Leadership Horizons

Reviewing Your Leadership Year

• Lois Burton • Episode 43

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The rush to close the year can drown out the one habit that multiplies growth: reflection. We press pause to turn a demanding 2025 into hard-won wisdom for 2026, sharing a practical framework you can complete in 30–45 minutes that transforms experience into better decisions, calmer leadership, and clearer priorities.

Lois recaps the forces that shaped the year—AI accelerating from promise to reality, ongoing geopolitical uncertainty, and the tension inside hybrid work—then gets candid about the courage it took to launch this show and live the 80% rule. 

We explore why burnout spiked, how resilience-based leadership protects performance, and the neuroscience behind reflection: how consolidating learning creates neural pathways that help you respond faster and wiser next time.

You’ll get six guided prompts to capture your three biggest wins, mine lessons from setbacks, map how you’ve changed, spot recurring patterns, honor the supports that kept you steady, and decide what to let go of before 2026 begins.

 We also reframe the AI question with a human-first lens: let technology handle the mechanical so you can lead with presence, empathy, and judgment. Along the way, we offer perspective that restores energy, gratitude for the ground you’ve covered, and clarity on what matters next.

Take the pause. Do the reflection. Then carry that wisdom forward. 

If this conversation helps, share it with a leader you value, subscribe for the year ahead, and leave a quick review so more people can find the show.

https://www.loisburtononline.com/


Leadership Horizons - Helping You Lead Beyond Boundaries

SPEAKER_00:

Hello and welcome to Leadership Horizons. I'm Lois Burton and this is our final episode before Christmas. And I have to say, sitting here recording this in mid-December, I'm acutely aware of how quickly 2025 has flown by. I know that many of you are in that end-of-year rush, finishing projects, closing deals, tying up loose ends before the holiday break. Your inbox is overflowing, your calendar's packed with year-end reviews and Christmas parties, and you're probably already thinking about 2026 priorities. Just as a heads up, I'm going to say something about an opportunity in the new year at the end of today's episode. But for today, I want to invite you to do something different. I want you to invite you to pause and to reflect, to really look at the year you've just led through and ask yourselves some crucial questions. Because here's what I know after 25 years of coaching leaders. The ones who grow the most aren't necessarily the ones who work the hardest or achieve the most. I've said this a number of times this year on this podcast. The leaders who grow the most are the ones who take the time to reflect on their experiences and extract the learning. 2025 has been quite the year, hasn't it? We've watched AI continue to transform how we work. It's not coming anymore. It's absolutely here. We've navigated ongoing geopolitical uncertainty, and many organizations are continuing to wrestle with hybrid work models, productivity, profit, and funding challenges, and the question of what leadership even looks like in this rapidly changing landscape. On a personal note, this has been a really significant year for me too. Leadership Horizons launched this year, and creating this podcast has been both a joy and a learning curve. I've had the privilege of speaking to hundreds of leaders through my coaching practice, and I've watched patterns emerge, patterns about what's working in leadership right now and what's not. One of the most consistent patterns I've observed is this. Leaders are moving so fast that they're not taking time to process what they're learning. They're solving problems, making decisions, managing crises, but not stopping to ask, what did that teach me? How has that changed me? And what do I want to do differently? And without that reflection, we're not really developing, we're just accumulating experiences. Again, I've spoken about this before, but there's neuroscience behind this. When we reflect on our experiences, we're not just thinking about them, we're actually consolidating the learning in our brain. We're moving knowledge from short-term to long-term memory. We're creating new neural pathways that help us recognize similar situations in the future and respond more effectively. Reflection is how experience becomes wisdom. Before I give you a framework for your own reflection, I wanted to share a bit of mine, because vulnerability and authenticity are at the heart of the kind of leadership I believe in. Looking back at this year, I'm struck by how much my own leadership has evolved. Launching this podcast pushed me right outside my comfort zone. I've always been confident in one-to-one coaching conversation and in in-person groups and online groups. But speaking into a microphone to thousands of people who, many of whom I don't even know, that required a different kind of courage. I've had to practice what I preach about the 80% rule, the 80% rule, sorry. Taking action before I feel completely ready. Beginning this and many of the episodes I've recorded where I've thought, is this good enough? Will this resonate? And then I've remembered what I tell my clients. Perfectionism is the enemy of progress. So I hope it has resonated from you. Some of the feedback I've received has been so much appreciated. And so thank you, thank you for all of that. I've also been reflecting on the themes that have emerged through my coaching work this year. Burnouts has been a massive issue, perhaps more than any other year in my 25-year career. Leaders are exhausted, and many are questioning whether the pace is sustainable. That's led me to focus more on resilience-based leadership and helping leaders understand how to put sustainable resilience strategies in place and understand their own nervous systems. And I've watched people grapple with the AI question in fascinating ways. Some leaders are embracing it as a tool for efficiency, others are wrestling with anxiety about relevance or ethics. The leaders who are thriving are the ones who are asking, how does this technology free me to be more human in my leadership? That's the question I'm carrying into 2026, and no doubt we'll have lots of discussions about that. So those are some of my reflections, and now I want to help you do yours. I want to give you a structured way to reflect on your leadership year. You can do this exercise whenever it works for you, maybe during a quiet moment if there are any, during the Christmas break, maybe on New Year's Day with a cup of coffee, maybe in a journal or on a long walk. Grab a notebook or open a document or turn your phone to record. And give yourself 30 to 45 minutes of uninterrupted time. This isn't about creating a performance review on yourself. This is about honest self-reflection. So here are the questions I'd like you to consider. Firstly, what were your three biggest leadership wins this year? And I don't just mean business results, though, although those count, of course. I mean moments where you showed up as the leader you want to be. Maybe it was a difficult conversation you handled well. Maybe it was supporting a team member through a challenge. Maybe it was making a brave decision. Capture them. Either write them down or record them. We're often so quick to move on that we don't acknowledge what we've done well. Secondly, what were your three biggest challenges or disappointments? Not to dwell on them, but to extract the learning. For each one, ask yourself, what made this difficult? How did I respond? What would I do differently now? And what did this teach me about my leadership? Thirdly, how have you changed as a leader this year? This is a big one. Are you more confident, more cautious, more empathetic, more strategic? What experiences shape those changes? Sometimes we don't realize how much we've grown until we pause to look back. And fourthly, what patterns keep showing up? Look across your year and notice themes. Are you consistently struggling with delegation? Is work-life balance an ongoing issue? Do you keep avoiding certain types of conversations? These patterns are trying to tell you something. They're showing you where your development edge is. Fifthly, who or what supported your leadership this year? Was it a coach, a mentor, a trusted colleague, a group? Was it a particular practice like exercise or journaling? Was it a book or a podcast that shifted your thinking? Acknowledge your support systems so you can maintain and strengthen them. And finally, what do you want to let go of as you move into 2026? Maybe it's a limiting belief about yourself. Maybe it's a habit that's not serving you. Maybe it's trying to control things you can't control. Maybe it's the guilt about not being perfect. Give yourself permission to release what's holding you back. I know that taking time for reflection can feel indulgent when there's so much to do. But here's what I've learned through thousands of hours of coaching. The leaders who pause to reflect are the ones who ultimately go further and faster. Because they're learning from their experiences and turning that learning into wisdom. I've spoken before about the power of the pause, and I can't stress enough how important it is to do this. It's not time wasted. This is strategic leadership development. This is how you compound your growth year on year, instead of having the same year of experience repeated over and over. We want to move beyond that groundhog day. And something else reflection gives you. It helps you to see how far you've actually come. When you're in the middle of the year, everything can feel hard and you can feel like you're not making progress. But when you look back, you can see the distance you've traveled, you can see the problems you've solved, the people you developed, the courage you demonstrated. That perspective is energizing. So as we head into the Christmas break, I want you to give yourself, gift yourself this time. Not just for the business reasons, although they're very valid, but because you've earned it. You've led through another complex, demanding year. You've shown up for your team, your organization, your stakeholders, and you deserve to honour that with reflection. Before I close, I do want to say a big thank you. Thank you for listening to Leadership Horizons this year. Thank you for the questions you sent, the feedback you've shared, and the trust you've placed in me as I've shared insights from my experience. Creating this podcast has reminded me why I love this work. Because leadership matters. It really, really matters. The quality of leadership in our organizations, our communities, our world, it shapes everything. And you're part of raising that quality bar. Just before we close today, I wanted to give you a heads up about some training I'm offering in February. It's called February Focus, and it's your chance to work with me on your key goals for 2026, and most importantly, create strategies learned from your wisdom to ensure that you actually achieve those goals. All the research shows that January resolutions rarely last beyond mid-January, whereas February is a great time to focus once you've got your breath back from the start of the new year, and that's why we've chosen February. I will be posting on LinkedIn and to my email list about this. So if you're interested, please contact me either on LinkedIn or email me on Lois at LoisBurtononline.com. I'm going to be up front with you. There is a cost for this training as it's over a four-week period. It's$47 or$37 if you join before the end of the year. And it would be great to have some of you join us. There'll be a link on the blog that I send out as well, but you can contact me on any of my channels. So please, please do if you're interested. So just to remind you, this is the lab pot the last podcast before Christmas. There will not be an episode on Christmas Eve. However, there will be an episode on the 31st of December, when I'll give you the heads up about what we'll be focusing on in 2026. So for now, take the pause, have the break, do the reflection, and enjoy your break, knowing that you've given yourself one of the most valuable gifts a leader can receive. The gift of learning from your own experience. The way we led yesterday is not going to lead us into tomorrow. But by reflecting on our yesterday, we prepare ourselves to lead tomorrow more wisely, more courageously, more authentically. From me and everyone at Leadership Horizons, I wish you a wonderful Christmas, a restorative break, and a year ahead filled with growth, impact, and moments of genuine leadership joy. I'll see you in 2026. Until then, keep reflecting, keep growing, and keep pushing your Leadership Horizons forward. Thank you.