Today’s episode of Creating The Path is all about annual planning in a way that feels good, easy, and aligned. We start by looking back at this year so we can celebrate and learn before planning for the year to come. Then I’ll share the simple planning method you can use to plan your themes for the year to keep you focused and on track.
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Topics discussed in this episode:
[02:45] Year-end review and values exercise
[05:00] Step #1 of Annual Planning: Braindump
[05:35] Step #2 of Annual Planning: Categories
[06:39] Step #3 of Annual Planning: Compare
[07:23] Step #4 of Annual Planning: Themes
[08:10] What your #1 focus for the new year should be on
[10:02] Not spreading yourself too thin
[11:02] Extra tip when it comes to annual planning
Free Resources:
Get your FREE Annual Planning Workbook here!
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Noteworthy Quotes:
“The whole idea of this annual planning process is to come up with your ‘themes’ for the year.”
“You can decide what’s best for you.”
“If you aren’t taking care of yourself, you’re not going to be able to show up in the way that you want to.
“If we aren’t taking care of ourselves, we’re limiting the impact that we can have in other areas of our lives.”
Summary of the Podcast:
Creating the Path is a podcast that challenges multi-passionate entrepreneurs to achieve their goals by working less and eliminating overwhelm, so they can create their own unique pathway to a life they love. My mission is to transform hustle culture and assist others to shift away from living life on auto-pilot to living intentionally and following your own path to a life you love instead.
Host Bio:
Heather Grace Hanson is a certified positive psychology-based coach and creator of the Intentional Energy Framework, a system that empowers you to create a life and business you love without burning out. Heather is obsessed with all things personal development, running and walking in the park, interior design, salsa dancing and most importantly, spending time with her pup, Barclay.
Episode Transcript:
This is the last episode of 2021. So of course I have to talk about planning for the upcoming year. Now, there's a ton of content out there already on planning and goal setting, especially this time of year I feel like it's pretty much the only thing we hear about for a few weeks, but I really want to talk about this today because this year I'm doing the process a little bit differently because I really want to keep the process simple, and to make sure that I'm zeroing in on what's most important.
So I'm gonna go through this process with you today, and I've created a workbook that you can download. There will be a link in the show notes, you can sign up for my email list and get the workbook to follow along and do this process in the workbook if you would like to.
So the overall way that I am approaching planning and goal setting this year, I'll give you kind of my overall framework first. Now for the annual planning, I'm basically coming up with my themes for the year, so these are the areas of my life and business that I want to focus on for the year, and then from there I'll move down into monthly planning. I'm not so much of a quarterly planning person. I like to just sort of review my goals and plans every month so I do the annual planning setting the themes and the areas that I want to focus on then moving into the monthly planning where I'll be setting more specific goals. And then from there that helps me set my weekly goals and my weekly tasks.
So today on the podcast I'm just going to be focusing on how to come up with your themes for the year basically and then in future podcast episodes I'll talk about how I take that and then go into monthly and weekly planning. But today we're just focusing on those yearly themes and how to create those.
So the first thing that I do is, I do a year-end review but I'm keeping it really simple. I have heard a lot of people talk about their year-end reviews that sound like a really intensive deep dive and, I don't know, that always just stresses me out. So for my year-end review I'm keeping it really simple.
I'm asking myself 2 questions and the first one is: What went well? So that's when I'm going to look back on the last year and look at what I accomplished. What were my successes? And I'm going to take a few moments to really celebrate that and savor the things that went well. And I'm doing this process looking at both personal and business at the same time. You can separate them if you want but I'm doing them at the same time. So yeah, think of all the things in your personal life and business that went well and take a moment to appreciate those and come up with that list.
And then the second question that I'm asking myself isk: What didn't go well? So looking back on the last year, you know, what are the goals that you had that you didn't achieve? What do you wish you had done differently or better? Anything like that..
And that's pretty much it. That's my year -end review. I answer those 2 questions and I come up with those 2 lists.
And after the year-end review, then I move into the planning. But before we get into the specific planning, I really recommend doing a values exercise for this method of planning. It's really important to know what your top 3 to 6 values are. So I talked about how to do a values exercise in episode 1 of the podcast so you can definitely go back and listen to that. I'm not going to talk about how to do it. How to actually do the exercise right now but the exercise will also be in the workbook if you want to download that. But it's really important to start this process knowing what your 3 to 6 top values are.
So once you've done that then we can move into the planning. And the first thing I'm doing for that is to just do a huge brain dump of all the things in my head. Whatever ideas you have for things that you could do, accomplish or experience in the upcoming year, just write it all down and once you've done that…
Well so first I'll say, I am doing this digitally because in the next step you're going to want to be able to kind of move things around and copy and paste. But if you are a paper person feel free to do it on paper.
But once you have this huge brain dump list, you're going to want to look at the list and start grouping things into categories. So similar items that could maybe be combined into a category. Maybe there's multiple things that you want to do and focus on that are around self-care or focusing on your health. Maybe there's multiple things on your list of things that you want to do with your family over the next year. Maybe there's multiple things that you want to learn over the next year for your business. Maybe there's multiple things on there in terms of multiple ideas for business products or services that you could create in the next year or different things around, you know, building your audience for the next year.
So just starting to look at the list and grouping similar items that could fit into a category, and once you do that you want to look at those categories and compare it to your list of your top 3 to 6 values and see which ones or which categories or themes are most aligned with your values, because like I said, the whole idea of this annual planning process is to come up with your themes for the year, the areas of your life and business that you want to focus on, and you really want to make sure that those are aligned with your values. So if there's a category that is maybe not so aligned with your values, maybe that can just be put on hold for now. Or maybe you just decide you can eliminate it altogether, but you really want to start to narrow down these categories to come up with 3 to 6 overall themes for the whole year that you're going to focus on.
