Hello Rebooters!
Welp, somehow it’s the end of 2020 (and thank fuck for that, hey?) and we’ve made it to the end of our first year and first season podcasting!
We’re going to have a little break, and return in a slightly different format next year – three seasons of ten weeks each, plus a sneaky celebratory Christmas episode.
So, 2020. I mean… it has been the year to end all years, hasn’t it? And we figured that as it’s the end of the year, we’d have a look back over it, and the podcast, and maybe also look at some planning and how we do that.
What we talk about
Planning, new year’s eve rituals (ice cream is involved), unravelling and reviewing and planning.
Remembering to look back and taking a few precious moments to recognise just how much we’ve achieved over the year – and why we’re so exhausted by the end of it!
The role your calendar has to play. Post its. Pulling together the year and trying to make it coherent enough for a blog post (remember those? Year review posts? Not sure how many of those will surface in 2020, although Sarah has done one!)
Most of us will be feeling like we’ve spent this year firefighting, especially if you’re running a business. We’re also bloody fed up of talking about COVID on the odd occasions we do see our friends, and we think pivoting has been more like this – but less poised and elegant:
Carla describes her planning as stabilisers for the year ahead – not wedded to the outcome, but as a structure to start the year with. She’s been doing it for 10-15 years and would be lost without the new year planning ritual (and her 90 day and mid-year check-ins. For someone who’s chronically chaotic, she’s kind of spookily organised…)
Sarah has only started planning in this kind of way this year. Before that she did her review process in December each year, doing a looking back blog post and releasing it between Christmas and New Year. She’s more in the present than a reviewer or a planner – but has discovered goal setting and planning at the end of 2019 after her move to Canada.
Daring to dream… the bravery and beauty of changing up your goals when it feels right – throwing out old ones and bringing in new ones.
Having the structure to be able to make the right decisions throughout your year. Being in tune with your business and what it’s doing and where it’s going – so you can do mad stuff like a totally unexpected rebrand in the middle of the year after you’ve chucked out half your business (cough, Sarah, cough).
Working out, partly through the planning process, any bad or icky stuff as well. What did and didn’t work over the year, how you’re feeling about different things you do, and if there’s anything that you still do well, but you just don’t like any more. This is all valuable information and the more you know, the better the decisions you’ll make!
Delving in and trying to pinpoint, if you can, specifics of your icky feelings, particularly if you’re on the fence. But also, always trust and follow your gut – if you feel strongly, you don’t necessarily need specifics.
And then once you know what you don’t like, you can start building up your network of trusted people to refer to who do those things!
The woo and the logic of goal setting! Putting it out to the universe and seeing what happens – and then being spooked when things you’d forgotten you wanted happen years and years later.
Goals don’t have to be set in stone – especially when we both (and probably you too) hate being told what to do, even by ourselves! There’s an element of magic to the process and we both find it very exciting!
We would also like to mention here that if all you’ve done this year is survive, you have done brilliantly. If you have achieved anything else on top of that, even if it’s not what you’d have done in a normal year, it’s been in spite of the trauma of a pandemic and you are amazing.
Life happens, and even more so this year! The worries and anxiety and limitations this year have had a massive impact, no matter who you are or where you are or what you do. So don’t be hard on yourself – it’s too easy to let that feeling sneak in when you’re reviewing a year.
What we’ve taken from 2020, despite everything
Speaking opportunities without the travel. A bunch of press. Networking. Facing some fears. People we’d never otherwise have met. Reconnecting with old friends over Zoom, and family video chats!
And… we can podcast! This time last year we were just thinking about turning this domain name we’d bought into something 🙂
Everything is figureoutable!
And some stats: 18 episodes (including our 2.5 Covid episode), 6 guests (Jenn Hume at Hell Yeah Tech, Tara Perlaki at The Feminine Space, Verity Clarke Hair, Merry Moonhawk, Alison Grade and Megan Andersen), 749 downloads at time of recording (and we’d love 1000 by the end of the year!), at least one Alexa play – and it’s not us!
We’re seriously considering a guerilla campaign to get more Alexa plays – shouting through windows, being put on people’s speakerphone…
Platform-wise, 60% of you are on Apple Podcasts, 66% are in the UK, and 27% in Canada (which I still can’t type on my first attempt!). We think this is pretty balanced given Sarah originally came from the UK. We’ve also had some listens in Denmark, Spain, India, Ireland, Singapore… which feels like a massive achievement for our lovely little podcast!
Resources we mention
Susannah Conway’s Unravel Your Year workbook
And finally…
As ever, we’d love it if you share us, like us, rate us – tell people about us if you love listening! We’ll be back in 2021 – and we hope you have an awesome festive season!