Happy Holidays!! Hello fans of Agency Performance Partners and curious onlookers! As you’re reading this message it means that Christmas has passed and we are all settling into what I call the Holiday Hangover period! Most of us will have the time off between Christmas and the New Year to relax after the presents, family dinners, and other shenanigans that are synonymous with the holidays are over.
However, it is this person’s belief that you should take this hangover period as a reflective moment to think about our agency and what we want to accomplish for 2016. We talk a great deal about goals in our blogging efforts and while I always believe you should have your goals set for the following year I am encouraging you to dig just a little deeper and think critically about what you achieved this year, what you believe you succeeded at, where you may have failed, and what you will do personally to make this year better.
I recently read an article that described the value of quiet time for a business owner and how they don’t get enough of it. We have lives, families, businesses, and hundreds of activities that can pull us in different directions and at the end of the day we are left exhausted and ready for sleep. The risk we run though is that without careful and quiet reflection, we are sometimes doomed to repeat our mistakes.
To avoid these pitfalls I always recommend scheduling time for quiet self reflection. Coincidentally, I find the best time for this exists exactly at this time of year. We are usually in hyper holiday drive up until Christmas and then we crash! It’s an exhausting time of year because we are closing out the year business wise, planning for the following year and taking time with our families. My advice is that once it’s all over, find your quiet place.
For myself it’s telling my wife that I’ll be in our makeshift loft office and I’m going to take the next few hours to review my plans for 2016. I’ll confirm my goals, maybe crunch a few numbers, and then list my accomplishments and failures for the past year. Then I reflect. I think about how I achieved those successes and use them as a means to remind myself of how I can recreate those successes for the year.
I also look at the failures and I don’t allow myself to get brought down by them. I think of them as my teachable moments for the year. I’ll then list out what I learned from them and how it will apply to my goals going forward. It’s a great exercise to take your goal setting just a slight step further. Don’t let the mistakes of the past haunt your future because it’s easy to get trapped in what we should or shouldn’t have done.
The New Year is all about doing things differently. That’s why they came up with resolutions. Your business shouldn’t be any different and if you think you may have trouble trying new things, give us a call at Agency Performance Partners and we can help!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all!
