Sometimes the end of one year and the start of a new one is a good time to take stock of things. For 2020 I’m not feeling the need.

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Highlights

  • Why I’m not seeing the need to “plan the new year”
  • Prompted by the questions
    • What do you want to leave behind in 2019?
    • What do you want to take forward into 2020?
  • January 1st is an arbitrary date
  • Saying “yes” and “no” to make deliberate choices
  • Forgiveness
  • Discarding all of the judgement of
    • Myself
    • Others
    • Judgement about my judgement
  • Planning can be a trap
  • No “Hell Maybe”
  • Is the “reason” really the reason you don’t want to?
  • The power in making a choice
  • The perspective of “no wrong choice”
  • “How to” vs. “Want to”

Credits

All songs licensed under Creative Commons

Transcript

This transcript was created automatically and may contain small errors.

This episode may not apply to you at all, but it’s where I’m at this year, and it surprised me that I found myself here. I’m not planning 2020. There’s nothing to plan. There’s nothing to take stock of. There’s— Yeah, I don’t know.

This idea came to me. I was on a call with the team recently, and they were doing an exercise around what do you want to leave behind in 2019, and then what do you want to take forward with you into 2020? And as much as I searched and searched inside of myself to answer this question, I couldn’t come up with anything because I find that these days I’m doing that on a daily basis. So that’s this year. Next year could be completely different, and you’ll hear me preaching a message of planning your next year.

But about this time of year, I start to get really tired of all the emails about planning your next year and, you know, how’s— how are you going to make next year your best year ever? And all of those kinds of things. And also feeling like January 1st is really just an arbitrary date. Yes, it’s a new year, and I suppose during the holidays and around the new year we tend to slow down and maybe have more time to think. But the way that I’m building my life right now, I have that time now, and I’m creating that time now.

I don’t always have it, but it’s always within my power to create it. And what I’m finding is, as I remember to create it, it changes everything. So yeah, this process of, of saying yes and saying no and clearly choosing on a daily basis, it’s really, really powerful. And it’s an amazing feeling to realize that there’s nothing big I want to change. I just need to keep doing what I’m doing.

And I know that if I keep doing what I’m doing, The best version of me is going to continue to come forward. My business will continue to grow. And as I get incoming information that something needs to change, I’ll change it. Part of this has also been just an ongoing practice and turning up the volume on forgiveness.

Forgiving everything, myself, other people. Yeah, and just losing, losing the judgment wherever possible. Other people, myself. And this is a new one I learned recently, my judgment of my judgment. I don’t know if you ever end up in one of those thought loops where you’re getting down on yourself for doing something or being a certain way. And then you beat yourself up because you’re beating yourself up.

So forgiving yourself for all that stuff, can’t recommend it enough. The other thing that occurs to me about planning the next year is planning can be a trap. And I say this as a recovering project manager. Maybe it’s also the older I get, the more I realize the more detailed the plan, The less likelihood that it will come to fruition. Not always, but I can’t tell you the number of people and project plans and software releases I worked on that had been planned to the nth degree that just never quite worked out that way.

And I’ve seen that, I’ve seen this in my own work recently too, where I’m in the process of creating I am statements, and I was procrastinating on this work ’cause I, quote, needed to do a little bit more research to understand how to really do them. And I realized that was just a way of avoidance and procrastination. If you know what you need to do for 2020, as you look at like what’s right in front of you— actually, I’m gonna change that. If you know what to do next, In terms of your life that’s right in front of you, do it. Just start doing it now, whatever day of the month this is, or even what year this is.

And if you know what to do, start doing it. If it’s not happening, you might want to ask yourself how bad you really want it or how committed you are. And then just make a conscious choice. Yes, I’m in on this, or no, I’m not. I don’t know where this originally comes from, but Derek Sivers, as well as Rich Litvin, often talks about hell yes or hell no, and that there’s no hell maybe.

