The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 223 - 2023 - Part 1

Transcript:

Jen: Happy New Year, Peter Shepherd.

Pete: Wow. Happy New Year, Jen Waldman. 2023...what the hell? How did we get to 2023 so quickly?

Jen: It is wild. And I thought that today, like we've been doing for the past however many years, we could share with each other, and with our listeners, how we reflected on the year past and how we are setting ourselves up for the year we are in now.

Pete: That sounds delightful. I feel like, as always, you are more prepared for this conversation than I am. However, maybe you can inspire and help me close the loop on some of my reflections. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Now, the only reason I'm more prepared than you for this, Peter, is literally twenty-four hours ago, I ran my end of year reflection workshop called Name It To Claim It. Which, this was the second year that I have run it, and it's so fun and so invigorating. So, spoiler alert, we'll be running it again in December 2023, if you want to stay in touch.

Pete: Yes. How did it go? Did that help inform some of your reflections? Or was it more just facilitating others' reflections?

Jen: No, I do it right alongside them, so I was discovering it all in the moment as well. And essentially, I break it up into three sections. Reflect, where we look back at the year that has passed, basically a reflection script, like, "What went well? What went less well?" And then, we do a projection, "Start by going five years in the future."

Pete: Woah.

Jen: When I wrote 2028 down, I almost threw up, because that's the year my daughter's going to college. So I was like, "No! No, 2028." But just asking like, "Where would I like to be at that moment? And then, what does that mean for how I need to prioritize these next twelve months?" So after we do the reflection and then the projection, then the last section is about activating that with language that is open enough to be inclusive to all possibilities, but specific enough to align you with your values.

Pete: Wow, that five...I've already written down to add the five-year plan/question/noodle to my 20% remaining to do that. It terrifies me, but I...it totally terrifies me, but I absolutely could see how valuable that would be. Even just, like I feel like this is true with most of my projecting even just to 2023, is like I put things down to put them out there but I'm not obsessed with every single one of them coming through. It's kind of just like the act of dreaming is helpful for then how I show up, at least that's how I think about it.

Jen: I completely agree. And I go out of my way in the workshop to make a point that I believe deeply in goal-setting, but I don't give a shit about goal-reaching. Like, I don't care about goal-reaching.

Pete: Oh, that's good.

Jen: But it's the goal-setting that helps you identify where you might prioritize your resources...

Pete: Yes.

Jen: ...and how you might strategize moving forward in a specific way.

Pete: Yeah, I totally agree. One of the things I found most valuable, just as a side bar I guess, with goal-setting is the process helps me get clear on, "Is this goal within my control, or is this goal outside my control?" And immediately, I can then go, "Oh wait, I have a goal in my head that I'd never written down. It's actually outside my control. That's not a goal, because I can't control the outcome. So, maybe I should not have that as a goal." So I agree, the process is more important than the achieving. Huh, yep. Yep, yep, yep.

Jen: You know how sometimes we talk about recency bias, and things that are in our recent past are really informing the way we're seeing things?

Pete: Yes.

Jen: I wonder if there is a correlating idea that I'm, in this moment, I'm naming it immediacy bias. I feel like there's got to be something like that out there, where the immediacy of the next couple months colors the way we're seeing our future. So what I like about the five-year projection, if I say, you know, "Five years from now, I want to have the resources to be able to say yes to whatever college my daughter decides she wants to go to," if I haven't been thinking about finances, for example, that makes me go, "Wait a minute. I haven't even thought about that for this coming year, but I want to be able to give that to her five years from now. So, what could I do this year to ensure that that's possible when it happens?"

Pete: I love that. I love that so much. There's this related philosophy in health and fitness that a guy by the name of Dr. Peter Attia has popularized...I'm pretty sure this is accurate. It's essentially, "What do you want to be able to do when you're ninety or one hundred," and then work backwards from there. And I'm pretty sure...I'll double check, and put in the Box O' Goodies. He's talked about this in many podcasts, I'm pretty sure he said something like, "I want to run a marathon when I'm ninety," something like that.

