Design Your Best 2025: A Personal Annual Review Process

Kristen: Welcome to Love and Leadership, the podcast that helps you lead with both your head and your heart, plus a bit of humor. I'm Kristen Brun Sharkey, a leadership coach and facilitator.

Mike: And I'm Mike Sharkey, a senior living and hospitality executive. We're a couple of leadership nerds who also happen to be a couple.

Kristen: Join us each week as we share our unfiltered opinions, break down influential books, and interview inspiring guests.

Mike: Whether you're a seasoned executive or a rising star, we're here to help you level up your leadership game and amplify your impact.

Kristen: \ Hello and welcome back to Love and Leadership. I'm Kristen

Mike: and I'm Mike.

Kristen: And we have a bit of a special episode today. This is airing on Christmas Day. So Merry Christmas if you celebrate that. It's also, it's also the first day of Hanukkah. And I think

Mike: is awesome. That's pretty late for Hanukkah.

Kristen: Pretty late for Hanukkah. Yeah. I think, um, I think Kwanzaa even falls. Yeah. Like the 26th. So they're all like really close together this year. So happy holidays.

Mike: happy holidays. Whenever

Kristen: you celebrate, or if you celebrate nothings, happy time off, whatever it is. And we, expect probably not a lot of people are going to be listening to this on Christmas Day, though, who knows?

But, I wanted to do an episode specifically for this week because it is one of my favorite weeks of the year as a time for reflection and kind of setting intentions for the new year. I just think it just provides such a natural point where things just slow down. The actual work part of work for most people really slows down and

Mike: after Thanksgiving

Kristen: yeah, after Thanksgiving,

Mike: It sounds like a 2025 problem

Kristen: And it really just provides a good opportunity to kind of set yourself up for the next, for the new year. So this is a little bit of a special episode. We'll keep it relatively short, but I have a process to

Mike: We'll see about that.

Kristen: I guess I should never say that. I'm setting us up to like record for forever.

Anytime I say it's going to be a short episode. So we'll see. No guarantees.so I guess the starting point for this is what is a personal annual review? I know the first time I said this, Mike was like, that sounds like a performance review.I call it that just because there are a lot of like major bloggers out there in this space that also call it that.

So it's the most, I think, recognized term for it. But I've done variations of this for probably 15 years or so, not every year, but the years I do it, I really appreciate it.

Mike: Can I take a moment and rant against self reviews that companies make you do?

Like, you know, we had a great guest yesterday. I'm sure she's airing after this.Yeah.

Kristen: Late January probably

Mike: She talked about one of the things that made a great leader was find someone who sees things in you that you don't see in yourself. Now why I very much believe in an annual review, a daily review, weekly, all the, this self reflection introspection, you should expect that people that are farther along in their, career journey, life journey, or just, have, a different perspective and can share things with you that you can't see for yourself.

I think that's the whole idea. And I just, I want to take a moment to say, I think the self review is pretty lazy. It's good to make young, especially young leaders do it. You know, the self reflection and introspection should be something that is taught in school and probably is not.

And I'm a big believer in that you, you should be doing that. But the, companies not taking the time, especially at like higher levels, like to sit down with their teams and say, Hey, this is what I saw this year. This is what you did. This is what I think you can improve on.

Where do you want to go? What do you want to do with your life, with your career here in the future? I think that's a real missed opportunity.

Kristen: Are you talking about like a self review in place of 

Mike: I I have well that's been my reviews For the last 10 years. Okay, they make you do a self review and then your manager will maybe comment a little bit on it and probably just forward it ahead without much comment at all.

Kristen: Okay. Yeah. The companies I've worked for there is, the self review happens first and then there's a manager, sometimes a peer feedback. I ideally of peer feedback collection process and then the manager writes a review. I don't, I think. I have a lot of feelings on performance reviews.I, because I think they're largely, if you're doing your job as a manager, there should be no surprises in them.

