387 Holly Worton ~ Wrap Up the Current Year Before You Start Planning the New One

Transcript

Holly: Hello adventurers and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 387 the second to the last episode of the year. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today I am going to talk about wrapping up the year, seasons changes and that kind of thing.

I was really debating about what to talk about this week, and I was feeling like I didn’t want to go with the purely nature-outdoors adventure episode, but I wanted to talk more about this time of year that we are in, and changes that are happening and new things. I think that is really important. You may have noticed from my emails, or from things that I have been talking about on the podcast, that I released my yearly planner called The Year You Want. And this is based on the process that I use every year to kind of wrap up the current year and plan the things that I want to experience in the New Year and this has been a really powerful process for me for the last few years and it has been a really important part of my life, to make sure that I do all the things that I want to do and I have all the experiences that I want to have and I achieve all of my goals.

Not every year do I achieve all of my goals and this year was one of those years, which I am sure it was for many people, where lots of unexpected things happened and things didn’t work out as planned, so a lot of my goals just were impossible, they didn’t happen. There was some travel I wanted to do to write two books on the Camino, I wanted to walk the Camino Portuguese and the Camino Ingles, none of those happened and so I am putting those off until 2022, because next year is a holy year and there will be a lot of people on the trails. Kickboxing, black belt grading, that didn’t happen. We did have a modified kind of winter course a couple of weekends ago, where we did the grading for the line work and the fitness aspects of the grading and I passed that, barely, but I did pass, and I am very pleased about that as that is a step towards that goal. And I replaced the Camino with the Ridgeway, which was fantastic, I was planning to walk it next year and I just bumped that up and I did all kinds of other things. This was a year where I had to completely reevaluate a lot of my goals and so it really helped to have this system, to look through what were the goals that I set, which goals are still viable and which goals need to be put off for next year or the following year, and what am I going to do instead? And I have a whole podcast episode about that. So that’s kind of what I am feeling now and so I wanted to talk about that with you.

I have also been feeling lately, the last couple of days in particular, really tired. I think, I have been talking about this a lot with my friend Joanna Hennon, this has been a stressful year for everyone, again, because of the uncertainty, because of the changes, and also, I have had some uncertainty with clients that we work with and I am just so tired. So as we record this, I have got this workcation planned for later this week and hopefully going to take it easy for the next couple of weeks. You will obviously have a podcast, because I never miss a week on this podcast, but I am going to take it easy and start planning the next year. But before then, the day that this goes live, Monday 21^st is solstice, winter solstice, so I wanted to talk to you to you a little bit about that before I get into other things.

So the winter solstice is also known as Alban Arthan, it is a time of the year solstice means stand still, so it is a time when the time appears to rise and set in more or less the same place for a few days. The actual solstice is our shortest day of the year, but our longest night of the year. And then after that the days start to get a little bit longer and the nights start to get a little bit shorter. So it is like a new cycle of life is beginning. And I know I have talked a little bit about Samhain or October 31st being the New Year but there are many new cycles throughout the year so it is not just that one year, we have also got this new cycle, we have a very clear shift between shorter days to longer days, and it is something that you can see every day as you look out the window and you realise that the days are getting longer. And so a lot of solstice ceremonies have to do with banishing the dark and welcoming back the light and welcoming in this new cycle, this kind of rebirth.

So apparently, up until fairly recently, people celebrated this festival for two weeks, with peaks in the festivals on December 25th, January 1st, January 5^th, and this was the origin of the 12 days of Christmas, so obviously this was in pre-Christmas times. But these were the dark months of the year and these were the times when people didn’t have a lot of work if they were manual labourers, and this was the time to kind of rest and celebrate and call in this new cycle. And I think that’s why a lot of us feel the need to go into hibernation at this time of year, or really just wind down and take a break and rest and recharge and get ready for that new cycle.

