✍️The Reflection Ritual: What I Do Every Year to Prepare for Growth💭

New year, new you? Nah, same amazing you but with bigger dreams and better routines. 💫 In this episode, we’re wrapping up 2024 and prepping to crush 2025 with clarity and purpose.

Inside This Episode

🪄 A behind-the-scenes look at how I crushed 2024 goals with focus
🪄 Tools to reflect on the highs, lows, and lessons of your year (yes, we’re all about that self-growth energy).
🪄 How to break your life into “buckets” – think: biz, relationships, health, and glow-up goals.
🪄 The routines and actions you need to step into your main character energy for 2025.
🪄 Fun prompts to reflect solo, with your partner, as a family, or even with your besties.

Don’t Miss This

✨ Mind School Mini – January 2025. Join us IRL to level up your 2025 goals!


End the year with clarity and step into 2025 ready to conquer. You’ve got this! 🚀 

As always, please don't forget to hit Subscribe! xxx

Transcript

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Music. Welcome to the mind school, the classroom for your mind and soul, where we design our lives from the inside out. Here you will find a human first approach to life, business and relationships, to create freedom, growth and constant evolution through mindset, emotional intelligence, leadership and connection to self. I'm your host, Breanna may educator, CEO mindset and business mentor, and my mission is to teach the things we were never taught at school so that no dream is left on the pillow and no purpose left unfulfilled. Here, you can expect a lot of laughs and thought provoking conversations as we squeeze every drop of juice from this beautiful, precious, crazy thing called life. Welcome back to the mind school podcast. Welcome back to this new studio. If you're watching on YouTube. This is a little bit fancy, I must say, I tried. I was like, right? I'm going to step into my tech era. I'm going to step into my content creator era and do it all from home. And my poor team is like, oh gosh, Breanna, you just really tech is not I get very easily overwhelmed by technology. So here I am. I'm at this beautiful studio in West Perth, and I'm very excited about next year bringing in some really incredible guests, because something I've been reflecting on, and I mentioned on a few weeks ago, the podcast a few weeks ago, I love podcasting, but I don't love doing it alone, and so one of my intentions for next year with the podcast is actually to have a lot more in person connection and have really incredible guests coming in, and I actually have one of my best friends coming in in a couple hours, and we're going to talk about business and scaling and all sorts. But it's just something is different when you do it in person. And I just love it. So I'm going to do a few solo episodes. Thank you to the people who did reach out to me. I asked, actually, on a few, a few episodes ago, I said, help me out. What do you like? And so many of you replied and said, I'm sorry, Breanna, we just love the solo rants. So here we are doing a solo one. Today is actually all about my new year's reflection ritual, and I've been doing this for years and years and years, and it always creates magic. And I don't mean magic in manifesting or creating the next level, even in giving me clarity and helping me to find lessons and value in the challenges of the year, and even in the wins of the year, so that I can keep repeating them. I truly believe that reflection is the number one that is the most important thing before you set any goals. And I've got my ritual down to a fine art. So today's episode is all about that ritual. What I do every single year to look backwards before I look forward. So before we dive in, I'm going to start with my win and my challenge. My win today is that my brother is home. He has got a new job. We're very, very close, but he got a new job. How dare he? And he's been away for three weeks, so he's back today, so I'm meeting him and Paul down at the foreshore for a couple drinks and some dinner tonight, and I'm just so excited about that. It's, It's the simple things, really. And my challenge, I sort of sat with this and to be completely honest, I couldn't think of a challenge today. I couldn't think of a challenge that's been overarching this week, maybe this time of year. I would say my motivation to work is a lot lower because I don't want to be inside. I don't want to be on a laptop for too long. I want to be out. I want to be at the beach. I want to be in the pool. I want to be like enjoying summer. But at the same time, I sort of knew that when I built my business. So summer is a time that I kind of do have a lot of freedom. However, with that, I know that it's a great time to get ahead on projects. And we have a lot of projects in my business at the moment, which is very, very exciting. So maybe that's a challenge. Just some are feeling so amazing, but also wanting to get my head down, bum up, but it's all exciting stuff. So let's dive into my reflection ritual. So I'm going to break this down into two parts, and I think the most important thing is that this whole episode is about reflection. It's actually about looking backwards for so many different reasons, so often, especially in the personal development space and in the business space. And just for people who are very Taipei, love to set goals. Love to be on to the next thing. What can happen is we create a pattern where we're always ahead and we forget to be in the present. We forget to even mine the gold of what just was. And I read