And you can have these themes, you know, balanced out however you want. You know, maybe you have 3 themes or areas of your business that you're working on and then 2 areas of your personal life that you're focusing on or it can be reversed. Maybe there's 2 business areas that you're working on and 3 personal areas. Whatever works for you in terms of that balance, you know, you can decide what's best for you. However, I do have a strong recommendation that your number 1 focus should be something around self-care, health and wellness, because if you aren't taking care of yourself, you're not going to be able to show up in the way that you want to in those other areas that you're focusing on. You know, if we aren't taking care of ourselves, we're really limiting the impact that we can have in other areas of our life. So of course these are my own personal recommendations. You can do whatever you want for your own life, but I highly recommend that the number 1 focus area for yourself over the next year and honestly every year probably, is self-care. Make sure your health and your wellness is taken care of.
And that's really the process, is to just start with a brain dump and then narrow it down until you get these 3 to 6 focus areas that you are going to work on over the next year. And now what I want to say is, the more areas that you decide to focus on, the more you're going to be spread a little bit thin. I mean that kind of makes sense. We only have so much time and so much energy that we can devote to different things, so if you come up with a final list of, you know, 3 areas that you want to focus on, you're going to be able to devote more attention to each of those areas than if you come up with 6 different areas. So not that you can't have 6, especially since we're thinking of both business and personal. But, you know, as long as 1 of your focus areas is your health and your wellness, that's good because that will make sure that you're taking care of yourself, but just remember that the more focus areas that you come up with, the more you're going to spread yourself thin. If you can really narrow it down to as few as possible, you're going to be able to make more and faster progress in each of your areas, if that makes sense. So just be aware of that when you're finalizing the the different themes and focus areas for your upcoming year.
And that's basically it! Once you have finalized your focus areas or your themes, whatever you want to call them, that is the end of the annual process, and like I said, I will talk in future episodes about how to make sure you are really keeping in alignment with your focus areas as you're doing monthly and weekly planning. But for now, just focus on the year and here's another helpful tip that I like to think about when trying to come up with these themes, because I know for me, I do sometimes have a tendency to get really excited about planning for the upcoming year, and you know, it can be hard to kind of narrow down that list of all of the things that we want to accomplish because it all sounds so exciting, especially if you're a multi-passionate person like I am. There's so many things that we want to do, so it can be hard to really narrow down and kind of put certain things to the side.
I don't know who this quote originates from, so I apologize I can't you know, I can't say who originally said this quote but there's that famous quote of, you know, how we overestimate what we can do in a short amount of time, so like I don't remember exactly what the quote is, but. We overestimate what we can do in like a day or a week or a month, but then we underestimate what we can accomplish in a year. And I have found for myself that it helps give me clarity, when figuring out what is a realistic number of goals and things to set for myself when I think of if I fast forward to the end of the year. So if I'm thinking right now about planning for 2022, my instinct is to want to add too many things in, like set too many goals for myself. But if I think ahead to the end of the year and think what would I be really proud of to be able to say that I accomplished over the year, it's much easier for my brain to then think of a much smaller list especially when you're thinking of these overall themes. So for example, I'll use some of the things that I'm personally thinking of in terms of my business as an example, so there are so many ideas that I have for different services or courses or things that I could offer, and you know it's easy for me to get all gung ho and say like, oh I'll create this course in Q1 and then I can create the second course in Q2 you know and then all of a sudden look back and see on my list that I'm planning on creating like 3 courses and I'm planning on you know building my podcast, and then also maybe start doing blog posts and all these things.
When you when you think of it in terms of smaller amounts of time, my brain tends to add in too many things, but if I look to the end of the year and think, what if I by the end of next year, if I have consistently put out a podcast episode every week for the whole year that means by the end of the year I will have published 52 podcast episodes. Wow, that sounds amazing. So in terms of you know, getting my message out there. It's easy to see how great of an impact it could be to literally just focus on my podcast and not worry about doing blog posts or other things. Literally just only focus on my podcast so that by the end of the year I can say wow I published 52 podcast episodes. And if if you're thinking about, in terms of you know, courses or services or you know group programs that you could offer, rather than thinking you know by the end of the year thinking that you could create four different courses, what if you decided on 1 course or 1 service and you built that out in Q1 put it up for sale in Q2 and by the end of the year you've you've tweaked and you've promoted this 1 product or service and by the end of the year it's really built up into a successful service for your business, you know, or if you already have a successful product or service, what if you spent the entire year just you know, building up your audience and getting the message out there and finding new customers and clients, and really grew that into something bigger or tweaked it to to make it better. When you think about it in the long term, at least for me, maybe this is different for other people, but when I move forward into the future as if I'm looking back on 2022, it's much easier for me to see how setting a smaller number of goals will be much more impactful.
I hope I've made that clear because sometimes I can be a little convoluted when I'm talking about these things, but I just wanted to mention that because I know for me in the past, I've had a really hard time with setting goals and narrowing them down. But for me the most helpful thing is to envision the future of when I'm looking back on this current year that I'm planning for in the moment. Sounds a little weird to say but I'll end on that note.
And just as a reminder, if you want the workbook on how to do this annual planning method, definitely click the link in the show notes and you can get that, and again, I will talk in future episodes about how I do further planning beyond this point when I do my monthly and weekly planning to really make sure that I am sticking to these small focus areas that I've set for myself and that I'm making sure that I'm not adding in too many goals and too many tasks and just burning myself out and making sure that what we're doing is really going to be the things that are moving us forward and making sure that we're not doing all the busy work that just isn't important and is just burning us out, right? Because that's what this is all about. So I will end there and I will see you next time.