Jen: Wow.

Pete: So it's like, okay, so if that's what you want your joints to be able to do when you're ninety, what do you need to do now that you're forty-something in order to set your body up for success? And that's like, how he thinks about his strength training and fitness training. That has blown my mind in so many ways. So, I like this. I like this. You're in good company.

Jen: Oh, I love that example. That's really cool. Really, really cool.

Pete: Also, imagine running a marathon at ninety years old.

Jen: I can't even imagine running one now. I can't imagine having run one when I was younger. Like, I just can't imagine running one...I guess that's what it really boils down to.

Pete: Okay, I feel like I took us off script a little bit but, so the reflection, to summarize what you said you did, "What went well? What didn't go so well? And then...," and that was kind of it?

Jen: Well, there are more prompts than that, but it will take us far more than this one episode. But it essentially looks at the things that went well and that didn't go well, and, "What did you learn from those experiences? So, what were your aha moments? What are the questions that you have now? What are the things you've changed your mind about because of the experiences that you've had in the last year?"

Pete: I love it. I love it. If we stay on the topic of reflection...this is something I've actually done. So I had two five-hour flights for Christmas, and so I spent a bunch of time just in a Google Doc, and I've called it 2022 Reflection, and I literally just started writing down dot points of like memorable milestones. I think about it as things that energize me and gave me energy, and then the flip side, things that didn't give me energy or things that drained me. So the same kind of question as, "What went well? What didn't go so well," I just look at it through the lens of, "What gave me energy? What didn't give me energy/" And I've shared this, I think in every single year that we've done this, some of the ways I go about collecting that information are I go back through my Google Calendar, I go back through my Google Photos, because I tend to take photos of things that are memorable to me at the time, and I also spend some time just going back through my notepads and gratitude journals. So I guess I've done some version of the same thing, just captured in a slightly different way, which is cool. And I actually split mine into sort of categories, which, you know, like project/work related ones, versus like health and fitness related ones, versus experiences and holiday related ones. I kind of had a couple of different categories, but it's essentially the same thing. Right? "What went well? What didn't go so well? What gave me energy? What didn't give me energy?" And then getting into projecting, it's like, "How do I create more of the moments of energy and less of the moments of drain?" I guess that's the high-level philosophy.

Jen: I have to tell you that Mark and I (listeners, Mark is my husband) have decided to adopt your photo reflection, but we're doing it together. So we're going to sit down and go through our most meaningful photos of the year, we're going to flag them all, and then we're going to make them into a hard-copy book that will sit on our bookshelf this year, and then we'll do the same thing next year.

Pete: That's amazing and very wholesome. Wow, I love that. I feel like we've done that to some degree, Tracey and I, because we got married this year and we have a wedding book. Like, every photo that I look at that like was meaningful to me is basically a photo of our trip in Italy and when we got married.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: The other thing I added this year, which I mentioned in the podcast a few times, we have the win wall that Tracey invented, which is like with index cards where we capture wins throughout the month. And so it's been cool to reflect back on the wins that I've had, many of which I'd completely forgotten about. I was like, "Oh yeah, in February, that was a good win. I did deliver that for the client. That was good."

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: So, it was cool to just like capture those as well.

Jen: That is so brilliant to do the win wall with index cards, and then put them away somewhere, and then be able to go back to them later and have them all in the same place. I love that idea. Hmm, thank you for that...I'm going to implement that this year.

Pete: Also, I just find like it complements the photos, because I don't necessarily take photos of, "Ran a great workshop." You know?

Jen: Right.

Pete: But I capture it in a written index card. So I feel like the complement of those two, plus things I'm grateful for, for me that covers most of the good stuff. And then, you know, I can think...and I guess it's more thinking around, "What is some of the negative stuff, or the stuff that drained me a bit more?" So I feel like the reflection part is actually quite fun and relatively easy for me, because I have the mechanisms to do it. Where I always get stuck, and the reason I joked at the start about you being more ahead than me, is, I get a bit like, "How do I get an A+ for projecting and planning my 2023?" That idea of like getting the A is so embedded into my like psyche, that it's something I need to work on constantly. But I'm like, I get tripped up with, "How do I do the perfect 2023 plan?" And I feel like I'm 80% of the way there...and it's definitely not perfect, which I'm trying to embrace. But I'm curious for how you approach that, because you've done sentences and words in the past. Where are you at this year?