So if you are feeling that as well, that is very natural, you are not the only person, and I know this because I have been talking to lots of friends about this lately. We are all experiencing something similar, this real need to rest, especially after this year, which has been such a strange year and full of stress for a lot of people. I just got an email from a friend the other day who lost his job, you know that’s happened to a lot of people, a lot of people are losing work and a lot of people are having to change the way they do things, having to rethink the way they do things. So it has been a time of unrest and stress and it is very natural to want to rest at this time of year and I think the fact that travel is restricted for a lot of people means that a lot of people may have more rest time this holiday season than they ever have before, because there probably won’t be as many celebrations and family get togethers and things. It will be a lot smaller if they are happening at all. My husband and I always have a very quiet Christmas, with the exception of last year when he had family visiting, but we are going back to that quiet Christmas this year and I am really, really looking forward to it.

So, on this longest night of the year, tonight, which is when this goes live, there are different ways that you can celebrate this. I am planning to go on a long run, so I can spend time in nature and just really be outdoors but then at night, what can you do? You might want to go through the house and turn off all of the lights, spend some time feeling into this darkness and feeling into how that darkness feels and what comes up for you. And then you might want to light a candle and then take that candle around your house, from room to room. You might want to relight candles in each room, if you don’t have that many candles you might want to turn on a light (I know candles are much more romantic than electrical lighting, but the fact is we live in a modern world), so you might want to light those rooms in a modern way, little by little, or do it by candlelight which is lovely.

Celebrate this new cycle of light. Celebrate this new cycle of longer days, of rebirth. If you garden you might wan to look through a seed catalogue or look through a plant catalogue or think about what you might do with your garden in the New Year. You might want to have a drink in celebration of this rebirth of the year, of the longer days. There are so many different ways that you can have a small little ceremony to celebrate. I really like the idea of turning out all the lights in the house and going through and relighting candles. My house is really small so that is quite easy! But think about what you might like to do or maybe just sit and reflect on this new cycle. And perhaps see how you might want to spend some time in nature on Monday, today, as this goes live. Whether that is going out for a little walk or walking in a local park or walking around your town or going for a run or a bike ride or whatever, maybe spend some time outside and maybe spend some time outside as it is getting dark, so you can really feel what it is like as the day gets darker and darker and darker. And then you might go home when it is dark and then light some candles around the house. Try to get outdoors on these festivals, that’s what I do, if that is your thing, it might be a new tradition for you!

So, as you are looking into wrapping up this year and reflecting on your year, there are a lot of thing that you can look at and I find this really, really, useful, a really useful personal ritual to do and I find it really difficult to start my New Year without wrapping up my current year. So I usually start out by doing kind of a mind dump, in my journal or in this planner that I have written, just write pages, kind of like morning pages if you have ever done those. What was the year like for me? And I kind of write down whatever comes to mind, I just let it all out of my head and onto paper and I find that really useful (and sometimes surprising) to see what comes up.

And then I go through my old journals for the last 12 months. I actually haven’t been writing in my journal as much as I used to, mostly because I kind of abandoned my morning ritual this year, I really shifted out of doing that for a long, long, time, so that mean I wasn’t writing my journal as much, but go though your journal from the last 12 months, if you have them. Just look at what stands out and read through some of the stuff that you wrote and remind yourself of how you were feeling and what was going on for you. I also find this to be really surprising sometimes. And then what I also do is I review my oracle card spread that I did last year to predict the themes for this year. So what I do is I pull an oracle card, 13, one card for each month and then for an overarching theme for the year. I kind of look at those, I write it all down in my journal, although now I would be writing it down in this book, and then I kind of see how things are matching up in the months to come and I look at the themes and I kind of get ready for what might come, because this has always been really, really, accurate for me in terms of the overarching themes for each month.

Then I look at my list of goals and projects for the year, probably more this year than any other year, because I have had to readjust and change things. But I look at: did I achieve all of my goals? Did I complete all of my projects and plans? One thing I am not good at doing is celebrating my achievements and that is why I added this to the planner, The Year You Want, to remind myself that it is important to celebrate. So in the planner I say to celebrate the goals you achieve and then I have a spot to write down ‘how do you plan to celebrate?’. I look at which achievements I am most proud of. I really did a lot of work this year on my writing, on my publishing, I achieved most of my goals and beyond, and so I am really, really, pleased with that, so that is something that I am going to be celebrating.

