Strategies for Year-End Reflection and Revitalization for the New Year
26 Dec 2023 · 5 min
In this solo episode of Mastermind Mastery, host Tina Corner Stolz, founder of Elixir Council and author of Your Seat at the Table, shares practical, low‑effort activities that peer‑advisory council (PAC) moderators can use to close out the calendar year and set the stage for a vibrant new year. She walks listeners through a series of concrete facilitation ideas: (1) having members write a detailed “letter to yourself” that captures personal and business goals, which is sealed and revisited the following December; (2) creating inclusive awards—MVP, most‑progress, most‑fun, etc.—to reinforce desired behaviors and celebrate achievements; (3) selectively sharing parts of the group’s strategic plan (open slots, diversity goals, upcoming socials or retreats) to give members ownership of the group’s vision; (4) celebrating tenure and referral milestones with personalized recognitions; (5) aggregating and visualizing member‑tracked data (mindset rankings, health, business metrics) to provide a high‑level reflective snapshot. She encourages moderators to collect ideas from the community, promises a future episode on conducting a member audit, and ends with a call‑to‑action to access show notes, templates, and an online community. The tone is conversational, enthusiastic, and instructional, aimed at empowering moderators to add meaningful, reflective rituals to their groups.
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Hello and welcome to Mastermind Mastery, the podcast for professionals who want to create and run successful peer advisory councils, or as we call them, PACs for short, or they're also known as peer groups or business mastermind groups. I'm your host, Tina Corner Stolz, founder of Elixir Council, where I've been in the industry running groups since 2005 and now help those like you with education, certification, and support wanting to do the same. At one time, I ran 10 groups, nearly 100 members, and sold my groups for a good multiple and recently released my second book, Your Seat at the Table: How to Create and Run Your Own Peer Advisory Councils, published by Forbes, and grateful to you that it's an Amazon bestseller. I invite you to join each week where we share strategies and techniques to successfully launch and become a master of running your PACTs. You'll hear insights, perspectives, do's and don'ts, learn from my and my guests' mistakes, successes, and get the inside track to key takeaways. Each time we have a guest, We'll be having a bit of fun. So are you ready? Let's get going and dive into today's episode.
Welcome everyone to another episode of Mastermind Mastery. I am your host, Tina Corner Stolz, and today's topic that I am excited to talk to you about has a lot to do with closing the year out and opening up a new year. I'm going to share with you today different ideas about fun things you can do with the groups in order to kind of prep them for the year and do some reflection on the year that they just completed. So I'm going to give you lots of different thoughts, and I'm sure out there in this bear group land is that you all have ideas too. So I encourage you as you listen to this episode, also drop me a note with your thoughts that I can include and give you credit for in my future episodes. So let's get started. Number 1, and in no particular order, is a letter to yourself. Now, I suspect that many of you already do this exercise for yourself every year where you write a letter to yourself about what you prophesize and see and would like to see in the coming year. Do this for your members and your groups. Have them do it. I can tell you in doing it, it's such a fun and enlightening exercise for them. So what does it mean? It means that whether you do it in the month of December or you do it in January, but you have your members write a letter to themselves. Yes, literally on paper. Now granted, if you're doing a virtual group, then you have them email it to you and they don't share it with anyone. And what happens is they write in their letter things that they want to see happen for sure in the coming up year. Now you can give them a template or you can just let them freeform. I encourage you to give them some direction though, because otherwise sometimes some of the members just write a few sentences and that's not detailed enough. So you want to give them enough creative kind of, you know, freeform opening, but with some direction like, do you want to have them include personal and business? If they include personal, what are some things in the personal you would like them to expand on, whether it's family or hobbies or habits they want to break or whatever it is, or something new they want to learn? What is it in business that you would love for them to include? Their key initiatives or things about their own leadership style they want to change, whatever that might be. But the more specific and detailed they can get, the more visual and the more likelihood that will actually happen. Because I can tell you that when members of mine have actually done this letter, it is phenomenal about how much they actually make happen. And so what you do is when you get the letter, you put it in an envelope or an email, you kind of file it, seal it, and you hold on to it and hand it out in that next year's December. If you're meeting in person, have them read it, read it to themselves first, reflect on it, and then give everybody their thoughts and their insights. What surprised them? What didn't surprise them? Did they leave something major out and they didn't realize? What shifted and it was no longer important that they thought it was really important when they wrote the letter? So it's just a really, really good reflective exercise. And if you have a member that starts partway through the year, that's okay. Have them do the letter when you onboard them and just keep it even though it's for a partial year. I encourage you that you get them hard copy if you can and hold them because it's just fun to open them. So if you're virtual, you could still do the same. You just print it, put it in an envelope, and when it gets close, you mail it out and then you have them open it on your virtual meeting. So letter to yourself.