Jen: Yeah. Yeah. So how I think about the projection is, I do this, "Where do I imagine I want to be five years from now," and then I ask myself, "Based on what I've seen in that vision of the future, what might I need to prioritize this year in order to make that vision possible five years from now?" And then, I hypothesize about possible markers or goals that I might consider committing to...but I'm not committing to anything yet. But then, the really interesting piece is I look at the reflection and I look at the projection, and I ask myself, "What is this suggesting I value?" Because ultimately, what I'm trying to do is set my next year up to be in alignment with the things that I value. And my goals might shift and change and new opportunities might come in, but my values can really continue to guide me even as circumstances change. So my goal, ironically, my goal when not worrying about setting goals is to come out of the reflection and projection with a values-based action statement that can help me make values-based decisions in the new year. So, I'm not really thinking of this as a time for me to set specific goals. I'm really asking myself like, "What kind of value driven path do I want to be on this year?"

Pete: Oh, I love this so much. So it's like the goal is the potential outcome but not the guaranteed outcome, as a result of living in alignment with the values that you want.

Jen: Right. And what's really interesting is, when I looked at my reflection and when I looked at my projection, the things that I valued were...I'm actually looking at my notes right now. So, releasing things that I would call drains, like freeing myself, freedom, family, adventure, health, and high performance...those were the sort of values or priorities for the next year. And so, I used those to try to inspire a very succinct phrase that could encompass all sorts of different potential circumstances and opportunities that might come my way in the new year.

Pete: Nice. Well, naturally, I want to hear what the phrase is. The one thing, I did this last year, which I think speaks to what you were saying and I'm planning on doing it again, was last year I came up with like meaningful connection, healthy habits, experiences and travel, like I would say four or five categories of things that I value. And I actually wrote underneath it, "Possible outcomes if I focus on these."

Jen: Ha, I love that.

Pete: Just to like put them out there as like, "This could potentially lead to this, but I'm not attached to it. They're not goals. They're like possibilities as a result of showing up and focusing on healthy habits, or possibilities that might come if I show up and, you know, lean into experiences and travel. Maybe that means I have some incredible adventures in Europe," which ended up happening, "Maybe that means, if I focus on healthy habits, I'll get a personal best for like one of the swims that I do," which ended up happening. So like, these possibilities I like to put out there, but I don't like to stay attached to them. They just kind of like...I think it helps make the values more sticky.

Jen: This reminds me so much of the episode we did a couple months ago called Pre-Parade...

Pete: Right. Yes.

Jen: ...which I will drop in the Box O' Goodies. Like, it sounds like you were giving yourself a pre-parade

Pete: I was, yeah, pre-parade. Huh. That's cool. I haven't done that yet, that's the bit I need to get to. So, what was your sentence?

Jen: Before I get there, it's just going be like a big build up for maybe something that is so simple and not that sexy. I realized, looking back on the last several years, that all of my values-based action statements have basically been a plot, like they've been building on each other. But I didn't know it at the time because I was in it, but now that I'm beyond it...so the first year that you and I started working together, my action statement actually came from you, and it was, "Lift the walls."

Pete: Mmm-hmm.

Jen: You were the one who was like, "Jen, what would happen if you lifted the walls?" So, "Lift the walls," was the first action statement where I really committed to this process. Then the next year, it was, "Leak the content." So I wanted to get my work and the ideas that were happening within my very insular studio community beyond the four walls of the studio, I wanted to be more generous sharing it. So, "Lift the walls to leak the content," right?

Pete: Wow.

Jen: Then I got a little too widespread for my own comfort, and so the next year it was, "Bring it home." So like, pulling it back to center. And then, I was like, "Okay, now that I'm centered," the next year, which was 2022, was, "Catch the dots." In other words, "Catch what people are throwing to me, and then connect the different dot points."