Mike: Yeah, that was an interesting. And that's part of my life, is we're giving daily feedback and correction and trying to move, there shouldn't be anything that you don't know in a performance review. We've been talking about it every day. Yeah. They're kind of last year, if you will, or I don't know if they're outdated, but

Kristen: But they usually are. Cause usually if especially bigger companies, I feel like the review cycles are, you're talking about the previous year when it's like April, cause that's like when the performance increases are and things like that for a lot of companies,

Mike: Yeah. I had a company like give out year end bonuses based on wanting to base percentages on a review that was done in the early spring for the previous year.

And if you have not changed in nine months, I just, I don't know. It's not a, it's not an efficacious process or a purpose driven one. it's like a formality and I understand why managers hate doing it, but I think you should invest a lot of time if you're going to, if you're going to give somebody a review, you should be very thoughtful and supportive.

Yeah.

Kristen: Yeah, I always took them, and you know, it's, when you have like eight or nine of them to write, it's very time intensive. But yeah, I always

Mike: it. It is, but it, it's the most important thing is developing your team, developing your people.

Kristen: I do think that there are companies that make the process overly complicated. I don't know. There's a lot of this depends on the company. I don't have problems with self reviews as a concept as long as they're being in the concept.

Because I think it is actually a very good practice to just keep track of your accomplishments.

And if you do that, then writing your self review is actually pretty easy. Unless it has an overly complicated formula and all of this stuff that it often does. But, in theory, I don't have problems with it, but the actual execution varies a lot by company.

Mike: Yeah, I agree. I love the idea of it. tell a story to start this off. Sorry.

Kristen: See, seven minutes, in, and we haven't even started in on the main content. I never should have said it.

Mike: And I'm going to bring up, I'm gonna bring up Jocko. And this is not from Extreme Ownership, how us Navy SEALs lead and win. It's from a podcast that I heard him talk about this. And he said in the Navy is very much, at least while he was there, this is very much like a normal corporate performance review, one to five, and it's pretty, remember exactly what he said, but it's really the kind of stuff that you would normally see written by an HR department that is not an ops department.

And, he had someone on his team come to him who he had given a four in a certain way, and, or in a certain category, and the guy came to him and he said, I think I'm a five. And Jocko sat there and he read, the description of what it was, like a five is someone who's a recognized expert in this field and is sought out for his assistance by not only his, current unit, by, by other units.

And as he kept reading this, the guy was like, okay, I'm going to, and Jack was like, would you really think you're a five? And he's like, no. But then he talked about, and I think they had like some kind of forced ranking where you could only give out so many fives, only so many fours, that sort of thing.

It was a standard like three page document, your HR and, but he was very inspired by the review process for the Marine Corps. And I kind of have adopted some of this. So in the Marines to get a one is already a very high standard Like to be a Marine they have, the highest standards of conduct of behavior of competency of how you behave as part of their amazing unit.

That's a one we give a You know in most corporate speak you get a three and that's average a two is below average one is like failing. But we have a lot of people that are probably between two and three and we're kind of okay with that. But the Marines they have just a way higher standard to be part of their group You're already supposed to be the best of the best and that's a one. And he their document is 12 pages long. And it's super intense and when you get to the top and I could be wrong remembering this, but in the entire Marine Corps, there is only one person that gets a five in the entire Marine Corps.

And that it, that person is the eminently qualified Marine. For me, if you're going to do it, that's how you should be doing it. You know, your standards should be incredibly high to be part of our company, to be part of our team. A one is, you knownot nobody's ever late, that shouldn't show up on your performance review.

You want to get a five, you have to be the best in class. And I'll try and find that where he talks about this, but it's important how you evaluate yourself, how you evaluate your team, your peers,setting the standards and holding yourself accountable as you go forward.

That's the only way to make progress. So. You'll probably cut some of this, I don't know, but you shouldn't. But, I don't know, it's very inspiring. The Marine Corps document, 12 pages long, only one guy out of the, I don't know how many people are in the Marines, a couple hundred thousand, right? And there's one dude that is like, and I don't know, that's special.

You know, that's a high standard.

Kristen: I feel like we should table the rest of this for like an episode on performance reviews. Which I'm sure will be a topic. At some point.

Fine.. 

Mike: Look at our cute little cat in her cute little house..

Kristen: Arya had surgery

Mike: Little surgery,

Kristen: A little surgery a few days ago. She's doing well. She's got like a, we replaced her cone of shame with this really cute little flower collar thing,

Mike: It's like a pillow, which she seems to not want to take off at this point. Yeah.

