Design Your Best Ever New Year Strategy: Easy as A,B,C!

Appreciative Analysis

Spend focused time looking back over last year with compassionate curiosity. Where were the gifts, new seeds and even manure?

Break it Down

What would 2023 success look like? Get to what is most important to you about each of these goals and find your purpose; find your ‘why’.

Celebrate, Compost & Commit

Commit to taking the first steps. Commit to celebrating the wins and learnings from each step and taking the gifts of learning

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I sat down this weekend with my ‘Set Your Compass for the Year Ahead’ workbook and was pleased with myself for being well-prepared this year!

However, as soon as I began to look back into that 2022 rearview mirror, my positivity soon drained away. I could only see the ‘shocks’, the ‘disasters’, the ‘disappointments’, all the things left unfinished and all the plans not yet started or even promised and forgotten.

To say my inner critics came to poop my party is an understatement and it reminded me of the importance of putting security on the door before beginning any Review & Preview Party!

So, if you are also ready to review 2022 and plan for 2023, here are some additional exercises to complement and support the ‘Set Your Compass for the Year Ahead’ workbook (download below) and make it the best Review & Preview Party ever!

Calm Your Party Poopers

First things first, here’s a little trick to calm your Party Poopers if they start judging you:

• Take a sticky note,
• Listen for your loudest Party Pooper
• Draw it on the sticky note.
  If the ‘Don’t be ridiculous, you can’t draw’ Party Pooper shows up, put your drawing implement in your non-dominant hand and tell him/her/they/it that no one else will see this drawing so ‘thanks for the warning and trying to protect me BUT I’m good thanks…
• When you have your Party Pooper’s attention, look around your space and decide where the party ‘Chill Out Zone’ might be. Whatever Party Poopers arrive for you during these exercises, tell them there are drinks and snacks waiting for them in the Chill Out Zone.
• Write on a second sticky note what you can do if you feel the Party Pooper or Poopers sneaking back in: Laugh? Let go? Give them a virtual hug..?

2022 Appreciative Analysis Exercise

• Take a sheet of paper and fold your page in half vertically then horizontally to make 4 segments.
• Give each segment a season title (Spring 2022/Summer 2022/ Autumn 2022/Winter 22) and jot down key events that took place in each 2022 season.
  NB: When I jotted my key events down, I felt like 2022 had all been a ‘disaster’ and wound my Party Poopers right up. Be prepared to hold a safe and empathetic space for any of yours that get triggered too.
• Next, visit each seasonal segment as if it were a shop asking yourself, ‘With hindsight, what positive things can I take from each segment?’ However challenging events were, what positives can you discover there: Learning, growth, new awareness, appreciation, new connections, personal or professional development? Take whatever serves you from each ‘shop’ and leave the rest behind.

Break it Down

• Take another piece of paper and fold it into 4 segments as before.
• What do you really want to achieve in 2023?
• Break this main goal down into what you would like to achieve in each season.
• What is most important to you about each of these quarterly goals?
• Taking answers from step 4, repeat the question, ‘What is most important to me about this?’ and continue to repeat this step until you connect with your core purpose or ‘inner-why’ for each.
• You now have a red thread for each season leading to your 2023 goal. Whatever the year throws at you, keep these elements polished. This will be your 2023 compass.

Celebrate, Compost & Commit

• Looking back at the 2022 gifts you discovered, give a celebratory title to each segment. This could be a single word, a sentence, a mantra or image you want to remember.
• Take the time to celebrate the good stuff, the learning, the doors that perhaps wouldn’t have opened without others shutting.
• What first steps will you commit to in January 2023?
  NB: Put your Party Poopers aside if they remind you of 2022 poop! Bring your attention to how this poop has, or potentially could, become ‘compost’ and what you could plant, grow, nourish and harvest in it.
• What will support you most moving through 2023?
• What could you do to keep your Party Poopers calmly and curiously learning and celebrating in 2023?

Now you are ready to complete the ‘Set Your Compass for the Year Ahead’ workbook (download below) for the best New Year plan yet!

Happy 2023 from Inside-Out Coaching, where you will find all the support you need whatever the year throws at you!