A Year’s End Reflection for Creative Business Owners and Entrepreneurs.
Vol. 24
A Year’s End Reflection for Creative Business Owners and Entrepreneurs.
Reflecting, auditing and preparing based on the past year to set yourself up for success and fulfillment in the coming new year.
A quick bite:
New Year’s resolutions can be daunting. And, oftentimes, I find that creating a new year’s resolution causes me to move on past the year we just had without taking the chance to steep in what I accomplished, failed at or learned. This self reflection exercise has been HUGELY impactful for my personal and professional life for the past 3 years.
Continue reading below…
The end of most years is oftentimes pretty chaotic: wrapping up projects, taking time off for holidays, time spent with friends and family (well, normally...). There’s a lot going on, and as an artist, graphic designer, design studio or otherwise creative business owner, the old and new years frequently start to bleed together.
In the years past, I’ve found myself fantasizing about slowing down my graphic design work so that I can focus on planning, prepping and preparing for the next year. Without failure, rush projects and last minute commitments have me in a full blown sprint from November through January, where I inevitably dive back into another quick-paced year.
I’ve never really been much of a planner or a New Year’s resolution person. I mean, I’m an artist and graphic designer — planning doesn’t really come naturally. HOWEVER, for the past 3 years, I’ve been completing a year-end self reflection exercise with a good buddy, and it has totally changed how my years transition and how I proactively and intentionally steer both my personal and my professional life.
Why is self reflection valuable?
It improves self awareness, which leads to self improvement.
It provides perspective, which enables you to think and act based on the big-picture.
It enables you to respond not react. A bit more calculated decision making is good.
You’ll be afforded the opportunity to learn more from your mistakes.
It’ll give you more confidence.
It’ll challenge your assumptions.
Why is goal setting valuable?
Goals give you clarity: (you have a better chance of knowing if you should say yes or no to a future opportunity)
Goals challenge you: if you have a larger goal that’s broken down into smaller, more actionable steps/goals throughout the year, you’re able to slowly and consistently work towards something that might have otherwise felt too daunting.
Tracking progress: with a clear end “goal”, and an obvious starting point (wherever you are currently) you’re able to see and track the progress made.
You are 42% more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down, according to Inc.com
The following process is a 3hr self reflection that has been hugely impactful on the overall quality of my personal and professional life. I highly recommend considering both your personal and professional life as you work through this process as they are oftentimes far more interconnected than we like to admit.
Things you’ll need:
Paper (preferably large)
Markers/pens
Postit/sticky notes
A good friend/partner/loved one
Access to your email, photos (instagram/facebook) journals, calendars or other documented moments from the year
The Process:
Step 1: Reflect on the year
Set a timer and spend 30–60mins+ (longer is better) reflecting on your year by immersing yourself in everything you’ve gone through. Go through your email, social media, photos on your phone, calendar, texts, bank statements etc. Anything that can trigger memories of what you’ve done this past year.
Because I regularly take photos and post on Instagram, this is the best place for me to remember all that I have accomplished, worked through or talked about in my life.
Additionally, I like to go through my emails, my calendar events and photos from the year, and recall some of the highlights, low points, and otherwise interesting opportunities or conversations.
Once you’ve re-immersed yourself in your past year, set a 2-3 minute timer (for each bullet point below) and list out as many thoughts as you can for each of the following. For all of the ensuing timed writing sessions you’ll want to practice “stream of consciousness writing” where you’re not focused on editing/perfection, but more so getting as much out as quickly as possible, even if in fragmented thoughts. Additionally, if at any point you need more time, take it!:
What were the highlights of your year? What made you feel excited, proud, and positive?
What were the low parts of your year? What made you feel sad, hurt or was difficult?
What did you learn in your year? What did you learn about yourself, others, your business, your community, the world?
At this point in time, you’ll want to review with your partner. If you’re doing this solo, take some time to reflect.
Consider the following as you each go through your highlights, low parts and learnings of the year:
What surprised you?
What changed over the year?
How did your attitude, perceptions, or perspectives change?
What was different than what you had planned or expected?
What was significant in the moment, but will be insignificant in 1, 3 and/or 5 years from now?
Take a quick moment to write somewhere more prominently your top 5 highlights, low points, and things you’ve learned from this year.
Highlights: what were your big wins and accomplishments?
Low points: what are you happy is over and behind you?
Learnings: what lessons, findings or insights have stuck with you or feel most profound or impactful moving forward?
Write one sentence that encapsulates the year: “2020 was a damn dumpster fire, but it was a year that made apparent to me the importance of saving, planning and self-initiation.”
Step 2: Audit your Life
This is an opportunity for you to look at the big 10 (explained below) areas of your life, and make an assessment of what’s going well, and what needs some work. I personally have built my life around “balance”, and pursing a career that is part of my lifestyle. Work is play. Play is work. My hybrid professional identity is a combination of many things, and I truly base my “success” based off of the balance of the big 10 below. Note, you can change, add or subtract from the big 10 list.