Kristen: it.

She hated the cone of shame of course, so.

Mike: Well, this is like, she can rest her head on this little pillow anywhere she goes. It's pretty cute.

Kristen: Anyway, again, we set ourselves up saying it was, well, I said it was gonna be a short episode and I should just never say that. I'm sure I will forget

Mike: I have a lot of strong feelings about

Kristen: Well, so the purpose of today is to not talk about your like official corporate performance reviews, but this is a review for yourself to reflect on your progress, both personal and professional from the past year, your learnings, challenges, and set your goals and intentions for the coming year.

And I love doing this the week between Christmas and New Year's. Andsometimes I've actually gone to a hotel to do it. But you can also just do this within a couple hours. There are so many versions of this out there. Some of them are very complex. You can get like very complex Notion templates out there with all these cascading databases and so forth.

But you can also keep it pretty simple. And I've developed a process that is I think a little more involved than like,just a quick two or three question one, but it's simple enough that you can do it within an hour or two reflection. And for me, that's generally a good point. And then I'll probably go deeper into the goal stuff myself for like business goals and such.

But I wanted to walk you guys through that for this episode. And I also created a workbook that goes with this. It's like a 20 page PDF that you can download for free. So if you want to download that and follow along, the link will be in the show notes, but you can also go to llpod.link/2024review. And it'll just go to your email.

Mike: 20 pages. Jocko would approve.

Kristen: Well, it's a workbook. So there's a lot

Mike: Oh, it's a workbook.

Kristen: Fill in things, but it's just good. It's something you can just print and go through this yourself.

Mike: Workbooks.

Kristen: I also printed out a copy for Mike.

Mike: I'm not a real workbook kinda guy. I think it's super valuable process though to like actually put it on paper. I would never do that in the past, but after I read the Gap and the Gain, which we really should do just because it's such a good book,and he made you go back and like kind of list. Where were you 10 years ago? Where'd you think you'd be and where are you now? So when you really list your 10 year wins, okay, alright, I'm doing okay. I can ease up on

Kristen: can ease up on it. Well, there's a tremendous amount of value around writing things down. And I hate handwriting stuff, personally, but there's so much value in doing it.

And there's a lot of like research that backs it up as well. So I, yeah, I mean you can do whatever works best for you for any of this stuff, but I definitely like writing it out, whether you do it in a journal or workbook or you can do it in Notion or your computer or whatever it is, just the process of writing it out, I think it's very helpful.

So there's three parts to this. The last part's very short, but the first part is starting off with reflecting on 2024. So the first part of that is celebrating your wins. So what were your biggest accomplishments of the year and taking time to write this out? There, there are other exercises out there if you need to go through a process to help remember, but like we talked about it as a hot tip for self reviews, It's for performance reviews.

If you are keeping track of your, like, your work accomplishments, it's much easier to do it. And you can do the same for non work accomplishments as well. This process, I designed it so you can, you can use it for life and work, or you can specifically focus on one area of your life or work if you want to.

So it's very flexible. But yeah, listing out all your accomplishments is a really good way to start. Like your, what were you most proud of in 2024? And I also like to, ask what was a risk that you took in 2024 that paid off? Because it's good to reflect on that, we'll talk about challenges later on in the section after this, but take some time to reflect on what did what risk did you take that paid off?

And then if you could relive one moment from 2024, what would it be? And writing that out is a nice process

Mike: I'm totally going to do

Kristen: Yay! I'm excited. I mean, we kind of talked out a version of this, but

Mike: But we talk about this stuff all the time.

Kristen: We do. But it's really nice to just write it out and go through the process. So the next section is talking about challenges.

And I keep this really simple. What didn't go well this year? What were the biggest challenges that you faced? And listing those out. And then also listing out, like, what were the most important lessons that you learned this year as well, which can be related to the challenges or maybe something else, but just taking time to summarize out, like, what were your main learnings and what might you want to do differently?

