Title: How to make time to make Vital decisions for next year
Welcome to the Soulful Entrepreneurs Club podcast, where we are dedicated to empowering spiritually led businesses to run purposeful and profitable enterprises aligned with their true selves. As we approach the end of the year, it’s crucial to take the time to reflect, assess, and plan for the upcoming year. I’m Kavita Melwani, a master certified success and business coach with two decades of entrepreneurial experience and nearly a decade as a coach. Join me in exploring the practical solutions for soulful entrepreneurs to step into their unique purpose and shine in the year ahead.
As you wind down for the year, it’s vital to take a step back from your business, rest, rejuvenate, and assess what you want to continue and what you want to let go of. This process isn’t just about business decisions; it’s about consciously choosing how you want to show up in your personal and professional life.
The year-end hustle can bring about stress, whether from spending time with family, attending social events, or even the pressure to plan for the next year. It’s crucial to consciously choose your commitments and prioritize the essential tasks in your business. Take a moment to pause, reflect, and make decisions consciously, rather than operating on autopilot.
First and foremost, take stock of all the tasks you routinely perform in your business. Assess their significance and only continue with those that align with your vision and goals. Let go of non-essential activities and create space for what truly matters. This process can help alleviate overwhelm and create a sense of clarity for the year ahead.
In addition to evaluating business tasks, it’s equally important to manage your personal life effectively. Allocate time for self-care, your physical well-being, and activities that bring you joy. These are integral to maintaining balance and preventing burnout as an entrepreneur.
Reflection is a powerful tool. Take the time to reflect on the past year—acknowledge the joys, express gratitude for the challenges, and recognize the lessons learned. This practice can help you approach the new year with a sense of purpose and intention.
Consider setting a word or phrase for the upcoming year to guide your energy and focus. Deliberately create your vision, set goals, and break them down into actionable steps. By doing this, you are consciously creating your future rather than letting it unfold by default.
The decisions you make for your business and personal life should stem from a place of alignment and trust, rather than fear. It’s okay to give yourself space and time to make these choices, ensuring that they resonate with your authentic self.
As we approach the upcoming year, my word for 2024 is alignment. I encourage you to define your primary energy for the new year and make decisions that honor your purpose and intuition. Embrace the challenges and joys, and trust yourself to navigate the path ahead.
I welcome you to share your word of the year and the changes you plan to embrace for the upcoming year. Together, let’s rise up and shine our light in the year ahead.
Here’s to creating a purposeful and prosperous year. Take good care and embrace the journey that lies ahead.
Key Topics of This Episode: How to make time to make Vital decisions for next year
Primary Topic: Importance of Taking Time to Make Vital Decisions for Next Year
- Planning for the next year during the end of the current year.
- Pulling back on marketing and using time to plan for next year.
- Taking time off to rest, rejuvenate, and assess business activities.
Primary Topic: Managing Stress During the End of Year - Dealing with stress during the holiday season.
- Evaluating stress related to family and social events.
- Conscious choices about attending events to manage stress.
Primary Topic: Assessing Business Priorities - Identifying essential tasks in the business.
- Writing down regular business activities for assessment.
- Letting go of nonessential activities to avoid overwhelm.
Primary Topic: Balancing Personal Life and Business - Incorporating personal life activities into the schedule.
- Setting aside time for self-care and well-being.
- Identifying and prioritizing essential personal activities.
Primary Topic: Reflecting on the Past Year - Reflecting on what brought joy and gratitude in the past year.
- Acknowledging challenges and deriving lessons from them.
- Identifying and letting go of things that are no longer serving a purpose.
Primary Topic: Setting Intentions and Goals for the New Year - Choosing a word or phrase of the year to guide intention.
- Setting specific goals and intentions for the upcoming year.
- Making conscious decisions and setting actionable steps to achieve goals.
Primary Topic: Creating a Positive Energetic Shift - Acknowledging gratitude and accepting challenges to influence positive energy.
- Choosing to consciously show up in a new way for the upcoming year.
- The importance of being conscious and actively making choices to serve oneself positively.
Primary Topic: Making Decisions for the New Year - Allowing oneself the necessary time and space to make decisions.
- Need for emotional attachment to some decisions and the process of releasing them.
- Trusting oneself and making decisions consciously and in alignment with purpose.
Primary Topic: Embracing Change and Trusting Intuition - Embracing change and enjoying the journey instead of waiting for it to be over.
- Setting a goal to follow intuition and trust oneself in decision-making.
- Sharing personal word of the year and encouraging others to do the same.
