Season’s Readings for Reflection and Renewal

This is a great time of year to put our lives in perspective. As business slows down during the holidays, we can step back from the life canvass we’re painting with our daily brush strokes to review our personal masterpiece.

Year-end reviews are highly valuable to my personal growth and development. Decades ago, Heather and I began an annual practice of reviewing highlights of the past year. We use this as a progress check against long-term vision, purpose, and shared values. We then update and renew the vision of our preferred future.

One of today’s big challenges is weathering the tornado of multi-tasking the crazy-busy bustle that can spin us around in ever faster circles. If we’re not careful, we end up just getting through ever more hectic days and not really living and leading.

Now’s a good time to assess whether we’re spending way too much time sweating the small stuff and missing the big picture. Unless we turn down the volume, we can’t hear our inner voice.

With a blog posting each week, we’ve published over 50 in the past year. Following are the five most popular blogs. I hope you find them useful “season’s readings” for stepping back and putting your year — and life — in a broader perspective:

• Don’t Get Dragged Down by all the Negative News: Life’s Better Than Ever
  I am delighted to see this was the most popular post for the year. It’s our annual actual and factual negativity negation of the “fake news” of gloom and doom. Stay tuned next week for our annual update to start the New Year with a blast of good news.
• Facing Reality: Are you a Rational Optimist or Unrealistic Pessimist? 
  Are you wearing “crap glasses” a little too often and ruining your I-sight? Clean your glasses and read a few insights from Matt Ridley’s book, The Rational Optimist, for a reality check.
• HR Needs to Make Big Changes to Boost Effectiveness
  Research shows big changes are needed in performance management, coaching, teams, and learning and development to help organizations become much more agile.
• Stupid Busy: Is Your Leadership Team Overloading Your Organization?
  Just in time for a year-end perspective check. Have you been smart busy or stupid busy this year?
• Time to Assess How You’re Using Your Time?
  Smarten up your busyness and assess your strategic use of time. Learn how to leverage and master your leadership time, so time doesn’t master you. And don’t lose your cabbage!

Last year we also polled our readers for the most important topics in eight major areas I generated for a new development book, key chapters, or series of books I am going to write. Click here to see which topics were voted most popular. This pull method of outlining and writing a book is a big shift from my previous approach to writing a book and then pushing it to market. After spending lots of time with our wonderful grandkids, this will be the main project I fit in between keynotes, workshops, retreats, and executive coaching work. If you’re intrigued by this project and would like to be part of the book writing process, you can join my Book Advisory Panel. We’d love your advice as this process moves to the next steps. Click here for details.

17th century English poet, Edward Young, said, “they only babble who practice not reflection.” Yoda, the funny little Star Wars philosopher and teacher, would like how he phrased that sentence. So, as Yoda might say, babble, do not. Reflection teach you, it will, if you pause to listen and learn.