Mike: I think we should talk about all that too. These can be both personal and professional. And I'm a big fan of like grouping stuff. It's easy to set a goal at the end of the, okay, I'm going to go to the gym. That's not really going to work. You have to have a, at least for me, I think it's better to set like higher level goals that say, I want to focus on my health this year.

And here are some things that I could do because maybe you'll go to the gym for two months and then you'll, you won't want to do that anymore, but you'll want to take walks and go on. You have to set like more overarching directions. And because six months, it's like doing the, but like we went in business, we write a budget like in, in September for the next year.

And then the next year comes and so much has happened by then. So you have to be adaptable. You have to know the directions you want to go. The rubrics of containers of things that you want to work on. Okay. Personally, I want to do this professionally. I want to do this. And I think it's helpful to like,

separate it too, because you're, your personal success is not always like your business success or your professional success or some years maybe you're going to make more progress on your career and some years maybe you're going to make more progress on yourself. I don't know, I, you have to

Kristen: And I really like looking at them together, 

I mean, thinking about goals from like a life and business perspective, right? Because both of those, I might do a more involved process on my. business goals. But I, when I'm doing this process, I like to think about them holistically because they all impact each other, right?

I mean, my health has a huge impact on how I show up in my 

Mike: Sure. 

Kristen: So I, when I'm doing annual planning, I like to think about it like more as a parts of the whole, and we'll get into this a little bitin the next part as to like breaking out different parts of your life and how you can do that.

So the last section of the reflection part that I like to do is recognizing patterns. So this is thinking back on your year. I like to assign three distinct words that would summarize the year for you. So in these, I say distinct, like this doesn't need to be a three word phrase, be like three separate things.

So whether it was like meaningful or challenging or, whatever it is. For you, like healthy, whatever those words are, but kind of using those words to recap, what was this year like for you?

Mike: You're a good coach. This is very smart. 

Kristen: Oh, 

Mike: The Marine Corps could learn a thing from you.l Actually, of course, I found their form already and the Jocko podcast which I think is worth linking at some point.

It's, it's just, it's really inspiring, He's a jiu jitsu guy, too, and like, the core principle of jiu jitsu, is just always getting better. You're never done. There's always something you can improve on. And you got to be satisfied with where you are, too Especially, five years in ten years in. But you're always striving some type of improvement and usually that doesn't mean in comparison to others. Yeah, that's in jitz.

Eventually you'll see where you stack up in the potentiality of your ability to compete against others. And unless you're at the very top, most of us are in the middle or below that. And you're just, you're like, you're just trying to improve on yourself. And I think that's beautiful and powerful. Good stuff. I like this. I'm going to totally do this. I'm inspired to do it.

Kristen: it. I love it.

Mike: Is that a graph?

Kristen: We'll get to the wheel.

Mike: one. She's got a

Kristen: It's one of my favorite coaching tools. It's very core coaching tool. So the other part of patterns, of recognizing patterns for the year, I really like this, Sahil Bloom has his version of the personal annual review is seven questions and two that I really like to incorporate are reflecting on your energy for the past year and like what were your patterns?

So like what were the things that energized you the most in the past year, and what were your main energy drainers? And that's just good information to have when you go into the next part, which is actually figuring out, what do you want 2025 to look like for you.

Mike: That's so good. I saw that. I was scanning ahead.

That's so, so good. What gave you energy? Who said that? Who talked about that? It was an HR, one Was it Gianna? It was Gianna driver. It was Gianna. And she's like, what, what gave you energy at work. Oh, there's some stuff that I just absolutely love. That's not taxing on the psyche or it's like, I could go in and do that every day.

And then there's things that I just yeah.

Kristen: Yeah, and you know, there's going to be some degree of life is having to do things that drain you, but the more you can optimize your life and your work so that you're doing more of the things that create energy for you and less of the things that drain your energy, the better off you're going to be.

Mike: I love that. 

That's so smart. 

Kristen: So that gets into part two, which is the actual like designing 2025. So this is where I like to start breaking this out into priorities. But first, setting a vision. So I started seeing like even some celebrities doing this and I really like this, where like picking a word that you want to embodify in the coming year.