somewhere recently, I can't remember where it was. I read something about how there is so much joy and we get so much. Much positive impacts from the pure act of reminiscing and looking forward to things. So it's both, it's like we get so much joy excitement and positive reinforcement from looking forward with excitement, but also when we reminisce with joy and gratitude and peace, and like all of those things, when we look backwards, we also set ourselves up to know exactly where it is we want to go. So let's start with the reflection. Like I said, start with reflection, then action and planning. Now the other reason that we do this is because, as a goal setter, as somebody who is on to the next thing, what can happen is you get to the next thing, you haven't even really consolidated the learnings. You haven't looked back and made some changes. You haven't stopped to say, okay, is this actually working? How am I feeling? How is my soul? How is how is my lifestyle? What have I learned? Am I actually ready for a new evolution? Do I need to consolidate. And I think that this, this moment just to really reflect, be honest with ourselves, and think about what season we're actually going into before we just go on to the next thing. Can make sure that we do it in a sustainable way and in a way that feels good, because we're actually reaping that from the seeds that we sowed. We're looking back. We're looking back first. So let's do it now. What I've done today, and how I want this, how I want this specific episode to be, is kind of almost like a live workshop. So when you're listening, or if you're watching, I actually want you to actively consider all the questions and prompts that I give you, and take the time during this episode, if you can, or after, to really actively do this reflection process, to do this ritual, and I'm going to give you a few different ways to do it. Firstly, this is for you to do alone. This is a personal reflection. However, I've created a resource for you, and you can get the link in the show notes or in the description below, and what that is actually going to be, which is really, really, really cool, is a way that you can do this reflection ritual as a family or with your husband or with your friends. And what I've found by just asking these deep, insightful questions that prompt great conversations is that it is such a connective situation. It is such it creates such a it creates such a connected environment for you, your loved ones, your family. I'm actually going to be doing this this weekend when I go camping with my mates. I've done this most last New Year's. I actually did it with girlfriends hanging out in the pool. We asked each other these questions, and it just felt so exciting. It's also something I'm going to be doing with Paul for our marriage and for our relationship, and that is these reflection questions that you can do together. So like I said, there is a link in the show notes which has the prompts for you to use in all of these different capacities, and on this episode for you to do it alone. So do it with me. I'm going to be sort of reflecting. I did this this morning, actually, in a coffee shop before I came here, and honestly, it changed my whole mood. It got me really excited. It got me really reflective. It got me feeling quite clear. And it's just a really nice way to carve that time out for yourself and make sure that you're really reflecting before you move forward. So first of all, what I'll say before you get into this, whether you're doing it on a walk or on your drive, whether you're just joining me live or you're going to sit down and carve out some actual time, my suggestion would be, make this a vibe, like take yourself away from your usual environment, go to the beach or set set up something in your house. Go and do it somewhere else, make it a vibe. But in saying that, also, I sat down to do it today, and I was actually in a little bit of like a funky mood. Don't know why. Sat down to do it today in a bit of a funk, and when I started my reflection process, I literally left feeling completely different, just so grateful and so excited for what is to come. And so really, you can do it in any state, but do carve out the time. So what you're going to need is paper, pen and your phone. You're actually going to need your phone for this, and this is only for the first part, but then you're going to put it away. So the first thing I do when I'm reflecting on the gear is I actually open my camera roll, and for better or worse, sometimes I forget, and you're probably you might resonate. We sort of the year just feels like, Well, this year went so fast, and we kind of can forget what we've done. So anyway, I opened my camera roll, camera roll, and I'm like, right, January 1, let's go straight to there. And then I just literally take some time scrolling through the year that was 2024 and that's what I did this morning. And what I'm looking for when I'm sort of scrolling and reflecting is just what sensations I feel, what emotions come up, what memories really activate something in me, whether it's sadness or frustration or happiness or joy or gratitude. Attitude, and I'm just observing the moments, the memories and the environments that really activated something for me throughout the year. And I'm just doing that slowly and really looking back over the year and doing almost like a year in review through my camera roll. And for me, what that did this morning was like, I said, I started in a bit of a funk, and then I just looked through the