And then sometimes we have goals, and we take some action towards the goals and we don’t achieve them, but there are still goals that we want to achieve maybe next year or in the future. I think it is important to look at this as foundations, maybe we didn’t complete the process and achieve the goal, but we have laid the foundation for achieving that goal in the future, we have taken some action and we have done some work and that will make it easier to advance on that path, next year, or next month, or whenever it is that we decide to continue to take action towards that goal and that is a really important mindset to have. If you haven’t achieved a goal that is not a failure, you have just laid the foundation to work toward the goal in the future, if you choose to do so. Now sometimes, there are some goals that you might look at and say, you know what that is no longer important to me, my life had changed, I have grown and moved on from that, I don’t care about that.

The other important thing is to look at the goals that you didn’t achieve and think, do I want to do this or not? If I don’t want to do it anymore that is absolutely fine. Just because you set a goal doesn’t mean you have to achieve it because things change and move on. And sometimes things are no longer relevant, so please do not count that as a failure. I trained in NLP ten/nine years ago and I remember one of the first things you learn is the NLP presuppositions and one of the things I loved about that was, ‘there is no failure, only feedback’. So if you haven’t achieved a goal it is just feedback that it wasn’t a big enough priority or you made other things priorities, or it is no longer important to you, or something else. But it is important to look at why, the feedback you get from not having achieved that goal.

Then I like to look at, what were the overarching themes? If you had to describe your year 2020 in three words, what would they be. I posted this on Instagram a while back and there were a few people responding with their three words and it was really interesting. Were there any overarching themes for this year? How do you feel about this year? Just kind of get the big picture on what this year was like for you. And I like to look at my challenges, what challenges came up fo you? What obstacles came up? How did I overcome them? What mistakes did I make? What did I learn from them? Again, there is no failure only feedback. What did you learn from these things? Growth, how did you grow this year? What new things did you learn? And that could be life lessons or that could be online courses that you took or in person courses, what did you learn this year? And what did you learn about yourself this year? How did your mindset shift this year? That is another important thing to look at how our perspective, how our mindset has changed. Did you do any mindset work and what did you change as a result?

I like to look at health and wellness, how did that improve, how did that decline? What do I need to do?  What do I feel like doing for my health? Career, business, how did that go? That is always one of the things that is most forefront of my mind, in terms of goal setting and things but it is always important to look at our year in so many other aspects as well. So health and wellness is really important.

Personal life, people in your life, friends, and family, how did your relationships change this year? I think a lot of people have had some shifts in relationships both partners and friends and a lot of people haven’t been able to see their friends as much as they would have. Travel, again, that’s something that didn’t happen much this year but that is something that I look at where are the places that I enjoyed? Where do I want to think about travelling? And travel was very different this year, because it was really challenging to travel internationally, I cancelled everything, but I was still able to travel within the country, thankfully. The Ridgeway was a big, big, thing for me this year, it really kind of boosted my spirits after we had that first lockdown and before the second lockdown, I am really, really, pleased that I was able to get out and do that, so travel was an important part of my year, even though I didn’t do the travel that I thought.

Another thing that I really like to do is to go through my calendar, or you can do this with your journal, but I go through my calendar and week by week I go through, and I write down all my major activities, did they feel light? Or did they feel heavy? Did they feel positive? Or did they feel negative? And this is something I have found really, really, useful. I found it useful to look at how many things in my life, what is the balance like? Do I have mostly light things, or do I have mostly heavy things? And last year when I did this, I remember it was overwhelmingly positive but the things that were heavy were things that, I had very few things on the heavy list, but they were things that had taken up a lot of my year and so that was very easy for me to see that these were things that I wanted to change my relationship to, or change how I approach them, or try to eliminate them from my life.

