Do you want to make 2024 the best year of your life? Would you like to achieve things that you have never done before? Maybe you would like to build on successes of the past year or maybe you want to overcome challenges in the prior year. Maybe you know something is just not right in your life and your career. For all of these things, the answer or solution is the same. You must be be willing to do things you have never done before, if you want to achieve results you have never achieved before.
Regardless of the success you have achieved or the failures you have experienced, we cannot rely on what we have done in the past to make things materially better in the future. This is particularly true if you really want to make the coming year the best you have ever had. So how do we do practically set up to do things we have never done before? We need to ask ourselves the tough questions that we have either purposely avoided or we have left undiscussed as we operated within our comfort zone. To truly ask and find the answer to these questions we need four critical tools: time, silence, a journal, and prayer.
MAKE TIME FOR DISCERNMENT
We cannot hope to tackle major questions in the hustle and bustle of the day to day grind. You will need to purposefully carve out time away from work and family. If you can, it is worth taking time off work, to break away from the normal work cycle, and to apply your full energy to this process. If you cannot take a full day, break it up into smaller blocks of time, but each block needs to be at least a couple hours to really clear your head and dive into this work. If you cannot take time off work, than make the sacrifice of time on in the evening, the weekend, or commit to rising earlier a couple days in the same week. If you are a night person and can do this at night that is fine, but be sure you can carve out time from your normal routine and location, to fully focus on this.
ENTER BRAVELY INTO SILENCE
However you block off the time, you have to commit to enter into silence, to separate from the almost constant din of noise in this world. You need to shut off audible, visual and digital noise to give your mind the best opportunity to reflect on the deeper questions. I understand this may be a major challenge in and of itself, as we have all become so accustomed to living in the din of noise. Yet it is essential to the process.
Choose a location that is different totally from your normal routine, one that prevents access to people and activities you see every day. Find a place that will allow you real quiet for an extended period of time. For some people this may cause some initial discomfort being out of your routine and in unfamiliar territory, or again, just the silence, but you will over come this once you start seriously focusing on your deeper questions and planning.
Once you schedule your discernment time, also set up time on your calendar not more than a week or two afterwards, so you can have time to translate your what you discern into specific plans. Set it up on the calendar as an appointment with yourself and do not change it!
During your time of discernment, if the silence causes you anxiety, fight it, fight through it, take some slow deep breaths. Breathe purposefully for several minutes to calm your body and mind. A simple method to create a calm is to breath in deep, hold for three seconds. Then exhale slowly for a three count. Then, before inhaling, hold for another 3 count. Then slowly inhale deeply for a 3 count. Repeat this process for a couple rounds and you should find your body and mind slowing down. There are many good resources, even apps that help you to breath and calm. However, if you use an app, be sure all notifications are turned off on your device, and put it down as soon as you achieve calmness. Then transition to your discernment.
JOURNAL
Before you take time for discernment, start a notebook or journal, either on paper or through a writing device like the Remarkable. I highly recommend it being something that requires you write and not type. This will help you to further separate your mind and body from work and keyboards. it also activates different parts of your brain that can help open thought and create memory. If you use an electronic note taking device use a dedicated device like the Remarkable. Avoid using a phone or tablet that has other apps, potential distractions or temptations. Prior to your time of discernment, write down big picture hopes for this time of discernment. Also write down any big questions you already know of and write them in the form of a question. However, resist the temptation to jump into answering it. Save that for your discernment time.
When you enter the time of discernment, be prepared that this time may lead you not only to ideas, but to more questions that need to be answered to achieve real change. This is just fine. This is also a great reason to use a journal, to capture these new questions. Do not worry about coming away from this session with everything neatly organized and all the details to every question answered and documented. Capture enough to provide you a good basis for continuity in follow up sessions. Remember you are thinking about big questions, some you may have never attempted to tackle, it will be a successful session if you have identified a couple big questions or directions you want to address in 2024.
Prior to your discernment time, if you are in a situation in your career where you are not really happy with what your are doing, you are uncertain if you are really using your gifts, or your do not think you are properly focused as a leader on your unique ability, it may be advisable to take an assessment prior to your discernment, such as Patrick Lencioni's Working Genius assessment. This is assessment takes very little time, but the results can be great to reflect on during your session. A link to the assessment has been included at the end of this article.
Now that we are geared up for our discernment session, we turn to the final tool to make this different than any other year or process.
PRAYER
I understand that it may not be normal to see prayer mentioned in the context of business planning, or even on LinkedIn for that matter, but if you are really looking for changes, there is none more important to your success than this. As we stated at the outset, if you want to achieve different results, you must be willing to do different things. If you are not accustomed to praying as a part of planning, do not worry. Keep it simple. Here are three steps to take.
Pray prior to your time of discernment and ask God to help you prepare for that day. Ask for your mind to be open to the areas you need to work on to make 2024 the best year ever.
As you begin your session, pray for God to give you light to truly see into yourself and clearly understand areas that are holding you back, either because you need to improve, or because you are not fully utilizing your unique gifts.
As you complete the session, take whatever has come to you and entrust it to prayer. Thank God for the lights you have received and pray for the wisdom and the strength help you bring the changes to fulfillment.
RINSE, LATHER AND REPEAT
While the steps above will help you to set a course to make 2024 the best year ever, they really need to be repeated throughout the year, to ensure that you stay on track for success, and that you adapt to whatever you learn or address any challenges you face along the way. Just as many businesses do, you should plan on doing this process once a quarter. In total, you are only committing to an immaterial amount of your total time for the year, but it will be the best time you spend all year.
The Working Genius Assessment can be found at The 6 Types of Working Genius: About.
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