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Welcome to Episode 311 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama, and this is the last episode of 2024. And so, I think appropriately, I I'm going to do a rebroadcast of an episode I did several years ago where I cover three different ways to do an annual review. This is a great way to reflect on your goals and values and help you to focus on what is important to you in the coming year. If you're new to the podcast, you can connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com. You can get more resources at thenonanxiousleader.com, and you can sign up for my 2 for Tuesday email newsletter on the website or through the link in the show notes. Now, without further ado, here is episode 311, a rebroadcast of the year-end review with a family Family Systems take.

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The first of the reviews that I'm going to share with you is one that I did last year. I found out about it last fall, and it's from Tim Farris, author and podcaster. He does a year-end review that's a little bit different than I've seen before, and I really found it helpful. The way to start is to grab a piece of paper and make two columns, positive and negative. Then go your calendar for the year, looking at every week, all of the appointments that you've had, all of the activities, the people that you met with, the commitments that you had to keep, and then write down the ones that triggered the peak positive and negative emotions for each month. Once you have those columns completed, once you've gone through your calendar, then look at each of the columns and identify the top 20%, that is, the people, the commitments the activities that were the most consistently positive or negative, or were the most powerful positive or negative experience. Once you've done that, then take the answers, take that top 20% and start adding the positive ones to your calendar in 2020. Make a commitment to increase the positive activities in 2020.

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And likewise, also take out, that is, make a commitment to remove the negative 20% from your calendar. Now, you may not be able to remove everything. He reminds us that it's not enough just to remove the negative. That just creates a void. But the important part is to get the positive things on your calendar or they will get crowded out. Now, a family systems note on this. The people in the negative column are a clue to doing your own work because you won't necessarily to be able to remove a family member or a boss or a coworker from your life. You're going to have to deal with them in some way or another. But paradoxically, what you can do is you can make a commitment to connect with them in healthier ways. This is paradoxical because as Farris says, you want to remove them from your life. But what family system theory would tell us is that we actually need to move closer and in healthy ways. How can you get to know that person better? How can you learn more about them by asking questions that have nothing to do with the source of negativity?

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How can you practice self differentiating with them as well as remaining a non-anxious presence when they react to your own self-differentiation. This may not seem like a task that you want to take on, but it will definitely definitely improve your own functioning in those relationships and in all your relationships. Do the positive negative, go through your calendar, identify the top 20%, but if you have people in the negative column, think about how you can actually move closer to them in healthier ways. The next approach comes from Matt Perman at what'sbestnext. Com. I should mention that I will put links to each of these three approaches in the show notes. His first step, it makes sense, it's reflect on the prior year, look back, and he uses David Allen's process. David Allen is the author of Getting Things Done, The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. What he says is just simply write down in order that they come to mind the things that you feel you need to organize or categorize, as well as your most notable accomplishments, events, and other points of interest from the year. Notable doesn't have to be a big thing. It's This is something that comes to mind.

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This is a stream of consciousness approach. If you're not as systematic and you just want to sit down and reflect, typically, the things that come to mind are the things that are still with you, the things that you haven't completely processed yet. That's the David Allen approach, which is the things that are on your mind need to get out of your head and get into a trusted place where you can process them. Just think and write down the things you need to organize and categorize in your most notable accomplishments and events. The second is to define a few priorities for the coming year. Remember that they're not priorities unless they're just a few of them, but reflect on your priorities for the current year and how they went and what are your upcoming events? The major ones, especially for the coming year, the stuff that's on your plate, the things you really want to accomplish, and list three to five primary things you want to accomplish in 2020. And Five would be the tops, three would be better. These are your big goals, your big rocks, the way Steven Covey would identify them. Finally, permanent recommends a third optional step, although I think this is a really important step, and that is to review your mistakes.

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You don't want to dwell in them or beat yourself up, but you do want to try to learn from the past year. It is a good practice to learn from your mistakes, but he thinks most Most people do it wrong. He quotes Marcus Buckingham, who points out that most of us have a faulty assumption that excellence is the opposite of failure. In order to improve, we have to look at what went wrong and do the opposite. But according to Buckingham, that's not correct. Excellence is not the opposite of failure. In fact, excellence and failure are remarkably similar. He shares a story from one of Buckingham's books in which he talks about the difference between successful and unsuccessful salespeople. The latter typically suffer from call reluctance. You might conclude that to be an excellent salesperson, you need to get rid of call reluctance. But if you've ever been in sales, you know that actually, excellent salespeople do suffer from call reluctance, but what they've learned to do is to confront that reluctance and push through it. The skill or the approach that one would need to improve in the coming year is not to try to get rid of the reluctance, but learn a way to work through it.

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The way to learn from the previous year is to not look at what went wrong and to reverse it or invert it. The chances are that you've actually done most things right, and there might be one small difference maker, in this case of the example of being able to push through reluctance, and that small thing is a thing you want to try to build on. If you know anything about Buckingham's work, you know that he is all about building on our strengths, not trying to correct our weaknesses, and that most people try to do the latter, and they get frustrated and get in a cycle where they are never able to make any progress. The idea here is to look at the things that didn't go the way you wanted to and figure out how can you build on the bright spots, how can you build on the things that really worked and use them to take you to the next level. The third approach comes from Cathy Powell at orgcoach. Net, and it's very similar to other approaches I've seen, but I like her questions, so I want to share them with you verbatim.

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She starts by looking over the past year and asks the question, what was the overall theme for you? Or as she says, in other words, if someone were to make a movie about your life over the past year, what would the title be? Then three more questions. What were your three biggest wins this year? What were the top three lessons you learned this year? What one personal quality did you most develop? She gives the examples of patience, courage, integrity, humor, etc. Some very straightforward questions, but just another way to get you thinking. You may use part of this and part of Faris' and part of Permon's. You may develop your own approach, but I want to get you thinking about ways to look back at your year. Powell then looks ahead to the coming year and says, To set your goals for the year, use three guidelines. First, phrase your choices in the now as though you've already achieved it. This is a typical positive self-talk where you're making an affirmation about something you've already achieved. You phrase your goals in the now. Secondly, you phrase your choices in the positive. So not in the negative, not in terms of things that you don't want because your mind doesn't work very well with that.

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Like thinking in the now, thinking in the positive actually helps move you towards something rather than moving away from something. When you are trying to eat more healthy, if you're trying to watch your weight, if you're trying to lose weight, rather than saying, I'm going to stop eating junk foods, you would say, I am going to eat a healthier Diet. By thinking in the positive, it helps your mind to visualize what success looks like. Finally, eliminate the word want. She asked the question, Would you rather want the perfect relationship or would you rather have the perfect relationship? Or, Would you rather want good health? Or, Would you rather have good health? Want equates with deprivation, Powell writes. So avoid putting the feeling of lack in your goal or choice statements. Again, this is all about thinking positively, thinking about that it's going to be done, that you're going to do it, and thinking in terms of the actions that will need to take place to make them happen. She has a few more questions. What are your top three priorities for the coming year? What's most important to you? What will support you in achieving your priorities?

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I think this is a great one because you don't do things alone. What support systems will you need? This is really important because it may involve asking yourself, what do I need to do to change the way I function in certain relationships? Here's my family system's take again. What do I need to do to ask for help? What do I need to do to tell others that I'm going to be working on certain things, and this may change how we relate. These are all important questions to ask, and they will help you function more as a non-anxious presence. Finally, she asks to look at four areas of your life, health and wellness, relationships, prosperity, and personal growth. She has you do this exercise. Imagine that things are already the way you want them to be and write down the results in each of the following areas in specific and measurable terms as if they had already happened in these four areas. This is, again, like using positive affirmations. I know that when I first started writing a blog in 2016, I used to write down the affirmation that I am an author, teacher, speaker, and coach.

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Over the years, over the past three and a half years, I have lived into those ideas. I have lived into them. I thought about them as they had already occurred, and then I set goals in specific and measurable terms to get there. She then asked the question, what will it cost you to not achieve your expectations expectations. So what toll will it take on your psyche? What difference would it make if you didn't make the changes that you need to make to improve your health, or if you didn't work on your most important relationships? She asked, what will it cost you to not achieve your expectations. Then what do you choose to consistently do in order to achieve your expectations in each of these areas? It's this consistent effort that's really important. I wrote the book One New Habit, One Big Goal about a year ago because I had found that it is consistent effort that enables us to grow personally, to grow professionally, to reach the goals, whether they're in our relationships, in our work life, and whatever we're trying to do with our health and wellness and our personal finances, it's all about that incremental improvement, that consistent effort.

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Then finally, she asked this question, which takes us full circle back family systems, what request will you make of family and friends who can support your efforts? This again means that we're going to have to be willing to tell people that we want to change. As we know, this isn't always received positively, especially if it changes the nature of the relationship, especially if we're doing things differently. For some reason, people don't necessarily like to see those around them improve, whether that's in our family of origin or in our work We are going to have to think through, what does that mean? How will this change the relationship? What will the reactive response be? How will the anxiety level increase? Then how can I be a non-anxious presence to work through that sabotage to get to a new and better place so that I'm improving personally and I'm helping others to accept that around me? I'm being a non-anxious presence with them. In turn, that might even help them to grow. To me, that's the way this works, that first of all, we have to reflect on who we are, on what we've done, on what we want to do, what we can do better, whether that is in our own relationships or in our work world or in our hobbies or with our health.

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All of these things are areas that don't just happen unless we are intentional and self-aware, and we are then willing to take the steps small, consistent, and productive to make it happen. That's how I've seen it work, and I've seen it work in the lives of others. I think this is a great way to end the year and to take us into next year really focused on the things that matter most to us, the people, the activities, the work that we do, our own personal health, all of those things. If we can just take a few moments, really, I will say we'll probably take no more than an hour, maybe two, if you really want to reflect, to look on your year and start to prepare for next year. If you do it, it will make a huge difference.

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That's it for episode 311, the last episode of 2024. I'll be back next week with an all new episode. In the meantime, If you want to email me, send it to jack@christian-leaders.com. If you want more resources, go to thenonanxiousleader.com. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with somebody who might benefit, and please leave a review on your podcast platform of choice. Thank you for your help, and Happy New Year. Until next time. Go be yourself.