TIME TO RECAP AND REALIGN!

Here we are again my friends, the end of another rotation around the sun. That time of year when we get to spend some quality time with family and friends, reflect on the prior year, and imagine what the year ahead might have in store. 

From a business perspective, it’s the time of year for me that I like to recap the prior year, realign with my goals and vision for myself, and then reimagine what could be in the year and years in front of me. 

Let’s get right into the six questions I’m asking this year and would encourage you to do the same. What I am also going to encourage you to do is to take some time and write down these questions, as well as the answers to them. This is something I talk about all the time and this hasn’t changed for me: if you’re not writing stuff down, you’re not growing as much as you could be. Our brains are not meant to be efficient storage and retrieval devices, it just happens to be one of the benefits of having such an organ. The brain, however, serves a primary purpose, and that is to keep us alive. 

If life is worth living, it’s worth documenting and memorializing. Use yours arms, your hands, and your likely diminishing ability to actually write on a piece of paper to get stuff out of your head and out into the world via the brain hand connection. The first year end review question is: 

1. What did I change my mind on this year? 

I’ve talked on this show many times about something called intellectual integrity. This is when you value the truth more than you value being right. Intellectual integrity is the trait of accepting that you may have been wrong when you're presented with new information and new facts. Essentially, it means being willing to change your mind when new facts, data, and information is presented, even if those new facts run counter to what you wanted to believe was true. 

I made this the first question because it sets the tone for the rest of the exercise. If you can't find something that you've changed your mind on over the past year, you're simply not asking enough questions and you're not being honest enough with yourself. Growth is painful, which is why we all have a slight disdain for it in certain areas of our lives. We'd much rather get warm and cozy and then just stay there, as opposed to feeling cold, wet, and unsure, but growing and getting better.

To give you an example from my own year end recap of something I've changed my mind on over the past year, I realized that I've changed my mind a bit on the concept of scaling one's business. Having worked for a larger company for the past 2 and a half years, while also continuing to build my coaching company has given me a different perspective on business scaling; what works, what doesn't, what the ideal company size might be based on one's personality type and demeanor, and what is worth doing versus what's not worth doing. 

I've changed my mind a bit on business building versus brand building. You may have a sense of that if you've been following this show for any length of time. I'm much more on the side of the importance of intentionally and deliberately building a personal brand than I have been in the past. I've known for a long time that it's important to build a strong brand, but it's become much more clear to me over the last year or so just how crucial it is to build a personal brand while building your company or business brand. 

When you focus on building a high quality personal brand over just building a company brand, more opportunities can open up for you as a person than what the business brand might be able to return for you. Building a personal brand also almost always benefits the business brand, where the business brand doesn't always help you personally. In fact, in some cases, the business brand can harm your personal brand. I'll be talking about and encouraging this more for all of you in 2024, and showing you how and why to be doing it. 

The answer to this question, ‘what have I changed my mind on this year’, does not have to be a complete 180 degree shift from a prior belief. The question is simply meant to get your juices flowing on what kinds of mindset and beliefs shifts you've had as a result of 365 more days of experience, failures, successes, and reflection. You may have to really think for a bit to get something to come up at first, but hopefully this question will also create a new habit for you going into the new year of documenting your mindset shifts throughout the year, instead of waiting until the end of the year to try and think through how you've changed. 

The second year end review question is:

1. What created energy for me this year? 

This one should be a bit easier and less mentally taxing than the first question. What have you done or experience over the past year that created some new energy for you? If I haven't said it yet, I'll say it now, the answers to all of these questions do not have to be business related. This recap and realignment exercise should be a 360 degree type of exercise whereby you're assessing your whole life, not just your business. 

With this question, if you can’t think of anything that created new energy for you over the past year, while a sad recognition, it’s an awesome opportunity and awareness. We all get into ruts and routines. The questions should be whether or not your routines are giving you more life or taking it away. The follow up question would then be around what you could or should be doing in the coming year to create some new energy for you. 

The third year end question is: 

1. What drained my energy this year? 

An obvious follow-on question from the previous one and probably a little easier to answer. I know for me it was far easier, not to mention a much longer list of things that drained my energy than the ones that created energy for me. 

I'm happy to share with you some of the things that drained my energy, if that will help you get the juices flowing. The things that drained my energy this past year were:

1. Not working in my zone of creativity enough. I let the day to day grind of things sap my energy and creativity and I got away from some of my previous routines that allowed me to be creative and contemplative.
   
   
2. Poor eating habits. As is often the case when I'm dealing with a lot of stress, I tend to eat my feelings and I gravitate to convenience over what’s good for me. Do that day in and day out for several months and it becomes a wagon that’s very difficult to get back on.
    