So that’s kind of the idea here. In fact, I had a conversation with someone recently where they were dragging their feet on Getting something done and they were attributing it to certain reasons. And as we talked more, I— something— I don’t know, I just had this sense that this primary reason that they were kind of putting forth as the roadblock and reason for not doing it was really not the reason. And so I just had the presence of mind to say, scale of 1 to 10, how badly do you want this thing? Oh, 10. They’re like, yeah, about a 5. I was like, wow.

But, but the sense that I got was that this person was beating themselves up that they should have, you know, been giving it more, uh, attention and, and, you know, a deeper willingness to, um, really go all in on it when they really didn’t want to. Sometimes I think we also torture ourselves with decisions, and I say this as a recovering indecisive decision maker.

There is so much power in choosing yes or no, and often it can be super powerful to hold the perspective that there’s no wrong choice. In other words, there will be no wrong or bad outcome either way I decide.

Now, there’s obvious exceptions to this. If you’re in the midst of an ethical or moral dilemma, this doesn’t— this isn’t what I’m thinking about here, but, you know, maybe it’s a decision of, do I take this trip or not?

Do I meet this person for coffee or do I apply for this new job? Yes or no?

And then really living into the fact that there’s no bad or wrong outcome based on what you choose.

Incidentally, this loops back to this whole idea of judgment I was talking about earlier. And as I remove this label of right or wrong, good or bad, from the outcome that I’m predicting or anticipating, it really is changing a lot of things. I made a fairly big decision recently and went through this process with my coach. And he said, you know, just decide, are you going to do this or are you not going to? You know, just choose.

Are you going to do it or are you not going to do it? And I said, you know what, I’m not going to do it. And I didn’t believe him at the time, but it really did come true that saying no to this thing that I didn’t want to do led to all kinds of other open doors that were amazing. And the thing that I said no to ended up being a yes to a bunch of other things. And even though I didn’t do this thing that I didn’t want to do, it ended up giving me the underlying thing that I was actually searching for.

I mean, that’s a little hard to track without understanding the details, but that’s about as much as I can share about that here. So if the answer to, do you know what you need to do, is no, again, I would challenge you to consider how true is that? And if you’re focused on the how, there’s probably an answer on Google. And I would suggest that it might not be that you’re hung up on the how, you’re more hung up on the want-to. Like, how bad do I want to do this?

So if you aren’t sure what you need to do, what’s the smallest next step you could take to find out? A silly example of this is I have some airline miles that are expiring. And they’ve been expiring for months. And I keep getting the email that says, come January 15th or something, you’re gonna lose all your miles unless you do something. Now, I don’t have any trips planned, so I have no idea how I can keep these miles alive.

I was like, well, I could buy a magazine or something that I haven’t done in forever. So what I did was I created a little to-do item, a little card in Trello that said, spend 15 minutes Researching how you could save your Alaska Air miles. And what do you know, there were a bazillion articles on what to do and things I didn’t even know existed. What I ended up doing, and I’m going to use this with another airline as well, is I ended up going through their shopping portal and buying a special light bulb that I needed at Home Depot. Online, I think I spent $6.

I now have 6 new miles in my account that’s keeping this huge amount of miles alive. Anyway, 15 minutes of Google research solved my problem instead of sitting in the land of, I don’t know what to do. Oh, this is gonna be too hard, blah, blah, blah. And in closing, If this was totally the wrong episode for you, that you don’t have any idea what to do next or where you’re going, let’s have a conversation. There’s no obligation.

There’s no sneaky sales pitch. Um, I do this all the time and I really, really love— I just love meeting new people and finding out what’s up with them. Or maybe you like totally Love this message and love what I’m sharing today, and you just want to talk more about that. That’s great too. So just say Minimo, and we’ll do it.

Thanks for listening to the John Poelstra Show. Notes, links, and all that other good stuff for this episode are at johnpoelstra.com/podcast. Send your questions, ideas, or a simple hello to REDACTED.

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