It's like what is like your theme word for the coming year? And I really like doing it. You're looking at me like,

Mike: I don't know, it's, I want to say it's cute, but it's genius, but also cute like

Kristen: Yeah, I think, I feel like one of the first, I mean, there's a lot of people who have done this for a while, but one of the people who think who's done it most, like publicly is Rebel Wilson.,

Mike: Rebel Wilson has talked about how she chooses a word for each year. So the year she lost a lot of weight was like her year of health.and I really like that and so this is one thing.

Cool. Are, are we gonna, are we gonna compare each, compare and contrast ours to each

Kristen: Well, we don't, we don't need to compare and contrast.

Mike: it sound like

Kristen: Like we're competing.

Mike: A little bit. I didn't mean We

Kristen: We can share.

Mike: That's very third grade. Compare and contrast the Scarlet Letter with Emily Bronte.

Oh my never

Kristen: So, yes, but no, I think it would be fun to go, I mean, we've talked about a lot about our goals already for the coming year, but I think it would be fun to go through these

Mike: process. Well, this is very, this is very like, formalized and organized,

Kristen: Yeah, it's just a process you can use to do it.To help walk you through it.

Mike: It helps you walk you through it, and 

even Candice yesterday, she, We asked her a lot of questions about what she thought made a good leader and things like that. And she, at some point, she's like, I never thought of it in this way before.

I never broke it apart,and because sometimes you just, you do these things and you have some things you focus on, but when you, make yourself write it out and slow down and the writing is a very powerful thing too you talked about that, but writing things out allows your probably engages a different part of the brain.

It definitely engages memory in a different way. And you're gonna, you're going to pull things out that you maybe knew unconsciously and you're going to get a better, broader perspective of them.

Kristen: Yeah. absolutely. It's very powerful, even as somebody who doesn't like handwriting things down. Cause I have ADHD and my brain goes a mile a minute, but it is, I find it very helpful. So if I'm forcing myself to do it, like

Mike: Oh, it's faster than a mile a minute. Like a mile a second. Mile a second.

Kristen: Always, always racing. Yeah.The other thing I like to do as part of vision setting is take like what would be an ideal average day in your life in 2025, especially think towards the end of the year, what would that day look like?

And like, write it out and just kind of envision like, what would you like to do starting from when you wake up to when you're going to bed? What would your ideal day, but still an average day look like. It's good for just help setting that vision. And then the next part of this, it's kind of my favorite, which is the wheel.

You might have seen this before. It's called like the wheel of life.It's a common coaching tool. You can use it in many different ways. But it's, it is a wheel. So the first thing you do is you start by identifying the eight priorities in your life or eight areas of your life that you want to focus on.

So there's a lot of different ways, I don't pre fill this because I think it depends on the person. You can do one that's like more focused on work. You can do one that's, one that has all your friends and family relationships together. You can separate them out. Butsome of the examples that I give for that are career and work, family, friends, health and wellness, finances, personal growth, romance, hobbies and recreation, spirituality, community, business, giving back, physical environment. Like, whatever it is. So you can pick out, like, what are the eight that you want to measure and really give some thought to.

And then, you fill those out and like the labels around this wheel and then you start by rating like where they are right now on a scale of one to ten where ten is you're very satisfied with that area of your life. One is not satisfied at all, right? And you can color this in different colors.

So it's it's fun. I like doing a different color pen so you can see the different areas. But basically you fill it in. And if you're looking at the picture, like the actual workbook, this will be much more obvious, but you fill in the circles up to the rating that you're scoring it.

And then you have this kind of visual representation of like, okay, what are these eight areas of your life that you want to be measuring, and then how are you doing on them right now? Knowing that you're never going to be like completely balanced, right? So part of, so the next step in this is, and there's a, there's some space in the workbook where you can put your rating for each and then also add notes, comments for each of them, any kind of initial ideas for goals and things you might want to focus on.

But the process after that is identifying, okay, which three to five? I would not do more than five are the areas that you want to focus on and what do you want to achieve within them. So that kind of gives you some ideas for goals you might want to be setting for these like bigger picture goals that we're going to get to next.

Mike: I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to use my bougie titanium pen.

Kristen: Of course you are.

Mike: It's light you're gonna write things like handwriting to me is important the taking the time to like letter

Kristen: I like just like pretty color pens. So I guess, similar but different.