year, and I was like, Oh my gosh, there have been so many highs, so many moments that absolutely made my soul sing. And what we do in a moment when we put the phone away is we start to look for themes and we look at, what can that teach me? So when I looked through this year and again, like I said, I'm just going to do this out loud with you my own process, so you can see the way my brain sort of works through this. What I noticed this year, and one of my words, which, again, we're going to get to, one of my words for 2024 was wholesome. And as I looked through my camera roll, I was like so proud of myself. There is such a balance of business, but camping and being with friends and going to Bali and being with Simba, like getting a dog, going to the beach, spending mornings at the beach with a dog, and mornings at the beach with Paul and family time and bike rides as a family, and my dad's 60th and my brother's 30th, and all of these things. Going down south to spend time with my grandparents. I spent more time with my grandparents this year than usual, just, you know, elderly things, and I spent more time going home to see my family. And as I was looking through my camera roll, I was like, God, the things that light me up have such a consistent theme. So that's kind of what we get to when we take out our paper and pen. The other things that I noticed were some moments throughout the year that I found quite challenging, and as I looked through my camera roll, I saw some things that were a little bit more challenging, and just times and moments where I remember feeling like I was being really challenged. There that point in my business or my life, I was being really challenged. So I just go through my camera roll with that sort of intention, then I put my phone away, so put your phone away, and then you're going to take out your journal, and you're actually going to start asking certain questions. And like I said, all of these prompts are in the show notes, but this is for you to start questioning, to mine the year for the gold and the lessons and the value that you can take into 2025 with clarity and real a real sense of alignment with your values. So once you've done that, you put your phone away, and you start to ask the questions like I sort of just suggested, what are the themes of this year that contributed to these heart explosions, to these memories that I cherish? What were the themes and underpinning that? What are the values that I've played out from that you can go one step further and think if a stranger or the best mindset and life coach in the world were to look through my camera roll, what would they say are my highest values? What are my highest values? Not idealistically, not. What do I wish my values were, but looking in the reality, and this is where we do a little bit of honest work with ourselves. This is where we can go down a shadow work process. But if you were to look at your life through the eyes of a stranger, what would you say is your highest priorities? What do you make time for? What is of most importance to you that tells you what your values currently are. And before we move into the next part, which is actually thinking about, where do we want to be, what do we need to prioritize? Who do we need to become to go where we're going right now, where are your values at and what is most important to you? Are you happy with how you built your year, and does it align with what's most important to you? So like I said, when I looked through mine, I was looking for themes, and I was looking at values, and I was really for me, it was actually just more positive reinforcement every time I looked at my camera roll and there was a little heart explosion. The things that lit me up were very simple. It was with family. It was with friends. And the theme, the theme for this year was actually laughter, so much laughter and micro moments that I specifically remember throughout this year that I think I will remember on my death bed. They all had a theme. One was lying in bed with my pop. I went to go visit him at the nursing home. He has a back injury, but he's very much still with it, and he's funny as and he was feeling a bit down, because, you know, his body's letting him down, which is so upsetting when your mind is still so with it. And he's so young at heart, he's got the younger spirit. So he was getting really down. And I just got into bed with him and put my arm over him, and we just had chats. And all I did for 15 minutes was tried to just make him laugh, and his belly laughs. My belly laughs. I had that moment. You know, that beautiful moment within a moment where you're like, oh my god, this is the best like you have the awareness within the moment that like this is a moment to cherish. I had that moment, and I will never forget that. That. So that was one of them. Another one was, again, being down south. It was actually the same weekend being down south, at my besties place, and there was a group like all of us, and we were sitting around, and we were playing a connection card. No, yeah, we were playing a shadow play game. We're playing Shadow Play. And we were laughing so much at, you know, at the detriment of each of us, we were sort of pulling the piss and being really inappropriate, but belly laughing. And the same goes for camping and being with, you know, there's so many different scenarios where I go, what was that? And it was laughter, and it was usually outdoors or just full present with good people, with humans. And then when I looked through the same lens in