Reflect, celebrate & reset: acknowledging the highs and lows of 2024

Hello and a very warm welcome to Cultural Communication Confidence with me, Victoria Rennoldson. And I’m really excited to be here today to talk to you about 2024. I know the year isn’t quite over as yet, and yet I think this is the perfect moment for you to really consider the year. Whether it’s been a good year or whether it’s been really tough for you, as I know it has been for so many people. I want to give you a way, an approach today to really consider what happened this year. What can you learn from it, what can you take from it, how can you celebrate it? And how can you set yourself up for success in 2025? Now I’m going to continue this theme in a future episode. So this will be a sort of two parter, but also today I’m going to be sharing an exclusive invitation right at the end. So make sure you listen to the full episode today. 

But coming back to 2024, I know that speaking to many of my clients and connections, that 2024 was a bit of a challenging year. And I think it’s really easy to get into that zone of could have, would have, should have, I could have done this better. I should have done that, but I didn’t get to do it. I would have done this if that had worked out. And I know that things haven’t always played out the way that you wanted to. I’ve worked with clients who really very much wanted to change jobs this year, and that wasn’t able to happen for many, many different reasons. I’ve worked with clients who weren’t very happy in their current role and weren’t able to make the changes they wanted to. I’ve worked with clients who wanted to get that promotion but didn’t manage to get there. And that can be so frustrating. And so what can happen is we can get into this cycle of blaming ourselves, of thinking, oh, well, if I just worked harder or even blaming others and things that are outside of our control now. 

I know that it is not quite the end of the year and in fact many of you are probably quite busy still. I know that there are lots of deadlines still to deliver. Perhaps even you’re in, an organization that has an end of year that comes in December, so you might be very much focused on that. And if you are in a culture or country that celebrates holidays in this season, you might be looking to the end of that point where you’re going to take some time off and really enjoy time with friends and family. But before you do all of that, I would really encourage you to take this moment to pause, to reflect about 2024 and to think about what it is that you have taken from this year. 

So the first part of this is mapping your 2024. So what I want you to do is to take a piece of paper, a blank piece of paper, and I want you to really imagine your 2024. So draw a line along the bottom and put the months from January through to December, and then up the side I want you to think about the lows through to the highs and I literally want you to plot, plot individual points in your year. Really think about this and take your time in this exercise. But what were those moments that happened in your – let’s take it through the lens of your work, so your current, job, your current workplace and really think about those highs and lows. And even if you feel like you’ve had a lot of lows this year, hopefully you can start to identify that there maybe were some moments which were either highs or at the very least, kind of at the average kind of level. And this exercise is quite important because we do tend to focus on the negative. We’re designed to remember some of the things that really have gone wrong. So I like to do this exercise so I can see it all, I can look at the full year and appreciate it all. 

Now once you’ve got that mapped, you can really start to appreciate it. And I like to look at it through the eyes of gratitude. Now gratitude is a practice that is really important to me personally and I highly encourage it with my clients, but also to you as well, my podcast listeners. So gratitude just basically means being grateful. Being grateful for the simple things that you see around you. I try to do this on a daily basis and be really focused in on that, even if I’ve had a terrible day, that there is something good about it. Even if it’s at the basic level of appreciating a warm home, enough food to eat, some of the really simple things that I often take for granted in my everyday. So be grateful when you look at your 2024, whatever your shape of highs and lows look like, be grateful for what you see. Even if you’re looking at a whole lot of lows and some really quite deep lows as well in 2024, recognize that although these are not ideal, we always move through that. There is always something we take out of it, even if it’s not obvious at the time. There might be things that we have learned from, that there might be resilience and grit that we have developed as a result of going through that low. So although it feels maybe painful to look at these in detail, I, want you to recognize that the lows also give us, develop us, they bring us forward, and they take us to a different place because we learn through those experiences. So that is really the kind of gratitude.

