal level and a business level. So in the context of business, what worked and what didn't, there's financial metrics, there's growth metrics, that's all ticking along nicely. So I don't feel the need to make any big shifts there.
So that's really easy for forward planning. More of the same, please. And I love that. Previous years there's been focus on growth. There's been bigger revenue targets that I wanted to hit. There's been growth objectives in terms of connections, clients, our onboarding numbers, our stats, all of that. But all of those statistics now, and we're just about to go into our sixth year, are tracking along nicely. There's a nice, steady upward trajectory in all of those stats and all of that data. So that serves me really well. But that's only one metric. What I really want to focus on and what I have been is how are things feeling? What has worked well and what hasn't in [00:10:00] terms of how are things feeling?
And I can tell you. What didn't work well, the absolute thing that didn't work well for me in business this year was in July when I tried to take two week block of leave from the business. It didn't serve me well, it didn't serve me well personally, and it didn't serve the business well. And that's because we're in a season of business and I'm in a season of life where big chunks of time like that aren't appealing to me. So most people will say to you, Oh, I like to block out all the school holidays. I like to travel overseas. I want to do all these things. With all the commitments we've had personally this year, so dealing with my mother's probate was one, school camp was another one, going away to sport. My son and my husband went away to Brisbane for a tournament for a week. There's been all of these things that have happened that have required our time and my focus and attention, but which didn't require taking big chunks of leave out of the business. So when I try to [00:11:00] take a couple of weeks out of the business, It didn't go well.
It didn't go well with my stress levels. I was not in a place where I was enjoying being away from the business for that long. I don't think I'd set it up well for that anyway. It meant I had a heap of pressure on the personal time to be really delivering at this level of excellence. And my gosh, this has to just be so incredibly valuable in terms of connection in order for it to be worth it.
I just set myself up to fail from the beginning, but I only realized that looking back. So what I learned is what is more valuable to me and my family and my business for this season of life that we're all in is to build my ideal working week in such a way where I'm constantly being rested and restored and rejuvenated whilst serving beautiful clients, whilst being present for my family, doing things that bring me [00:12:00] joy and hitting my metrics, my revenue, my growth metrics. That's more value. And so it's been an aha moment for me over the last few weeks and real light bulb moments where I've gone right, well, I'm not going to do that again in July. I'm not going to try and take that big chunk of time because it didn't serve me. We've got other things again going on next year. It's a busy year already. I've already scheduled in school holidays. I've scheduled in events. Another school camp time away for me.
There's a whole ton of things. And when I look at all of that peppered through the calendar, I realise, I don't crave, need or want a big chunk of time out of the business. Great. That's feeling really, really grounded for me and really clear moving forward, knowing we're not going to repeat what happened this year because it didn't serve the business well, and it didn't serve us well personally.
Not going to do that again. Fantastic. So when I say. Thinking back and looking at what worked well and what didn't, it's for things like that. It's for things like, was there a wrong hire [00:13:00] that you made? Was there an investment you made? Did you outsource to the wrong person? Did you trust the wrong person?
Did you say yes to the wrong clients? What didn't work well, but then what did, what felt good? One of my significant metrics for success is slow mornings. Slow mornings is the ultimate life goal for me. And most of the time, not always, but most of the time I can nail that, and that feels so spacious and so abundant.
I love that. So when I'm looking forward to plan, I'm making sure I'm planning my weeks, my days and my weeks and my months to hit my metrics of success. One of them being slow mornings. Life goals right there. Love it. So grateful to be able to share with you that after several years of trying, I think I've worked out how to get that one. So I'm going to do more of that, please.
It may have been an occupational hazard that I developed over many years as a litigator, earlier on [00:14:00] in my career, I worked in litigation and dispute resolution for 12 years. And my mantra in all of that time was, there is no substitute for preparation. And there couldn't be because there's consequences when you go off to court and you're representing clients.
If you haven't prepared properly, there can be consequences. So there's just no substitute for preparation. And that was drilled into me very early on by a barrister that I worked with a lot. And he was a mentor to me for so many years. And I learned so much. One of the most important things that we were here to say to me over and over again was there's no substitute for preparation.
And I get that. And I've carried that over now into this business, into my personal life, and I teach it to my clients. We talk about it all the time. That doesn't mean rigid. It doesn't mean lacking in flexibility. It doesn't mean lacking in fluidity. It's just the mantra that there's no substitute for preparation.
So if I want a successful year next year, if I want to set myself up for success, I need to put some time into planning and [00:15:00] preparation. That doesn't mean I'm taking out any white space. It doesn't mean I'm taking out room for fun. To the contrary. If I'm focusing on what really worked this year, identifying what didn't, so I can ensure that that doesn't happen again, working out what did, and then putting into place my approach of more of that please, that's preparing.
That's when I say it's so worth it, because without it, how are we navigating the year forward? How do we know what we're trying to avoid? And how do we know what we want more of? We don't. Taking some time to go through and work this out has been a game changer for me over the course of this business.
