It can be very helpful to do a review of the past year and it’s not too late to do so. I like to use this approach, which originally comes from Tim Ferriss ( I’ve modified it slightly). It takes 30-60 minutes and looks like this:
- Grab a notepad and create three columns: WORKED WELL, DIDN’T WORK WELL and D0 DIFFERENTLY.
- Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
- For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak worked well and felt good feelings or didn’t work well and didn’t feel good emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.
- Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of columns 1 and 2 produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
- Based on the answers, take your “worked well” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar.
That’s step one. Step two is to take your “didn’t work well” leaders, and note down in the third column whether you could do it differently and how. If your can’t do it differently or make it work better then take a sheet of paper and put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top. Note down all the outcomes that did not work well and that you do not want to do again. Put the list somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2019. As Tim Ferris puts it, these are the people and things you *know* make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO (Fear of Missing Out), or other nonsense.
And just remember: it’s not enough to remove the negatives or things that didn’t work well or feel good. That simply creates a void. Get the positive things on the calendar ASAP, so they don’t get crowded out by the busyness and noise that will otherwise fill your days.
Here are some of my summary highlights from 2018.
At the start of 2018, I ran two brand new events that I led myself - Two 6-week Clarity and Confidence programmes and in March the Goa, India retreat, which this time included a visit to the Isha Yoga Centre in Coimbatore. Details about the 2019 India retreat are below. In March, for my own development, I attended an online workshop called Tell Your Story by Denise Dee and did a performance in June of the short fifteen minute story called, “Don’t Wait in Vain,” that I wrote. I also enjoyed taking up indoors climbing - that’s slackened off a bit - and intent to do at least one outdoor climb this year.
In september, I went to Bali, Indonesia for the first time for the ilab entrepreneur event and combined this with some holidays. Much clarity was gained from iLab as well as knowledge about practical business tools and the mindset aspects of running a business. Being in Sonar by the beach was awesome.
Later in the year, I co-facilitated a workshop where I spearheaded scientific hand analysis. We focused on the unique personality profile details from the line formations in the hands. Your fingerprints provide accurate information about your life’s mission, talents and stumbling blocks and is your own internal soul-level guidance system.
