Rethinking reflection - the best way to start your 2026 planning.

Hello and welcome to the business of executive coaching. Now, as you know from the last episode, we are doing a bit of a series on planning and strategy development as we come into real planning season. Getting ready for 2026. Now, of course I'm not going through the whole of the strategic planning process that I teach inside the corporate to coach accelerator, but I am giving very practical, really high impact tips, steps and things you can do so that when you get to 2026, you are ready to fly. So today is all about how do we reflect on 2025 and how do we do it in a way that is more likely to drive the strategy, the strategic gains? I guess that, that we want because honestly, reflection, every year I do it, the reflection is the bit I don't love if I'm really honest because I want to be in dreaming mode. I want to be strategizing, I want to be future focused. I don't necessarily love the reality check, that is the work around reflection mostly because I tend to naturally focus on what are the bad bits, what has gone wrong. And of course I'm going to avoid it if that's what I'm focusing on. So if that's you just know you are in good company and we need to take our medicine and do it anyway. And I'm going to talk about why and I'm going to give you a few ways to make it easier. Just like everyone. My initial reaction is, oh yeah, all right. If I have to do reflection, just let me look at what was bad so that I can fix it. And of course that is only part of the puzzle. In fact, it's the smallest part of the puzzle. So reflection so important and why do we need it? So it's important on a number of levels. Firstly, we must honor and celebrate the progress that we have made. If we don't do this, we are giving ourselves a subconscious message that no amount of progress is worth celebrating. So you can imagine that subconsciously we may conclude that future efforts aren't really worth it if we're not going to take the time to appreciate and celebrate and give ourselves credit for that anyway. And this is all subconscious. But you might think, for example, let's say you are a high achiever at school and I sound like I'm talking very randomly, but this was a good take on my experience. But you're a high achiever and you may do really well, get really good results. But rather than giving yourself credit and saying, wow, that was amazing, what you're gonna do is say, oh, but I didn't get the top score, right? I didn't get the top score. And to some degree we are driven by that. Depending on your personality, and everyone's going to have a different flavor of it. You may be driven by that desire to win and that desire to be first, but equally you may then sort of almost check out, right? Which is the sense that no matter how much work I do, I'm not going to be the best. And if I can't be the best, do I really want to go for it? And so, I mean, gosh, I've had some therapy on that and if that's you, I highly recommend it. But we need to give our subconscious, then this different message. And the different message we need to be giving our subconscious is that we are celebrating progress. We are celebrating all the wins, no matter how big, right? So the win may be. I sent an outreach message today. Bloody excellent. I get to give myself a pat on the back. And I think it is in. I'm not sure if it's in Charles Duhigg Time or one of the books about habits. Could be atomic habits, could be tiny habits. I think it might be tiny habits, actually. There's a process that every time you do one of these inputs, one of these habits you're trying to ingrain, even if you just say yay or wave your hands in the air in a celebratory way, what we're doing is we're really priming that pathway that makes us think, if I do this task, there is a reward at the end. And let's tell our subconscious that we celebrate these things. We celebrate the inputs that we're proud of, we celebrate the outcomes, we celebrate the most tiny indicators of progress. We celebrate the inputs because that is what we want our brain to continue to help us to do, right? We want to do more of those things, we want to get more of those outcomes. And so we need to provide recognition for that because if we do that, we're much more likely to do it rather than if we have that critical, oh, yeah, but it wasn't the best. Oh, yeah, but you didn't do this. So really, we must acknowledge, honor and celebrate the progress we're making. It's also important that we go through this reflection process because we need to look at reality, not what we assume the facts were right. For example, we may get to the end of the year and have this felt sense that it was not a great year or we didn't do so well. We didn't get traction with a Certain goal. But then if we actually interrogate the data, so we look at our stats around business development, we look at the results we got, might find that in fact our felt sense is inaccurate. For example, you might say, oh, I didn't really grow my LinkedIn that much. And we're saying that because we feel like so many people with so many more followers on LinkedIn or getting more traction. But if we look at the data, we might say, actually, I doubled my followers and actually three of the five clients