Navigating Year-End Responsibilities While Setting Yourself Up for Success in the New Year
This past week mixing PTA and volunteering duties with work life
Momentum.
It’s something that’s been front of mind for me a lot these past weeks.
For one, I’ve been doing a lot of self-coaching around it, which I’ll share with you in detail in an upcoming Sunday issue.
But it’s also something I’ve been coaching on a lot with students inside Life-First Business.
Every 90 days, I host a live Map Your Quarter experience, where we go through my proprietary framework and workshop everyone’s strategic plans in real-time.
First, we set out tangible goals for the quarter that feed into their big picture “growth goals”, which I teach inside the program. From there, we create solid conditions and non-negotiables about the way we’re prepared to create those results; before deep diving into rocks, projects and our weekly needle drivers and benchmarks.
One student, for example, has a goal to double their annual revenue in the next 12 months while working the same hours; while another wants to make the same amount but in a more passive and automated way.
And inside of Traction, my membership/mastermind-hybrid for alumni students, we’ve already mapped out 2025 including launches, marketing and of all the intricate details so that they can set themselves up now and start 2025 with actual momentum rather than using the feeling of a New Year to motivate them to take action.
And that’s the piece that I want to unpack with you today.
One of the things I’ve noticed – and helped thousands of business owners navigate during this season when a New Year is close – is how easy it is to default into an all-or-nothing mindset and to accept the thoughts our brains offer up about why January is a better time to get certain things in motion.
Between things like travel, family, holiday celebrations and end of school stuff with our kids – there’s a lot happening in these last three months of the year, which means a lot of very real and valid reasons to rationalize putting things off until the New Year.
But I want to offer you a few reframes around this – beliefs and shifts that have served me well that I invite you to try on for size.
The first is that, desiring to be in your life more, doesn’t mean that you can’t create traction in your business.
If you cannot move your business forward and have the time, space and mental capacity to be fully present and engaged in your life, that has nothing to do with the season or time of year and everything to do with your business model.
So much of running a business in a life-first way is having space for all of those to exist simultaneously.
I was having a conversation with a girlfriend about that the other day in the context of codependency and self-abandonment in relationships.
If there’s not enough space in a relationship for you to show up for the other person and meet your own needs, there’s an issue there. Healthy relationships allow both of those things to exist; and the same applies in business.
When I really sat with that realization, it became one of those things that I couldn’t unsee, and it was a big catalyst in a lot of the changes I’ve made these past few years.
And it’s why we have big plans for Q4 to set certain things in motion for the New Year; and all of which will be happening while I embrace the fun stuff coming up for the holidays and with my team and I taking three weeks off over the break (I have issue scheduled breaking down how we’re making this happen coming soon).
When you block off your “life” priorities first, those positive time constraints simply challenge you to think more strategically about the needle drivers to prioritize when you are working that will create the results you want.
We want to use high level thinking to create results, not more time; and that’s a skillset to proactively lean into.
Having full and dynamic lives isn’t a problem, so we don’t want to use that as a reason we can’t make progress.
You want to learn how to run a business and enjoy moments like this.
You want to know how to build momentum when you have all of the time in the world and when life is life-ing, things are coming up, and your capacity is stretched.
But we don’t learn any of those things by waiting for the perfect set of circumstances or the right time.
The other big shift is around motivation.
What I’ve noticed is that many people are driven to focus on their businesses, to go all in and get support after January 1.
But the interesting thing is that, while the holidays tend to be more full-on with social stuff, most people’s January to March isn’t that different from their October to December.
The only difference is that they feel motivated to do something in January.
The reality is that motivation has everything to do with your thinking and nothing to do with the time of year.
If you think that it’s going to be hard to create traction in your business because you’ve got a lot going on personally, it’s only natural that your brain is going to offer you thoughts to reinforce that rather than solutions to support you.
Thoughts are choices, and are things we are ultimately in control of, which is why self-coaching (and getting coached) is so important.
We need to shift our thinking in ways that cast a vote for the kind of business (and self-concept) we’re trying to create versus contracting, kicking the ball down the road or putting the onus on our future self to figure things out.
We want to be kind to the future version of ourselves by doing this work now.
Resistance around taking action often comes from past thoughts and decisions; whether that’s feeling burnt out by taking on too much in the past, being forced to choose one or the other or feeling stretched thin because you were working hard but with little return because you were unsure what your needle drivers were.
Our past is the worst place to go to determine what’s possible for us and here’s the thing: the past doesn’t repeat itself, we do, which is why we want to proactively work at shifting this.
Which leads to my last shift and it’s the belief that you get to start today.
You don’t have to make a big story about yesterday, what happened before or why this will be easier to start in a few months time.
If you know it’s important and are clear that’s supportive of where you’re heading, start today.
And in fact, this is a really big piece in creating the self concept of someone who follows through and shows up for themselves.
The more you don’t buy into all of the drama your mind offers you and show up imperfectly, the easier it becomes to be the kind of person who does that.
It strengthens those muscles and activates internal motivation to take action versus relying on something outside of yourself or the “perfect” conditions. And there’s a pride that comes with that that only fuels you onwards.
So all of this to say that I don’t want you to miss the momentum that you can cultivate right now without burning yourself out, compromising on your life away from work, or needing to show up perfectly.
Life can be full, unexpected things can come up AND you can still create a ton of momentum in your business with a few hours of focused work each week.
The waitlist for the January cohort of Life First Business is open so if you want to get a deep look into this full process and support and accountability as you execute, click here to sign up.
Talk soon,
Naomi