3. Not exercising enough. What tends to happen with me is that I get into a negative work habit, I stress eat, the stress eating sucks my energy and vitality, I don't want to workout. Because I'm not working out I eat worse. Because I'm eating worse and not working out I sleep worse.  Because I'm sleeping worse, I wake up already feeling tired and don’t want to workout, nor do I want to eat better that day and the cycle is complete.
   
   
4. Not managing my hormones and endocrine system diligently. Friends, this is a big one. This should be something taught and encouraged at a young age, but it's not, so the responsibility is on us to get educated and stay on top of it. 

As we age, our hormones change. Diet, exercise, environment, sleep, hydration, stress; all of these things have an effect on our bodies over time. What affects the body inevitably also affects the mind (and vice versa). Over time, our bodies will make less of certain hormones and maybe more of others. Everything changes and it's on us to stay on top of what our bodies and minds need to maintain the health and vitality we may have had when we were younger. 

1. Doom scrolling. What is doom scrolling? It's getting on social media and getting sucked into the constant stream of ‘the sky is falling’ type posts from negative people. Yes, I know the difference between being negative and being realistic (that's what negative people say to justify their negativity). 

These are just 5 of the things I've identified that drained some of my vital energy over the past year. Trust me when I say there are at least 5 more things on that list. Regardless of the number, the important thing is to identify those things and then either reduce them, or eliminate them altogether. 

The fourth year end question is: 

4. Who were my sails and who were my anchors? 

I've done whole episodes on this topic so we won't go deep on it. It's a simple concept that says, those who lift us up and encourage us, those who help us go farther, faster; those are our sails. Those who drag us down, those who sap our energy, those who waste our time, those who make us feel small and incapable; those are our anchors. 

It's important to be identifying these people in our lives all the time, but if you'll at least make your list at the end of each year, you'll be way ahead of those who allow the anchors proximity and access, which also repels the sails in your life. If you're giving access to the anchors, the sails will simply stop wasting their vital life-force on you and give to more deserving people. 

The fifth year end question is: 

5. What did I not do this year because of fear? 

This one always gets me because, to answer the question, we have to make ourselves a bit vulnerable to our own ego and admit that we may have felt some fear in some area. Remember, this exercise is just for you, so go ahead and tell your ego to sit down and shut up. 

Was there something you thought of doing but maybe put on hold out of some kind of fear? Maybe it was a fear of failure, a fear of success, a fear of being wrong, a fear of being ridiculed, a fear of having to change or become somebody new. Whatever the fear, when you learn to identify it, you're that much further ahead to taking action on the things that have the ability to make you feel whole and working on your purpose. 

I don't want to gloss over that last line, ‘working on your purpose’. I encourage everyone listening to this show to be thinking deeply about what that purpose is for you. It doesn't matter what mine is, it only matters what yours is and then actively figuring out how you can work on your purpose within the work and life circumstances you've created for yourself. If your work does not allow you to work on your purpose, I won't be flippant and just say ‘quit’, but I will encourage you to be on the lookout for ways that it could, or other paths that will allow you to work on your purpose. 

The last year end question is this: 

1. What did I learn this year? 

Friends, if you take nothing else away from this exercise, I hope you'll at least take this last question. This should become an ongoing part of your mental operating system that is active on a daily basis so you can learn from the good and from the bad. But, if it's not, at least take an inventory at the end of every year and ask yourself, ‘what did I learn this year?’ 

Write them out, contemplate the list, find areas that you can implement the lessons learned, and then share it with others. When you teach somebody else, you're learning twice and you’re also embedding those lessons deeper into your subconscious mind so that they become part of your DNA. 

As always, thank you for investing your most valuable resource and currency with me each week, which is your time and attention. My sincere hope is that, as if I was your financial and investment consultant, you're getting a healthy return on your investment of your time and attention with this podcast. Working on my purpose entails adding value and increasing the self-worth and net-worth of those around me, and this podcast is one of the avenues that allows me to attempt to do that, so thank you for giving me that gift. 

If you want your 2024 to be bigger and better than your 2023, head over to www.CoachBlaine.com/freemonth and join the Appraiser Increase Academy absolutely free for 30 days. It's ony $29 per month after that should you decide you love the community, the live coaching calls, the 60+ hours of life and business altering video content, the 15+ coaching downloads and business building exercises, the private Facebook group, the one on one coaching opportunities, and everything else we do over there. 

By the way, I hold nothing back in the free 30 days. You get access to everything the paying members have access to, including one on one coaching with me. My goal is to add as much value as I can in your free 30 days that it will be a no-brainer for you to want to continue after that. If I don't do that, well then you just cancel your membership having never paid a dime and you can keep anything and everything you've downloaded or watched in that 30 days. www.CoachBlaine.com/freemonth is where you can get started having your best year ever. 

Here's to having the most prosperous year yet, so, until next week, I'm out…