I love to steal. Good ideas, that is. At the inflection point of a new year, I see all kinds of great exercises from fellow coaches on summarizing this past year and setting goals for the new year. My thanks to the following coaches for providing fodder for my thinking: Shirley Anderson, Janet Auty-Carlisle, Marcia Dorfman, Morgana Rae, Bruce Sandy, and Jeremy Stover.

After parsing through the practices of some of the best coaches in the field, I noticed a pattern of six general questions. Here they are:

1. What accomplishments do I want to celebrate? These could be breakthroughs, things I said or did, new behaviors or thoughts. By celebrating what was good about the year, I honor my efforts and those who helped me along the way.

2. What disappointments do I want to acknowledge and let go of? It’s easy to unknowingly bring forward my past failures from year to year, not as a way of learning, but as a leg iron that clamps down on my ability to create a new reality. By purposely recognizing where I have been disappointed and choosing to break the connection with that failure, the field opens up for something new to happen.

3. What are the lessons learned? This is a biggie for me. It’s a way to make sense of my struggles, frustrations, anguish. Without the lessons, those golden insights that guide me as I navigate life, much of suffering is hard to reconcile. The lessons change from year to year and point to where I am personally growing.

4. What am I grateful for? One of my colleagues captured this beautifully with the question, “Who am I most happy to have in my life?” This can also be, “What am I
most happy to have in my life?” Gratitude increases my awareness of the resources I have available to me, at any moment.

5. What do I most want for the coming year? This is the land of visioning, articulating my deepest desires. I like to pick a theme for the year. Others refer to this as naming the coming year, as in “The Year of …..” It’s where I set my intention for what I want to manifest, the target for the arrows I will launch throughout the year.

6. What commitment am I ready to make? To get what I want often requires removing obstacles and moving into new territory. What is in the way that I am ready to give up? It might be being right or doing it alone. As a friend says, what’s the skinny limb that I am willing to go out on? It might be trying out a new career. Or moving to another part of the country. When I commit, the whole world opens up. Not always in the way I expect, but I know that my commitment is opening doors.

For each of these questions, there are different ways to anchor the answers. I have used rituals for burning my disappointments (write it down and throw it in the fireplace), drawing my accomplishments (using crayons and colored pencils on poster board), and building (out of Lego blocks) my deepest desires. What matters is that I find a way to make my thoughts and feelings visceral and visible to the outer world. If the answers to these questions only live in my inner world, there is less chance that I will be able to make something happen in the outer world. I need to be able to witness my aspirations, to bring the inside out, in order to create the long-term results.

What I have forgotten to say until now is that all of this can be done with a sense of play and laughter. Sometimes I need to crank up the stereo while I’m reflecting and ritualizing, dancing out my disappointments. This need not be a somber event, but one where my full inner spirit gets to be expressed. The way I approach these exercises can cause procrastination and falling by the wayside or immediate jumping in.

Try it out for yourself. Answer the six questions. Make it fun, meaningful, and satisfying.