Girls are girls. So the last part of this is the actual like goal setting. And there are so many different ways to go about goal setting. And you might already have your own preferred way to do this. I like to start with a few big goals for the year and then you can break them down.

So then you, once you have those main goals, you can actually split out like, okay, what does that look like for January? What are like, what do I want to accomplish? So if I have an overall goal around health, like maybe that means in January I want to get to the gym three times a week, like whatever it is.

So I like to set some bigger picture goals for the year and then you can go and break those down when you actually get into, your more, like, monthly, quarterly planning if you do that from there. So identifying, since you have, like, all the, what you identified within your Wheel of Life part of this, you then pick, what are your three big goals for the year?

And, I would keep these measurable, but, pretty high level, so that you can set these more specific goals for, a given month or quarter within them. And the other things that I have within this section for you to identify for each are, how will you measure success? Because if a goal isn't measurable, then it's not really a goal.

I know people like talk about SMART goals and are so sick of hearing us about SMART goals, but it is true. And if you are, if you have not been overwhelmed with hearing about SMART goals.

Mike: Well, I think you can measure how you measure is up to you.

Measurement could also be a feeling.

Kristen: Yeah, there's many ways to measure goals.

How do I feel about what I've done, Yeah, like you can rate, you'd be like, I will rate myself how I feel about this at the beginning and rate how I feel about it at the end. That's a measurement.

Mike: You don't even have to rate it with a numerical scale.

Kristen: I like, I like

Mike: For sure, KPI, KPI, Not, you don't necessarily need,

Kristen: But I mean like this is for you, right? So you can do what is most helpful for you. By the way, if you are not familiar with the SMART goal framework, SMART stands for

Mike: goal framework,

Kristen: Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. So, just know that. Mike is looking nauseous. 

Mike: I think you can go too far with some of the, 

Kristen: You absolutely can. right? And this is, again, this is a personal preference. Some people have like extremely detailed goal setting processes and

Mike: I'm just not that organized. Like I'm going to,

What 

Kristen: works for you?

Mike: Yeah, I'm going to write this down and I'll probably maybe look at it once in June, you know, everybody's, everybody's different.

Some people need daily reminders. Some people like just set out on the journey and just,adjust as they go. It's about knowing yourself

Kristen: Absolutely. This is very much about knowing yourself and adapting the process for what works for you. And the more you do it, the more you'll get preferences on like how you like to go about this in a given year. But yeah, so for each of these three goals, identifying how will you measure success, however that is for you.

What habits do you need to create and/or break in order to achieve these goals? So this is getting down to,if you have a goal around health, like then you might start breaking it down into areas like eating and exercise, meditation, et cetera. What's the first step that you want to take towards achieving this goal, which will kind of help give you a starting point for like, how do you want to start the year out working towards this big goal for the year.

So, yeah, I keep it relatively simple because, you know, if, unless you were called to do a very detailed goal setting process, this, it's way better to write down any goals than none. So if like, if, if you want to do that, great, but you don't have to do a

Mike: I think your process is really um really good. It's a really kind of comprehensive high level review and how you design your your next year. It's smart. I am looking at the Marine Corps evaluation form we, as we speak also.

Kristen: Yeah, we, we can link to that in the show 

Mike: notes.

It's pretty awesome actually, you know, all of this, whether you're in the Marines or not, you need a radical honesty with yourself.

Kristen: Absolutely.

Mike: You have to, and that doesn't mean to be overly critical. You have to really look at how far you've come before you can, and honestly, I think the one year assessment is good, but at the same time, like maybe go back to three years and see how far you've come in 10 years. If you're a little bit older, like,we are, you can go back 10 years and see how far you've come, in your career, in your personal life.

it's probably going to be way more progress than you give yourself credit for.

Yeah. So you have to be, you have to be kind to yourself during this process. Like, this is not an occasion to beat yourself up, or to, exercise extra cognitive bias. This is designed to help you build on your successes.

Kristen: Agreed. The last part of this that I really like closing any exercise like this with a gratitude portion because I think it just really helps lock in your intentions for the next year and ending things on a positive note and there's so much research around gratitude as a practice and how powerful it is. So the last part of this gives you some space to write out 10 things that you're grateful and how you want to carry

Mike: those. 10's a lot. 10's

Kristen: It's, it's not really though, like when you think about it.