I did get came from outreach on LinkedIn. So we need to look at the data of these things that we assume to be true. And reflection helps us to do that. And also, again, look, we need to know and call in more of what works and what serves us in whatever season of life we're in. And the only way to do that is to actively reflect on the year that has been. But to make this a bit less, I say tedious, some people might love this, but a bit less tedious and make it even more practical always. Here are a few questions that you can ask yourself to fuel your reflection process. Question one is, what were the highlights of the year and what went well? Right? And this could be work, it could be life, it could be community, or all of the above. I want you to create a mega list of the wins, the experiences that were transformational. You can look through your camera roll and find your highlights, look at your calendar, look at your bank account, look at your notebooks. Really turn on your positive lens like a positivity detective, until the things you are writing down feel almost uncomfortably. Pollyanna Ish. If this doesn't feel a bit awkward, you, you probably haven't gone deep enough. So once you think you're finished, I challenge your, challenge you to go for another five minutes looking for even more highlights, things that went well, indicators of progress, right? And that'll help you to go deeper, right? From things that have happened or things that you have achieved and into things more like shifts in the way that you see yourself, shifts in the way you identify, shifts in how you understand the world or engage with your clients. So that's the first question. What were the highlights and what went well? The second question is, obviously if I'm looking at that, what then did I find challenging this year? So you do get to reflect on the tough bits or the things that you didn't feel you do so well, did so well. But I want you to give yourself a 5 minute timer for this one. So if you are like me, you can come up with infinity responses as to what you could have done better. So our job in this process is to balance out our negativity buck and remember that sort of somewhere between three and six to one is that ratio of how much better we are at identifying negative factors than positive factors. So I want you to spend only five minutes of time doing this. Constraints just get the highest, most important ones and then we spend more time on the positives with constraints on the negatives to get to that balanced point. The third thing I want you to think about is, well, after you've done highlights and what went well and challenges, the third thing is, so what? What have you actually learned about yourself, your business, your clients, your life, the world as a result of these, these things that happened, this progress that you've made, the challenges you've experienced? What this question does is it makes your reflection much more practical. It helps you to join the dots between the experiences that you've had and what you are going to build into your strategy for 2026 or not. Every highlight and challenge that you have listed, just ask yourself the question, what did you learn? And that will help you really start to pave the path to your strategic plan. The final reflection question, and it's a big one, but I'm going to give you a sub question to make it easier is to go through your data for 2025, right? Depending on what data you kept. And so that may be marketing and sales data, maybe your financial metrics. Hopefully it's your financial metrics. But if you only do one thing in that this data, make it answering the question, where did your clients come from in 2025? So that might mean this client came from a referral. This client came from outreach to my warm network. This client was an inbound query on LinkedIn. This client came from was my old employer. Now, if you are still working on getting your first clients or the numbers you have are very small, you might expand it a little bit to say where did your prospects come from? Where did the conversations that are business development oriented, where did they come from? So that we can start to identify what are the channels that are working for you, right? Is your channel is Your best channel LinkedIn is your best channel, going to networking events is your best channel referrals. So all of those things are really important data simply because we want to do more of what works and less of what doesn't. Okay, so there you have it. The first step to a great plan is deep reflection, whether we want to do it or not. And I really encourage you to put aside even just 30 minutes with a coffee and a notebook to sit down and work through those prompts. So, just to summarise, firstly, ask yourself what were the highlights of the year and what went well? Secondly, what were the challenges? Thirdly, what did you learn from the challenges and the highlights? And then finally getting into the numbers, where did your clients or real opportunities actually come from? Let me know how you go with that. You can drop me A message on LinkedIn is probably the easiest way. Or send me an email to ellieucentorg.com I'll be back next week with another piece of the planning puzzle to help you prepare for 2026.