Pete: Love it.

Jen: So, I spent the last year catching the dots.

Pete: Yeah, you did.

Jen: And what I landed on for 2023, now I'm seeing the whole story unfold...and again, this is not the sexiest language, but it's, "Invest in the good stuff."

Pete: Nice.

Jen: So the things that I've caught, some of them have actually turned out to be drains and I'm not going to invest in those things.

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: I'm not going to invest time, energy, and money, inspiration, relationship in things that are weighing me down. And instead, I'm going to invest in the good stuff, in possibility, in family, invest in my bank account, invest in my relationships that are meaningful, invest in my artistic expression. You know? So, "Invest in the good stuff." And then I went to my favorite website, which I know you're going to laugh at, visualthesaurus.com, which I will once again share in the Box O' Goodies because I love it so much. And when I typed "invest" in, I could stand behind every single synonym of that word...and there's so many different meanings. So I could stand behind all the synonyms and all the definitions, and I was like, "Okay...not the sexiest word. But I know what it means to me, to intentionally seek out what's good, practice good finding (which is one of the things I like to do), and then when I find the good thing, put something toward it."

Pete: Yeah, I'm obsessed with this. The thing I like most about that statement is, you define what "good stuff" means and looks like.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: And that, I think, is really important because it takes it away from a generic, like the most cliche, generic new years resolution, like, "Get fitter," or, you know, "Drink more water," and actually makes it tailored and targeted and personal to you. Which is, yeah, it might sound like a generic statement, "Invest in the good stuff," but you know, specifically, what good stuff means to you. And I really like that, yeah. I really like that.

Jen: I want to also just share that, as I was trying to land on this language, something that was really helpful for me, though also slightly painful, was to think about the worst moments of the last year, like the biggest challenges, the hardest pain points, and ask myself, "If I were to have a repeat of that, would, 'Invest in the good stuff' help me through it?" And it turned out the answer was, "Yes." So like, if I find myself in some sort of argument with a loved one, like a really intense, heated argument, "Invest in the good stuff," means I need to let go of my personal resentment or like, "I need to be right in this moment," and instead focus on the love, focus on the connection, focus on honesty, like, the good stuff.

Pete: I love it. Yeah, I really like that. I feel like it, yeah, again, it's like universally applicable but also highly specific and tailored. Our listeners could use that, I could use that statement, but it would mean something entirely different.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Hmm.

Jen: Have you started playing around with language for yourself for this coming year?

Pete: I have...and I'm starting to wonder if it's like a two-part episode, where maybe I come to you in the next week with more clarity and like solidarity about what my focus is. Because I feel like you've described so beautifully, A., how you got to your sentence, but also, B., what it actually is and how others might incorporate it. I feel like I want to do the same, rather than give you like a quick one-minute, "This is what I'm thinking." So maybe it's a Part 2, what do you think?

Jen: Love it. So, I think that's great. I'm into it. I'm investing in the good stuff there, Pete.

Pete: Yeah, you just...I feel like you've given me so much to think about. And so, rather than throwing at you a couple of words that I've been throwing around my noodle, like say "connection" (which is one of the words, just to give a teaser), I actually want to articulate to you how I got there and what it might look like moving forward, because you've done such a generous and wonderful job of that for me and for our listeners. I, yeah, I feel like it could be worth a Part 2, if you're up for it.

Jen: I'm so up for it. And it, I think, will shine a light on one of the things you and I both love most about working with each other, is how we arrive very often at similar outcomes using completely different points of view and completely different methods and processes. So, that'll be cool. Love it.

Pete: Mmm-hmm. Indeed. Okay, so I have some homework to do. And in the meantime, I'm wishing you and everyone a Happy New Year, and hoping that this episode and the following episode spark some curiosity, some noodles, some ideation around how you might make 2023 a healthy, productive, amazing year, whatever that means to you.

Jen: And that is The Long and The Short Of It.