my business, and I looked through the highlights and the moments that I'll cherish within my business, it was the same thing. It's micro moments, not where I'm not even where I'm in a podcast studio on my own, not even where I'm doing the things that I quote, love, which I do, I love these things, but the moments that you have, those little Oh my god. This is the dream. This is the best. This is a micro moment that I cherish, that actually, when I'm in the flesh with clients, times in the mind school where a client or a student has said something that just cracks me up, and we are laughing about something completely outlandish. In the midst of, you know, heavy work, we're laughing and we're connecting. And micro moments where clients have come to me and said something extremely personal and vulnerable that they've never shared with anyone else, but they felt safe and enough to do it. All of these experiences are to say that there was a theme. And the theme for me, the thing that gives my life meaning and purpose, is that deep, deep, deep connection and craving time to be present with these people, carving out, sorry, carving out time to be present with those people. So of course, that's something I'm going to take with me into 2025, and when I do that real, honest work with myself, where I think, have I really shown up in a way that is truly aligned with what I say is most important to me this year, I can truly say hand on heart, I'm so proud of how I've showed up as a daughter, as a friend, as a wife. I lean in even when I could be more productive somewhere else or my mind says, no, no, you've got other things to do. My highest values are connection, and I've truly lived by that. And this came after a couple years of reflecting and going, Oh, my business has really been the priority in those first couple years. I want to bring back a little bit of balance and wholesomeness, so you can see how when you reflect, you also get to do a little bit of self honesty. And is this who I'm Is this what I'm happy with? So what you look at is the themes, what lit you up, and what are the underlying values? Is that something you're happy about, and what does that mean? Moving into next year, when you look at your highlights, when you look at the things that you've achieved, when you look at the things that you know lit your soul on fire, even if it is those micro moments, the question then becomes, who was that person internally that created that who did I? Who was I? What internal processes did I put in place to make that a reality? So if you're looking at your highlights, and one of the highlights, for example, a business highlight this year for me, was that we went on the Channel Nine News came and did a story on the mind school. When CHANNEL NINE NEWS came to do the thing about the mind school, what I really see as the internal processes or the strategies and actions that created that milestone was that it was the first year that I have really leaned in to asking for support and receiving. That's something that has been a huge lesson for me, and as I reflected on this year, what I realized was I'm actually reaping the benefits of an internal process that I had to go through, which was one that was actually about realizing that I was caught blocking myself in business for a long time, trying to do everything by myself, and that was a reflection from last year that I brought into this year. And as I look at the highlights and the milestones, I can see that my internal process, my internal world, has shifted, and I have opened myself up to receiving now I have somebody helping me with PR. Now I have a support coach inside of the mind school. Now I have other people that are coming on board, and I'm allowing to support me so that I can be doing the things I love. And so when I look at outcomes, what I look at from a mindset perspective, is not just the outcomes, the milestones, the highlights, but what was the internal process? What was the characteristic that created that outcome? Who did I need to be, and how can I bring that forward with me into the new year, if that's still aligned? So what were the highlights? What were the moments that you cherished, and what was the internal process that created that? The other thing that I would look at when I do my reflection is, what have been the challenges, and what are some. Things that I'm still not completely satisfied with, or that I am still working on. And there has been a lot and this year for me personally, when I did this reflection, was one of complete duality. This year, there were so many highs, and in some years, it's been the most wholesome and rewarding and fulfilling and lit up or on purpose that I felt in a long time. And at the same time, I'm equally holding more challenge and more probably grief than I ever have before as an adult, and that's all around the fertility stuff and managing that. And so when I look at the challenges, I'm also looking at, what can I do? What is within my control, and what have been the lessons that I am learning coming to close this year that I don't want to bring into next year. The other thing for me that I look at in terms of challenges and things that I still need to improve upon is this beautiful dance between having freedom but also really craving and thriving in structure, and that has been a pattern. So what you're looking at when you're looking at the more low lights, the challenges, the hardships, the opportunities for growth is, what were the internal processes that also contributed to that? What were