This doesn't all just come at once. This is not the sort of exercise that I can sit down and do in one hour and go, right, I'm now going to identify all the things that didn't work, identify all the things that did. And I'm going to plan what to do next. Sometimes it takes some deep thinking and sometimes it takes some spaciousness for these thoughts to just develop [00:16:00] so that I can make sense of them.
And I'm sure you're the same, but now that I've started sharing these things with you and asking you these questions and sharing with you the questions I ask myself, it's just something for you to mull over like little seeds being planted and thoughts will come. And when they do, my best suggestion is to sit down and journal on it.
I get that not everyone's a journaler, I am, but if you're not, then you'll have your own method of crystallizing thoughts and doing your planning. But for those of us who are journalers, I find that really valuable because I can go back and revisit it as well. This is how we build on what's worked to elevate and enhance going forward.
Getting clear, knowing what we want, knowing what we don't want, focusing on what we want more of, elevating and enhancing. And I love that. And it sounds simple, but that's because I think it is.
I have talked a lot here when I'm sharing my process with you about my reflections, the clarity, [00:17:00] because to me, that's a reset. It always gets anchored back though, to my goals and objectives. But like I said a moment ago, it's not just the financial metrics or the growth metrics. They are important.
Absolutely. Know your numbers, be good at money. Understand your growth objectives and understand the trajectory that you're moving in. Absolutely. But there's more to it. And that is the life, the integration of business and personal, how it feels.
What other metrics do you have that are metrics for success? And I've shared one of mine with you being slow mornings.
What are your priorities next year? My priorities for next year are building on what I've achieved this year. So like I keep saying more of that, please. More time for me, guilt free. More time to focus on my health and my fitness, guilt free.
I'm getting better at that. More time to do the things that I love in my business, which is working with more aligned clients. Something else that worked really well for me this year [00:18:00] was niching in even further on the creatives that I support and saying no to clients that I know aren't aligned, guilt free, knowing that I'm setting them up for success by allowing them an opportunity to connect with somebody who can better serve them in a way that I can't because they're not aligned for me.
So next year focusing on more of the same with more aligned clients because I've niched in this year is setting me up for a really solid, successful year building momentum, getting into a rhythm that works, that serves me and the business that I'm building and the lifestyle and the family, but also serves the clients because they know that when I say yes to working with them, my clients are getting the best of me every time.
They're not getting tired, frustrated, worn out on the hamster wheel Tracey, that they would have gotten back in traditional legal practice for sure. They don't get that Tracey here. And that to me feels so [00:19:00] empowering and so energizing that it makes me really excited. So it makes me really excited to know that I'm showing up as my best self for me, my family, my friends and my clients. It's not always like that. Like I said earlier, it's not set and forget. So this is my reflection and reset process. It's quite fluid. It's quite lovely. I hope you're taking away that it's quite lovely, but it's not set and forget. It's not a do it once a year and that's it. It's not that.
I will come back to this as and when I feel called to through the year, but at least once a quarter, I do planning in quarters. I do loads of planning. Let's be honest. I've done 2025 planning quite some time ago. No surprises there, but I do plan my weeks, my months, my quarters, so that it all leads into being consistent with the yearly plan that I have.
That chops and changes though, there is fluidity there, but when I sit [00:20:00] down regularly to do my reflection, just to make sure I'm on track, how's it feeling? How are we going with our metrics? How am I going with my other metrics of success? Am I not feeling stressed in the morning? Am I chasing my tail? Oh my goodness.
Those are the types of things that require constant attention in my view to recalibrate as needed. That's really important. So this process that I go through now, whilst it's lovely, and I'm hoping that some of it's resonating for you, it's lovely and I love to do it at this time of year because it's such a lovely time of year to be thinking about these things, I also do smaller condensed versions throughout the year, at least quarterly. If there's a particular challenge that comes up and I need to do it then, I absolutely will to work out what's happened. How did we get here? What can we learn? What do I need to recalibrate moving forward so that we don't end up here again?
So that's something that I think all business owners ought to be doing if they're already not, although I'm sure most of you already are, but then just having regular touch points [00:21:00] to check in with my success metrics to make sure that the business is on track and headed in the right direction. I hope you have found this of value.
Like I said, take what resonates, leave what doesn't, but I really loved recording this for you. I've given a lot of thought to what I was going to share in this episode and how I was going to frame this process for you. And I hope that what's come through is that I find this a really enriching and nourishing process to go through.
It's something that I have seen make significant shifts in my personal life and in my business because of the time I allow myself to process and identify what needs to change, what needs to carry forward. So I'm hoping that you're getting the same vibes from it. I've really enjoyed sharing it. Thank you so much for listening.
If you have gotten value out of this and you have a business friend or a colleague that you think would also get value, I would be so grateful if you would share the episode Together, that is how we get the podcast into the ears of even [00:22:00] more business owners to add value to even more people.
Thank you so much. As always for listening. I'll catch you next time.
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