Overall, the text emphasizes the importance of taking time to reflect, make vital decisions, set intentions, and manage both business and personal life effectively during the transition to a new year. It also highlights the significance of conscious decision-making, finding alignment, and embracing change with trust and intuition.
Analogy of this episode: How to make time to make Vital decisions for next year
Making vital decisions for next year is like planning a road trip. Just like you need to map out your route, decide on your stops, and pack the essentials for a smooth journey, making time to assess your business and personal life is equally important. It’s like taking a pit stop to check your map, refuel, and ensure you’re on the right track. By reflecting on the challenges you faced and the joys you experienced, you’re essentially looking in the rearview mirror to understand where you’ve been and how it has shaped you. Then, choosing a word or phrase of the year is like setting the theme for your trip, determining the energy and focus that will drive your journey. Finally, breaking down your goals into achievable steps and scheduling them is like plotting the activities and must-see attractions on your trip itinerary. Just like with a road trip, by consciously planning and making decisions for the journey ahead, you can ensure a more fulfilling and purposeful ride.
Transcript for this Episode
Kavita Melwani [00:00:00]:
Hello. My name is Kavita Melwani, and I’m a master certified success and business coach with two decades of experience as an entrepreneur and almost a decade as a coach. I want to personally welcome you to the Soulful Entrepreneurs Club podcast, where my vision is to empower as many spiritually led businesses to run purposeful and profitable businesses aligned with true selves. I want you to confidently and opulently shine your light without the overwhelm, the stress or the burnout. Together, we will explore challenges that soulful entrepreneurs face and real, implementable solutions so you can step into your unique purpose and shine. It is possible to bridge the success you already have with the truest, soulful, mystical parts of yourself. Are you ready to rise up as the leader you were born to be? Then join me, my soulful friends. The time is now for you to rise up and shine your light.
Kavita Melwani [00:01:06]:
The world needs you. So we’re coming to the end of the year, and for a lot of people, this is their last full week of work, right? And so if you have your own business, depending on what you focus on, this also might be the last week that you are fully present in your business. But I do know that a lot of my clients and colleagues have pulled back on their marketing, as I talked about earlier in an earlier episode, using this time to kind of plan for next year to rest, rejuvenate, to assess the things that you want to continue doing, the things that you want to stop doing. That’s a really good thing to do right now. Some people wait till January, and then they start to get started with all the tasks that have to do with running a business. And then they actually never spend the time to step away from things and assess. And so taking some time off and taking time away from your business, even going outside where you normally work, can open up your perspective. And so on the flip side of this, on the other side of this, there are a lot of people experiencing stress during this time of year.
Kavita Melwani [00:02:26]:
Maybe there’s stress because you are spending time with family or because you’re not spending time with family. Maybe you have stress because there are more social events that you are attending. And especially if you’re introverted and empathic like me, sometimes those events can be draining. And yet, I do want to go. So whenever I have a choice, I consciously choose whether an event is something that I want to attend. And so as I’ve been able to attend events and learn how to manage, how I show up and what I do after, I’m able to attend more of these events and not have it totally throw me off, although I do get tired. So whatever the reason is that you’re feeling some overwhelm, it often feels like another thing that you have to do to step back and look at your business. So if that’s the case, then I would consciously choose the tasks that really need to be done right now.
Kavita Melwani [00:03:27]:
How many things that are you doing in your business that you just do because you’ve always done right? It’s kind of like you just repeat. You’re just repeating these tasks. And so spend time like writing down everything that you’re doing on a regular basis in your business. Even look at your calendar. I hope you’re using a calendar to track your time and what you’re focusing on and choose the things that are essential right now and let go of the things that are not. Instead of putting it on your list and moving it to each and every day and then beating yourself up because you didn’t actually get it done. So first, that’s the first thing that I would do. Then I would look at the social events that you have and make choices of what you’re going to be participating in and even add in, if you don’t already add in your personal life, things that you have to do to live and take care of your house, take care of your body, take care of your spirit, putting those things and making sure you’re setting aside time for those things as well.
Kavita Melwani [00:04:34]:
And so when you’re choosing what to let go of, letting go of nonessential activities, and then once you’ve done this, when you’ve looked at your time, let go of the things that you don’t really need to do, choosing what you’re going to focus on, making sure you’re putting in time for self, taking care of yourself basically as a human being, then pick some time that you can look back and reflect and reflecting on your business and reflecting on your personal life as well, because it’s all connected, right? We try to separate these things that are connected. Taking the time to look at the things that brought you the most joy and being grateful about those things. Look at the things that even though they were difficult, how you grew from those challenges. And maybe there are some challenges, you’re not sure how you grew yet, but you can still write those down. So writing down all the challenges that you faced and that some of them have overcome and what you learned from those challenges, even writing down then things that you are ready to let go of and feeling the pain, emotion, whatever that is there and then with that, you can choose what to bring in for the year ahead. Right. What is it that you want? A lot of people will pick a phrase or a word of the year and choose that to be the energy. And then you can set specific things that you would like.