Okay.
Another option is awards. So awards are fun. Um, awards can be very inclusive and they can be both kind of formal and informal. But awards really recognize what do you want to recognize? That's one of the points behind awards. So what do you wanna reinforce is behavior. Okay? And you can have awards voted on secretly by the other members, like an MVP award. So most valuable member, the one who's consistently attending, offering wonderful insights to the group, supportive, helpful. It's really like your ideal member, right, that you wish you had 1,000 of. You can have also an award for the member that made the most progress for the year or had gave the most insights. Or maybe it could be the one who actually, you know, really struggled and overcame some major milestone. So kind of like the most impressive award. You can also have fun awards. So fun awards might be the one that made everybody laugh. It could be the one who has the funniest laugh, but you could go through each one of your members and give kind of a certificate or award out of something personal and what they bring to the group. And that's kind of a very special recognition that you can give each and every single one of your members by doing something like that. So awards is an example of something fun to do as well as your year closes out. Now, a couple of weeks ago, November 28th, I released an episode on doing a strat plan for your group. So I'm not going to go into that in detail. Because you can go back to that episode and listen to the importance of doing that. What I am going to reiterate here is the importance of sharing your strat plan, certain parts of it. You're not going to share all of it, but certain parts of it with your actual members of the group. So sharing things like what you see and working towards about if you're filling a slot that you have open, a seat at the table, um, what Are you looking at doing that? When are you looking at doing that? It could be, are you looking for some more diversity in the group? It could be that you have now planned the socials and a retreat, or, you know, content for different months of the year. So sharing that strat plan is a very good vision of pulling in— like if you were a company with your employees— instead you're pulling in your members to the group where they really feel like it's their group, their personal group, and you're executing on that. So another idea is along kind of these lines is celebrating. So I know many people do like socials, they do holidays, they do at the holidays, they do a dinner, a get-together, a cocktail hour, or a fun activity. And those are all wonderful to do. But along those lines, you can also celebrate like tenure. So you can celebrate members and how long they've been with you. You can make that evident, like on their tent cards. If you do tent cards and you're meeting in person, you might celebrate milestones that some of them have made, key successes, by giving them not only just the recognition, but maybe it's some personal touch relative to that that you celebrate with them through the year. But you're having recognition in regards to a year's worth of work in your group and you're rewarding for members. You might give kind of recognition or award about somebody who's referred you the most. So there's all kinds of fun things that you can do. I just want you to get thinking on that. And one of the last things I want to share is if you've done any tracking through the year, this is a fun thing to also share. So what do I mean by tracking? So if you do the exercise of, for example, when you start the meeting, what's your mindset? And if you ask anything about rank of anything, whether it's rank personal, business, or health, then you can take that by member and put it in a graph and show them. And it's just a big overview of showing how their rankings have fluctuated throughout the year, how their mindset has fluctuated. And it can be very reflective depending upon what was going on at the time. And in fact, I have someone I know that puts together one of those word diagrams, and it has in it all the words that the members articulated throughout the year about their mindset. And that's so fascinating. So that's just, again, something fun. And but it is very effective about a review of the year at a 30,000-foot level, and it helps the members kind of take a step back and go, wow, I really have accomplished these things, and I'm looking forward to the new year because it helps validate the time they have spent with you has been well spent. So again, I am sure many of you have all kinds of other great things that you do along these lines, and I would love to hear them so we can share it with the audience. More importantly, I want you to walk away with ideas on what you can do, because I encourage you to do something like this as you start the new year with your group. And in a future episode, I'm going to talk a little bit more about not only an audit and kind of how is it that you can do an audit with your members, and that's going to be a future episode coming up in about a month or so. So until then, it's great to spend time with you. I appreciate the time you spend with me and, and look forward to the next episode, and we'll talk to you next Tuesday.
Hey, moderators of groups, thank you so much for listening to today's podcast. To get access to today's show notes and exclusive content and resources, visit tinacornerstolz.com/podcast. Or lxcounsel.com, where you can also become part of an exclusive online community, attend our academy, or get free resources, templates, checklists, and more. And you can even contact me there as well. So if this episode resonated with you and you know someone who can also benefit from listening, please share with them by taking a screenshot and even posting on your social media. I also love reviews and appreciate great hearing from each of you, those actually doing this wonderful work. Please tune in next week for another episode of Mastermind Mastery. And I'll close by sharing something my mentor did after every learning moment. He shared a shiny pebble from his pocket with anyone he passed knowledge to and asked them to forward that pebble knowledge on. So now I encourage you to go pass on a pebble, the takeaways what you learned today to either your existing groups or fellow peers. Now, go make it a great one.