On your paper, audit yourself on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of how accomplished or fulfilled you currently feel on the following (1: completely unfulfilled and 5: completely fulfilled.):
Friends & Community (social)
Family
Relationships & Communication (love)
Health & Fitness
Creativity
Travel & Adventure
Money & Finances
Career & Professional
Mental & Emotional Health
Self/Inner work & Spirituality
Here again, take some time to review with your partner. If you’re doing this solo, take some time to reflect.
Think about why you assigned the number you assigned to each bucket. What are you okay with, and what do you want to work on? Did anything here surprise you? What might you do or not do in order to address this? What’s holding you back from achieving a 5 on everything?
Step 3: Planning for this coming year.
Now that you’ve taken some time to marinade in and reflect on the highlights, low points, lessons learned as well as how this information has impacted the main aspects of your life, you can now make some assertions and plans for this coming year.
Set another timer for 3 minutes and write down as much as possible:
The Broad Goals: What do you want to accomplish, contribute to and feel proud of in this new year?
Now, set a 10min. total timer and focus in on what’s most important from the list above. Consider:
What are your top 1, 3 and 5 goals for this new year?
What do you need to do in order to attain these big goals?
What do you want to leave behind you as you step into the new year?
What are the top 1, 3, 5 things you’d like to change in this new year?
What do you need to do in order to make these changes?
With your partner, talk through the above, and establish the following:
What is your BHAG (big hairy audacious goal)? What are the 1-3 thing(s) that you really want to accomplish in this new year? This is generally a business term when establishing a business’ single purpose; however, in the instance of setting goals for the year, I like to choose a few.
Be sure to have SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goals in order to ensure success in attaining these BHAG’s.
Something like “I want to be better about marketing my graphic design business.” is not a SMART goal.
Maybe rewrite that goal like this: “I want to focus on posting 3x week on social media, writing 1 blog post each month, and engaging with others 2x per week in relevant LinkedIn groups in order to help market my graphic design business.” This goal has specific actions, you can measure (based on the numbers) whether or not the goal was acted on, it’s attainable in that it’s not unreasonable, it’s clearly relevant to marketing your graphic design business, and each action is directly tied to a timeline.
How can you define the success of these SMART BEHAGs? Is it simply the accomplishment of the goal itself, or is that tied to another metric? Is your goal tied to inbound inquiries, website traffic, revenue, or something other?
You want these goals to be something that you can look back at and say: “Yep, I did this.” or “Nope, I did not do this.” There should be little to no ambiguity.
Consider your motivation behind these goals. Why do you want what you want — again, talk this through with your partner. Also, be sure to consider how these goals play out in the big picture. How do these goals affect your personal and professional life over the next 1, 3, 5 and even 10 years? How will these goals contribute to the better alignment of your buckets from your self-audit? Identify areas in your life audit that were insufficient, and consider making SMART goals that will up their quotient.
Your goals should push you, but not be unattainable. Let’s consider the following hypothetical: You’re a logo designer, and you want to promote your logo design services on Instagram more often. Currently, you’re posting on Instagram about once per month. It would be reasonable to say that you want to be posting a few times per week, and that you plan to create your posts every Saturday morning so that they’re ready to go the following week on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It would not be reasonable to say that you want to go from posting about your logo design services once per month to every day. That is too severe of a jump, and will likely result in failure and potentially a negative start to the year. Push yourself, but also set yourself up for success.
Now that you’ve reflected, processed, audited and planned: name your year! What is this year going to be? I like to write a sentence that defines my year, and I then like to select one word that encompasses that sentence. That is my word for the year.
Step 4. Make An Action Plan
You now have a lot of ammunition, and it’s time to plan out how you can break these bigger goals into bite sized pieces so that your daily goals are working towards your weekly goals are working towards your monthly goals are working towards your yearly goals.
I’d be lying to you if I said that I’m good at this part. As the owner and creative director of a graphic design studio, I wear A LOT of hats, and my roles, goals and plans are constantly shifting and evolving (are these excuses? — I think I’m making up excuses...)
In years past, I honestly haven’t focused much on making this “action plan” too concrete. Whether that is to my detriment or advantage is up for debate. HOWEVER, I do make a point to regularly, throughout the year, check in with myself and my goals based on what I'm doing, working towards and where I’m at.
If you want to focus more on tracking your progress and holding yourself accountable (this is a really good idea), consider the following:
Set a 3 minute timer for each of the following:
For each of your yearly goals, set a 3 month, 6 month and 9 month milestone. What are check in points that you can dive into that assure you’re working down the right path in the right direction?
In order to achieve these new goals (especially with your newly attained insights on your life audit) what new habits do you need to pick up, and what old habits do you need to leave behind?
Networking: I’ve said it for years: “your network is your net-worth”. Who are the people or connections you need to foster in order to work towards these goals, opportunities or ambitions?
Talk through each of these with your partner, and write down your key insights.
Wrapping up your year’s end reflection
It’s overwhelming to think about an entire year at once. It can seem like our goals are set way too high. However, let’s look at this past year (2020) Think of how much f*#ked up sh!t happened. Who’s to say that YOU can’t do a TON of amazing sh!t in this new year!?
I hope this process is helpful and insightful for you! It certainly has been for me.
Happy New Year, and good luck!
Cheers
- Adam
Here’s a link to the original goal setting article that I adjusted to facilitate the above process.