Kavita Melwani [00:06:07]:
What would you like to achieve next year? What would you like to create in your life? If you’re not sure what you want to create, then you’re creating from your default, you’re creating from your subconscious mind. So I’m going to encourage you to do this. So you’re consciously creating. And so instead of just setting a New Year’s resolution by doing this process of looking back at the year, showing gratitude for the things that were good, showing gratitude for even the challenges, taking the lessons, you can move forward, a better person, a better version of yourself. Right. And so when you do that, then you can set goals from there. And then, of course, I’m always going to encourage you to not just set goals, but break them down and break them down into steps that you can achieve and start to schedule those steps. And when you do that, then you can have all the structure in place to achieve your goals.
Kavita Melwani [00:07:12]:
And it also by acknowledging all the things that you’re grateful for, by accepting those challenges that will impact how you show up energetically. And even the first part of this, where you are letting go of things that are not really vital for you to focus on, will help you show up energetically different. So these activities are going to happen this time of year is going to happen. How are you going to show up? Are you going to be fully present? Are you going to show up how you would like to show up consciously? Are you just going to repeat the same patterns from the years in the past, the patterns that don’t serve you? It’s your choice. The way that you’re going to do that is to be conscious. And so I do this myself, right. Anything that I talk about on this podcast or I recommend to my clients, I do myself. And I did do this in a group, in an aligned planning day.
Kavita Melwani [00:08:11]:
But before I created that event, I went through the process myself. And last week’s episode, I shared that I had invested in some things that I kind of regret, right? And I realized that I wasn’t following my intuition. And if I had listened to my true intuitive voice, I probably wouldn’t have made those steps. And I learned something valuable from everything that I did this year. Everything. And just writing it all down and looking at all the things, there’s a sense of accomplishment sense of, oh, I did these things that were out of my comfort zone. I took these steps, I learned these things. And next year, this is one I want to create.
Kavita Melwani [00:08:59]:
And I know that sometimes right now, I know that I’m in a point of making some decisions for next year of what I want to focus my energy on, what are some things that I want to let go of. And it can be difficult when you’re emotionally attached to some things, right? So it has taken a little bit of me giving myself space to make those decisions because of all the energy of everything that’s happening around, because of still running my business, because of also having family, because I will be traveling, because of all those things. I haven’t made all the decisions yet for next year, but I’m okay with that for now. I’m okay with giving myself the space, giving myself the time and making those decisions by January, right? Just giving myself some time. I’m set aside time in my calendar to step away and examine things and look at what’s important and create the plan for me. And that’s an alignment of where I am right now. And it may not be the same as next year. I know it won’t.
Kavita Melwani [00:10:12]:
I know it won’t. I’m going to change some things, and I love doing that when it’s in alignment, but I want to do that consciously, and I want to do that out of trust and out of fulfilling my purpose and not out of fear. So when I’m making those decisions, I have to feel that alignment. I have to make sure I’ve put myself in that place. I’ve let go of the past. So I’m going to encourage you to do that same thing. Look at what you’re ready to let go of. Send gratitude for the things that were great this year.
Kavita Melwani [00:10:47]:
Send gratitude for the challenges as well. I’ll tell you, this has been a very challenging year for me, and it’s been a very challenging year for a lot of people that I speak to. And I remember thinking that in 2020, right? I remember thinking in 2020 that, okay, that 2020 is over. And I remember that when it was over, we bid goodbye to 2020 and we bought, like, a pinata and put 2020 on it, and we all beat it up because we were ready for that year to be over. Little did I know that stuff would still come out and stiff stuff would still change and stuff would still happen. And that was, like, the catalyst for a lot of things. So instead of waiting for it to be over, I want to be here and enjoy the ride and for next year. My goal, like I said, is to follow my intuition when I make decisions, to trust myself instead of looking outward for the answers.
Kavita Melwani [00:11:53]:
And so my word of 2024 is alignment. So I’d love to hear what yours is, if you would love to share. If you don’t mind sharing with me, just send me a message and tell me what is your word of the year? What are you going to do next year differently? What’s that? Primary energy. So whatever it is, I hold high energy for that to occur for you. In the meantime, take good care. Bye.
