What is Your Year-End Mindset?
Good questions can help us can help us appreciate where we've been and get clear about where we want to go.
On Friday, a friend and I have a call scheduled. This isn't just a casual chat. It’s a planning session.
For a couple of hours, we’ll discuss our successes in 2024 and our plans for 2025. We’ll talk about the things we want to accomplish, explore, and the mindset we want to bring into the new year. We’ll dream about the future.
This conversation is clarifying for both of us—a chance to go on record and declare what matters most in our work lives, and the direction we want to head.
We are both very organized list-makers, so by the end of our call, I’ll have a working document to guide me through 2025.
But here's the thing: I still don’t know exactly what that plan is going to look like. I’m not clear on my writing goals for 2025.
And that’s OK.
Becoming Clear About What Matters Now
There are so many things I want to learn, try, write, and read. Places I want to go, and people I want to invite onto my podcast. And that’s not even touching on the personal and family plans I’m excited about.
When I think about all these possibilities, it feels like I’ve just stepped into a bookstore filled with books I’ve never read. I get a bit needy and overwhelmed, scooping up every book I see before remembering that time is limited. So, I make lists of books to come back for, but only take a couple home with me.
And that’s OK.
There’s value in finding a few favorites, focusing on those, savoring them, and allowing them to spark new ideas, desires, and plans.
That’s how I think about my annual goals and dreams—not as constraints, not a to-do list I feel frantic to complete, but as a way to get started, a fuel for motivation, while remaining open to other opportunities and life changes that are bound to come up.
Where to Start?
To narrow my focus and really get clear on where I want to start, I ask myself a series of questions. In the Polly Campbell, Simply Said podcast episode 292, I share the questions I use for self-reflection, personal desires, and goal-setting.
This time, though, it’s all about writing. The best way to accomplish our creative goals is to keep them in mind, taking small steps each day to move closer to them. Before we can do that, though, we’ve got to know what we want.
The quality of our lives is shaped by the questions we ask because they help guide us toward our goals. Be sure to ask good ones. To do this, I sit down with a notebook, a pen, and a cup of coffee, and get quiet.
Then I reflect on these questions:
