How to Mentally Prepare for 2022

Good morning, welcome to Mindset RX I'm your host Dr. Robyn McKay it's your place to be, if you are an emotionally intelligent leader who's ready to set the tone for a positive, productive and purposeful week, month, year, life, forever. Before we get started this morning, I have something I wanted to share with you. On December 14th, I'm gathering a group of high level women leaders from tech, healthcare, FinTech, and other high-performing areas, and we're having our quarterly Executive Women's Roundtable. It's on December 14th. I'm really excited about it, because this time it's an opportunity for everybody to come together shoulder to shoulder with a group of your peers, the people who you have come up through the ranks with who are also emotionally intelligent, also very accomplished, and to clear the decks from the last year, because it's time to start dreaming again, but before you can start dreaming, you have to clear the decks, there's an opportunity here to reflect and to savour your accomplishments this past year, and then after that's done, then we can turn our attention towards setting our goals and intentions for 2022 and beyond.

So if that's something that resonates with you, if you'd like to be part of that, we're gonna drop the link in the show notes, but keep in mind, it's December 14th, there's a 50% off promo code right now that we'll drop in the show notes as well, but I wanna invite you to that, I think that'd be a great opportunity for you to network with your peers, so you don't have to worry about giving everything and receiving nothing, but more importantly, it's an opportunity for you to look back on this last year and really give yourself a pat on the back for the things that you've accomplished in spite of great challenges and great obstacles in front of you, so if that's up your alley take a look at the link and I will look forward to seeing you at the virtual Executive Women's Roundtable.

With that said, let's go ahead and dive into today's content, which is all about how to achieve your best. How to get your mindset right so that you can do your best work in 2022. So let's dive into that. And before we do, I want to just invite you to breathe in love, grace, hope, truth, optimism, and breathe out everything that doesn't serve you, we do that every week, just to bring ourselves into the present moment, we wanna bring ourselves into the present moment because that's actually our promise, our present is our promise. I learned that recently from somebody, I forget who the... Who I heard that from, but I really loved it because I think that... I think that it's important to remember what we're doing here, it's not necessarily the things that you do, but instead it's who you be, it's who you be at any table, so less about doing now and more about being... That's the leadership style that's coming into focus for us now and in the future. Alright, so with that then, just setting aside everything that doesn't serve you right now, giving yourself just the space and time to come into the present moment and be here now, so even before you raise the first toast in the holiday season, if you're anything like me, you're already thinking about your 2022 goals, in fact, I started thinking about my 2022 goals, I think, at the beginning of this quarter.

And part of it is, I love a fresh start, I'm a New Year's baby, so not only do I get the new year, I also get my birthday as an opportunity to reset, recalibrate and go again. It's always just a very poignant time of year for me, and I do find so much value and magic actually, in setting my goals and intentions long before the ball drops on New Year's Eve to usher in the new year. So I take my own new year goal setting very seriously, and I take it through a couple of stages too, so I share this process with my executive clients, and I wanted to just bring that to us today here in the Mindset RX as well. This is about mindset. It's also about heart set, it's about attitude. It's about how you're showing up in the world. And so I wanted to just give you a little bit of behind the scenes today, this, by the way, we're gonna go through the entire process during the Executive Women's Roundtable, that's on December 14th. So if you like what you're hearing today, you're gonna love the 90 minutes that you'll spend focusing solely on your goals for 2022, so stage one that I take myself through, that I take my clients through, that I'll take you through...

If you're sitting at the table in December is the stage of reflection and savoring, this is the first part of developing a positive, productive and purposeful mindset going into the new year. So in stage one, I wanna just share with you some of the questions that I ask myself and that I'll invite you to ask yourself as well, and by the way, it's not just enough to hear this, you also have to actually do it. You have to cut out some time in your calendar, sit down with this and really do the work, it's not something that you can just give a cursory glance to, or kind of scroll through and think about briefly, these are deeper questions that require your attention, your focus your concentration in order to be able to fully answer and have that satisfying feeling of having answered them thoroughly. You guys remember that feeling, don't you? I know that I certainly do. So here, let's just start with this then.

I'd like to start with what was my focus in 2021. So I go all the way back to January 1st, 2021, and I look at what was I thinking about. If I chose a word, which I often do choose a word of the year, I'm going to go back and reflect on that word, so my word, for example, in 2021 was devotion, devotion to my business, devotion to my clients, devotion to my marriage, to my life. So I really wanted to be in my life just not skimming the surface of it. And after I remember that, then I'm gonna ask just a really simple question on a scale of one to 10, how well was I able to accomplish that focus, if it was less than seven, what were some of the distractions or challenges that interrupted my focus, and I was reflecting personally on that, and I remembered that back in June, we brought home our, at the time, 11-week old Goldendoodle puppy, and my focus had to shift from all of the things that I had been working on up to that point to managing puppy energy and understanding, crate training, and understanding the puppy's needs and making sure that he wasn't destroying our house and... Which he didn't, by the way. And making sure he was trained to go outside to go to the bathroom, and those kinds of things really took front and center at that time in the year.

On the other side of that, as I looked back, I thought, Oh my gosh, I lost an entire month of focus on my business, focus on work, focus on contributing to your lives, and while that's not exactly true, certainly my attention was pulled away from the things that I had created as priorities in the past, so nothing brings you closer in to the present moment than trying to raise a new puppy. That's my lesson there. But the point of this is that I can look at all of the last year, and I can get myself... I can scale out and give myself a number, and I want you to do that too, if that feels right for you, and I want you to think about the distractions and the challenges, but I want us to be careful here because as high achievers, one of the things that we are very good at doing is seeing all the things that we've done wrong during the year, while not focusing at all on the things that have gone well.

So I don't want us to get down into the weeds with what's gone wrong, or what do I wish I would have accomplished I didn't accomplish, but instead, I want us to turn our attention to in spite of that, in spite of the distractions, in spite of the challenges that might have interrupted your focus, how far have you come anyway? So when you answer this question, the things you can think about are, what are three to five to even 10 big wins that I've had over the past 11 months? 

I like to break it down into four big categories, health, wealth, love and leadership, health, wealth, love and leadership. And as I look at each of those, I can look at what were my physical, mental and emotional goals that I had, what were my relationship goals, what were my business goals, what were my financial goals, what were some big wins that I had in those categories over the past 11 months, and as I review my wins and I ask myself these questions and answer them, I'm gonna answer them in writing, so that my brain and my body are engaged in this process. That's a really important thing here again, it's not just about giving a cursory glance to these things, but it's about really allowing your body to feel and to experience the wins that you've had. Now, I've got 10 other questions that I go through and ask myself, some of them will land for you, some of them won't. That's cool, take what you want, leave the rest.

But when I'm doing this review and savouring, I'm really wondering about what I'm feeling, what am I feeling? Am I feeling relieved, joyful, excited, amazed, in awe? When I looked back, for example, at my year, I realized I had done a keynote address for a global division of Intel, I knew that. Of course, I did it back in March, but March feels like eons ago. And I did a keynote for Caterpillar, and I did a keynote for the Society of Women Engineers, I was on TV, so my message, in other words, was being amplified, and when I took a look back at that, all of the things that I've accomplished this year, I felt amazed by it. It was like, Woah, dude, even in spite of having brought home an 11-week-old Goldendoodle puppy with boundless energy, having to do a couple of ER visits with him, in spite of that, I had accomplished these other things as well, and that was amazing to me. So then I'll ask, what am I thinking about? How am I thinking about this? What am I noticing, what am I realizing about these accomplishments that I've had, and that just gives a little bit more time of reflection, reflecting what do I realize about the last 11 months.

Am I proud of myself? And if I'm not quite proud of myself, is that something that I need to maybe take a look at? Am I overly critical of myself most of the time, is nothing ever quite good enough, there's nothing that kills a buzz more than the criticism, is there? And this is not a time for criticism, this is a time for appreciation, it's a time for giving yourself the gift of a pat on the back, of a job well done. So now that we've reached this point in the review, the next step or the next thing we're gonna look at is what do I want more of? And what was missing, what was missing.

And I actually like those questions better than asking the question of what went wrong and what would I have done differently, again, that gets us into that sort of deterministic critical mindset, which again, is not particularly helpful when you're getting ready to set goals for a new year, is it? So what do I want more of? What am I missing? What do I need to forgive myself for? That's a big one. I think that we're real good at forgiving other people, but then there's that internal critic that holds ourselves to a higher standard, and when you're constantly missing the mark for yourself, it gets pretty discouraging and it gets real hard to continue to strive, you will... Because you can... And that's what you've always done. But I just want us to turn the page on that, remember I've been saying for a while now, grit, tenacity and hard work have had their place and we need something different.

Well part of that grit, tenacity and hard work has to do with how critical we are of ourselves, criticism is like the fuel for hard work, so let's give you something other than criticism to focus on or to run on actually. So what do I need to forgive myself for? What do I need to forgive others for? And then the last two questions, what do I appreciate about my career or my business? And I love that question, I really gave that a lot of thought this year, and here's where I landed on that, the thing that I most appreciate about my work is it allows me to live out my purpose. And I say thank God for that every single day. So what do you appreciate about your work, and if you're not there yet, that's okay, use my experience as an inspiration, as something that you can experience yourself, if you see it in another person that's available for you too. And then the last question, when it comes to the reflection and the savouring stage of this is, what do I choose to let go of, what's no longer working for me? In other words, what am I tolerating? What am I tolerating? And that is always a very good question.

We, again, the hard work ethic that's been driven into us since the time we were children, work hard, just work hard, that has created the conditions for us to tolerate a lot of things that aren't actually not necessary to tolerate any longer, you don't have to continue to tolerate these things. Toleration could be anything from, I don't know, wearing socks with holes in them, not that you would do that, but it just is an example from my own life. Well, I bought these socks a couple of years ago, I love them to work out, and now they have a hole in them. Well, I'll just make it work. It's a silly example. Tolerating a messy desk is another, tolerating the water bottles in my SUV, I have so many water bottles in my SUV, so what are you tolerating and what are you no longer willing to tolerate? That is the question that's gonna create the pivot for us as we move into this next phase of goal setting, which is now you can turn your attention to the future, we have to clear out the past and we have to savour and appreciate the things that we've done in order to create fertile ground for us to plant our 2022 goals and beyond.

So here's what I do next, after I go through all of those questions and I've really landed on my answers, I take a couple of days to reflect and savour my wins as well as to integrate my reflections and my realizations. And I want you to do that too. So that then when we turn to the next phase, which is to focus on what's to come, you have a beautiful fertile ground, so you've pulled the weeds, you've tilled the soil, maybe you even have your seeds in the bag from the ideas that you have about what you're gonna be doing going forward, we're not gonna plant those seeds today, we're gonna let the soil rest. Alright, so that is your Mindset RX for today. And again, remember it's time to start dreaming again. And I wanna invite you to join me on December 14th for the 90-minute Executive Roundtable for Women Leaders, where I'll walk high EQ, high IQ women leaders like you, through the process of letting go of 2021 and preparing for '22, the link will be in the show notes and along with the 50% off promo code. Until next time.