the internal thoughts, the beliefs, the behaviors that created that outcome that you're not so happy with, right? So for me, when I reflect on this, I think one of the big challenges that also is a pattern, when it's a pattern when it happens more than once, when it's something that isn't something that you've easily been able to overcome, when it's something that you notice is something, for example, that you reflect on. Year after year after year. I have had a couple years in a row now where I've said I really, really want more routine, but the pattern has been I love freedom, and I tend to rebel against rigid routine, and that has come up again this year. I'm getting better, and there has been some internal processes and shifts that have created that, but there is still room for growth. And so when I'm reflecting, I'm looking at what hasn't worked, what parts of me are contributing to this, not feeling good, and what needs to change for next year, what needs to change. So as I reflected, what I realized was it was really helpful for me to hire a co working space that helped me with rigidity and routine to a certain extent, and gave me more boundaries and time freedom with work and home. However, what has stopped me from going to the office is that sometimes it still feels like I'm going to the office alone. I'm driving down the freeway to go to an office just to sit alone. And I really need that collaboration. I really need that talking to people. So that's something that I am thinking about and sitting down to reflect on for next year, personally, as I decide who to hire within my business, and I'm actually looking to somebody who is more local, and that is because of this reflection process. So the other thing that you want to do is look back at and this is why the next part of this process is so important. The next part of this process is so important because what you do once you've got this clarity is you solidify or break your goals and your clarity down to some key phrases or terms that are going to help you to keep your goals and your intentions top of mind when I look back on what my intentions and phrases for 2024 were, and I know what they were, because for the first 10 months of this year, they were my wallpaper. I made a vision board and I put it on my wallpaper, and I know that my words for this year were wholesome, structure and routine and systems and processes. And when I looked over it and I had a bit of a reflection, I was mostly really, really proud of how I followed through with that. Well, I won't get you get into what we've done behind the scenes, but we've done all the systems and processes things we've hired. We've got an incredible team. I've stepped into more of a leadership position with the team, and now we're looking at new people. So the structures and the routines within the business is there that word wholesome I was really, really proud of, but the routine part is still something that I'm taking forward to next year and really, really thinking about. So then you can, if you want to go one further, you can even break your life down into buckets, and what you would probably hear from me is that there are buckets. I've got business, I've got relationships, I've got life. Health is always a big bucket for me that I reflect on. What are my health goals, and they change depending on what season I'm in and what actions, routines and internal processes do I need to embody to enable me to step into that next level. So all of this is just a lot of different reflection tools that you can use before you set your sights on 2025 and like I said, this is just a really quick sort of workshoppy episode to get you thinking. But what I'd. Really recommend you do is download the prompts that are in this episode show notes, because I've got prompts for you to do alone, prompts for you to do with your husband or your partner, prompts for you to do with your kids if you want to do it as a family, and prompts for you to do with your friends. It's so much fun. It's so connecting, and so it gives you so much clarity. And the other piece that I will add before I let you go from this episode, is that if you want some time to carve out the reflection and the setting your sights on 2025, and really getting clear and getting out of your own way in the New Year's, you can come to the mind school mini which we are holding in January. And there are only 60 tickets by the time this comes out. I'm not sure how many tickets there will be, but all of the information is in the show notes. It is an in person event where you can really get into the energy, connect with like minded people, and get get the time, put the time aside to really set your sights on 2025 that is all for me today. I hope you enjoyed this reflection routine. Let me know how you go and always tag me if you can, if you feel called to I'd love to connect with you, share what you have found helpful, and I will see you back here next episode. Thank you for tuning in to the mind school podcast. It is a massive intention of mine to continue to grow this show, because the more the show grows, the better the guests get, and I know that is going to be so powerful for you listening. So if I could ask this massive favor, it would mean the world if you could please leave a review, hit the Follow button, or leave a rating on Spotify, so that we can continue to grow this show and bring you the juiciest, most thought provoking and expansive conversations through incredible guests. Thank you so much for tuning in. I'll see you next week. You.