Now, the next part of this is actually the really fun part, and this is about gathering all the feedback, all the great things that you’ve done during the year, the wins that you’ve had, all into one place. I like to do this on a document, like a PowerPoint document, and I bring it all together, all the emails somebody sent to me saying thank you for something or what they appreciated and valued about my work, the reviews and testimonials I’ve had from LinkedIn or from clients I worked with, and I bring it all into one place. The reason for this is that, again, it’s easy to forget what we’re great at, what we’re really good at. And in our everyday business, we kind of forget that actually we are all unique. We all have our, special talents, our special value that we add. And we kind of don’t look at this regularly enough, in my view. And that’s not to be arrogant or to, be really, showing off, but more it’s about that. It’s to remind ourselves as we move forward that there are really good things that we do. So whatever works for you. But you might want to bring it in together in a document. You might want to print things out and bring them into a folder. Personally, I like to make it super visible. So I have it on my wall here, I have some printouts with all the kind of feedback and compliments. And that really is important so that when you’re having the tough day, you can see this, it’s visible to you. So that is kind of the next stage, looking at the feedback, understanding what you’re great at, reminding yourself of this and celebrate it and own it. 

Now, for some of you, you are in organizations that may be holding, festive parties at this time of year, either to do with holidays or to do with the end of the year. And that’s fantastic if you’re able to celebrate with a team. But if you are, a business owner, and some of you are, I know who listen to this, then do make sure that you take the time to celebrate properly, to really acknowledge what you’ve done and look at it and celebrate with others. Now, if that is somebody I’m talking to you, and you are a, solopreneur or you’re running a business, you might want to sort of think about doing that either with people that you’re connected to in your network, or you could even do it with a friend. I do it in a variety of ways personally, and I always go out every single December with one of my best friends and go out for lunch as a celebration for both of our businesses. So that is something I recommend to you as well. 

So once you’ve done that lovely, exciting bit of looking at your feedback, your wins, really acknowledging it, and drinking that in, I now want you to look about the future, and I want you to think about, okay, so that was 2024. What is it you want to take into 2025? And this is a bit more of a reflective process. So you might not do this in one go. You might even do this in a number of different sessions. But really think about what you have learned and what it means for the future. So you could think about it through the lens of: what is it you want to stop doing, what is it you want to start doing, and what is it you want to continue doing? That’s a very simple lens for you to think about. Another lens that I learned from somebody else, which I think is fantastic, is: what is it you want more of and less of in your work for 2025? That could be a really simple list you have on your phone that you add to as you’re thinking about things and out and about. And then there is a kind of point around really looking at those lows, looking them in the eye, and saying, okay, what did I really learn from this? Is there anything that I have, influence over? Is there anything that I can change that might get me to a different outcome in 2025? Even if it appears that there is nothing within your control, what you can always control is your response to the situation, your response to what happened, how you process it, and then how you move forward from it. And that is really powerful. So that is very, very important part of this reflection process. 

We’ve done a lot of reflection here, but, you know, once you have done these exercises, I want you to come back to gratitude. There is a reason 2024 played out the way it did. And, whether it has been an amazing, brilliant year for you or whether it’s a year that you really would rather end and forget, it doesn’t matter. There’s always learning, there’s always reflection and importantly, there’s a decision you get to make about how you want next year to be. So this is going to close today’s episode and I am going to continue this topic in a future episode. We’re going to release this probably towards the end of December, which will talk about how to set up yourself for the best start to 2025. And I’m going to share that very, very soon.

But in the meantime, I did promise that I would share with you an exclusive invitation, so I would love to extend that. Now, I’ve decided as part of a year end gift to my podcast listeners, to offer a very exclusive invitation to a complimentary. That means free one to one strategy call with me. Now, that strategy call will be a fantastic way to help you work through your reflections for 2024. But more importantly, it’s a really important session that I can help you set out your roadmap for what it is you want to achieve in your leadership, in your communication, in your team leadership in 2025. So that is something that I would love to offer you. Now, I’ve only got a limited number of slots, so I’m asking people to apply for this complimentary strategy call. If that is something that interests you, then all you have to do is go over to LinkedIn and message me on my personal profile, Victoria Rennoldson, and I’ll tell you what you need to do next to apply for this. In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me here today. It’s been great to be back. I really hope you’ve taken great value from this episode. I really encourage you to look 2024 directly into the eye, look at it really closely and see what you have learned from this year. And, I very much look forward to seeing you next time, on Cultural Communication Confidence.