Mike: I think it's how specific can you get? And you've talked to me about that before. She's like, I'm grateful for my family.

Okay. What about them? Yeah. You know,

Kristen: Well, I think there's different gratitude practices, right? Like this is a more reflective one. So kind of thinking about from the past year where it's like 10 of the things you've been most grateful for. You can also do like from a daily gratitude practice. I really like keeping it as like, what are three things you're grateful for and keeping it as specific as possible and trying not to repeat things.

So like not just being like every day, like I'm grateful for my husband, my home and my cat, right? Doing it much more specific. You're like, I'm grateful my husband took out the trash today and I'm grateful that my cat snuggled up with me in bed this morning. You know, whatever it is, like keeping it specific when you're doing this as a daily practice I think is so helpful.

Mike: The not repeating thing that you told me is hard. It's

Kristen: It's hard. I mean, you know, and you, you can, don't have to be like too hard on yourself, but it helps you just keep it specific, I think. But you can also do things like periodically doing like a rampage of gratitude where you actually are like writing out like 50 or even a hundred specific things you're grateful for.

And it's a really good exercise for your brain.And it just helps you. Helps when you're feeling bummed out. It's a really good thing to do, even though, like, I never want to do it when I'm bummed out, but it is really helpful. Whenever I do it, I'm like, I need to do this more.So yeah, so that's, that's the process.

If you, like I said, you can find this at llpod.link/2024review. It's also in the show notes. And the other thing too, if you want a little bit of help with the, cementing some of this, or you're feeling a little bit stuck. I am offering for podcast listeners for the month of January, a free 30 minute coaching session, to, which we can talk about.

You're setting yourself up for success for the rest of the year. So I'm doing this for January only, and there will be a link in the show notes to a calendar where if you want to do this, you can just schedule right on my calendar.

Mike: I, can I partake of that? I could use some

Kristen: Yes. Well, I mean, you get free coaching for life. You married me.

Mike: Well, I know, but,

Kristen: but yeah, absolutely.

Mike: Give them a little piece of I want a formal coaching

Kristen: We can do a formal coaching session.

Mike: Send me your Venmo. I'll tip afterwards.

Kristen: Totally makes sense when we're married. Yeah. So

Mike: Those who marry a chef, I think you get cooked for, but I know if you marry a massage therapist, you never get a massage. I don't think so. It's your job. You don't want to come home and do that.

Kristen: I guess that's fair. I mean, there are definitely times where like you want me to coach you and I'm just like, I can't turn my coaching brain on right now.

I'm like, I'm too it's 

Mike: true it's very.

Kristen: But yeah. So yeah, I think that's the episode. you want to add.

Mike: I think it's a great process be kind to yourself, be realistic. You know This is a pretty great template. I'm gonna use this and see how it comes out.

Kristen: Awesome. Well, I, I hope all of you have some great time for peace and reflection and time with family and loved ones during this period and start off the new year feeling refreshed and ready to take on whatever comes next. And I just want to say also, I'm just how appreciative we are for you guys for listening.

We're coming up, we will in the new year, we will hit 25 episodes, which is a nice milestone for a new podcast. And we're really grateful for all of you for listening to us,both listeners from the beginning and newer listeners. This wouldn't exist without you. So thank you guys.

Mike: Thank you so much.

Kristen: And we will be taking next week off for at least a full podcast, but we're going to be re airing an episode with a little bit of an intro and then we will be back on January 8th with a brand new episode with, that will be a really fantastic interview.

So we look forward to talking to you guys more then.

Mike: Thank you everyone. Happy new year.

Kristen: Happy new year. Happy holidays. The Love and Leadership Podcast is produced and co-hosted by me, Kristen Brun Sharkey and co-hosted by Mike Sharkey. Please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. We can't stress enough just how much these reviews help. You can follow us on LinkedIn under Kristen Brun Sharkey and Michael Sharkey, and on Instagram as loveleaderpod.

You can also find more information on our website, loveandleadershippod.com. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you again next week.