Gratitude, I look at the things that I am grateful for and I know a lot of people resist gratitude work, but I find it really useful and I do like to do a section of gratitude work for, no matter how difficult the year was, we have always got something to be grateful for and I find that is a really grateful thing to kind of shift my mindset and see the positive.

Then finally, I look at the decade. I know this kind of work was really popular last year, because we were moving into 2020, but I think that is really useful to do that every year and look at the last 10 years and look at the overarching themes of each year and look at what changed and what you did, and kind of keep those in mind as well. I think the decade review is really important and of course, if you do that every year, that is only going to shift by one year every year, but I think it is important to look at. So I have included that in this book, because I think it is important to look at our previous decade and it also helps us to look at the next decade, the coming decade, what kinds of things do we want to plan for our future, decade? And I think that is really important as well, because I think it can be important to plan the coming year but not really think about our vision for three years, five years, ten years and beyond. And I do have a podcast episode on goal setting for each decade of our lives and I will put that in the show notes.

And then finally I think about what kind of thing I want to keep in mind for this year as I move into the new year, as I move into this new cycle, as I plan this new year. What do I want to let go of before I move on and what do I want to release? And what do I want to replace it with? That is the point where you start planning the New Year.

So I hope you find this useful, I was kind of walking you through some of the process that I use, that I have included in this book, but I think these are really important things to consider and I think having some kind of ritual or ceremony or just journaling to reflect on our year is really important. I have said this so many years but for the first 35 years of my life I was kind of coasting, I didn’t really set goals, I didn’t really set plans, life just happened. And that is a terrible way to live, and things have really shifted for me in the last 10 years when I started reflecting on my life and planning the things that I wanted to experience.

So I don’t know what I will be talking about next week, but I suspect it might be shifting into this new year, we will see because I have got lots of good outdoorsy stuff happening over the holidays, I have got a half marathon and I have got some walking and running goals to achieve so we will see, as I said I have been feeling a little bit tired lately so I might just scrap it all and rest, except for the half-marathon, that is paid for and in the calendar and I am definitely doing that, because I am really, really, curious to experience this route that this company does, they do a lot of races in my town and in this place where I am going to be doing my half marathon and I am really, really, looking forward to seeing what it is like running that route, because it is a very flat route and I wonder what that is going to be like for a longer run, because I am so used to doing hills because I live in a hilly area.

So that’s me, what about you? What are you going to be doing to wrap up this year and let go of it so you can move on into the future? Please feel free to email me and let me know what you thought of this episode, but also let me know what you are doing to kind of wrap up the year and move on? You can always email me at: [email protected], or you can find me online and get in touch there. I do get Facebook messages from people from time to time and Instagram messages and that kind of thing.

Also, I wanted to mention, if you are a patron you will get the ebook version of ‘The Year You Want’ for free. Now I usually only give ebooks to patrons at a certain level, but this one I am giving to all of my patrons. So if you haven’t yet signed up for Patreon and you would like to you can go to Patreon.com/HollyWorton and you can me join me there. Membership starts from just $1 a month and you will get the ebook planner for that amount. If you prefer to get the printed planer or workbook, I will share the links to that in the show notes. Up until now I have always released all of my workbooks only as print because it seemed obvious to me that that would be the right way to do it, because the whole point is having a book to write down your answers and then it occurred to me that some people might want to write down their answers in their main journal. So that’s why I have produced the ebook for this and I might actually go back and produce ebooks for all of my other workbooks as well, that is one more thing to do, so I might add that to my list for this workcation.

So Patreon, if you want to join me there, that’s Patreon.com/HollyWorton and thank you so much for listening, I hope you have a really beautiful solstice, I hope you manage to get outdoors a little bit and I would love to hear about whatever little ceremony, or ritual, or thing you might do to celebrate this new cycle. So get in touch and let me know.

And remember to visit: HollyWorton.com/387 for the show notes on this episode, thank you so much for listening.