Dear Reboot,
Jaye, Nancy and I wish you the best for the holidays and hope you will be with family and friends. It is a great time to see old friends, spend time with family and enjoy some time away from work. It is also a great time to take stock of what is important to you and prepare for the new year. There are two things we encourage people to do when they catch some quiet time,and I will remind you in this newsletter.
CIRCLE GOALS
The first is to look at your Circle Goals for the year and think about what you didn’t get done and want to do in 2020. We tend to do this around New Years, but anytime these last two months are good. If you remember, Circle Goals are a pie-shaped circle with 5-6 equal slices where you put key goal areas of your life and 5
actionable things in each category that you want to accomplish in the next year. I’m already working on mine, and my goal areas are Finances, Healthy Eating and Exercise, Creative Activities, Corporate and Nonprofit Board Work, Mentoring of Others and More One on One Time with My Husband. For each of these areas I am working on the things I can do to spend more time thinking about and reaching them. What are your goals for 2020?
CIRCLE OF TRUST
The second is especially important to do around the holidays as it will help you think about how you spend your time, and with whom you spend it. We use it to even plan who to send cards and presents to as well as invite to your annual holiday party. It’s called the Circle of Trust. Remember Meet the Fockers movie? That’s where we got the idea. People are either in the circle or out. Draw a target that has three spaces between the rings. Put those people who you totally trust, who have your back, who you can tell anything to, in that small center circle. Put people you mostly trust and love or like into the next biggest circle, but they might be people you don’t tell everything to, like a really good friend at work, or a sibling or even a parent sometimes. In the last space put the people whom you value for their friendship, love, advice and entertainment, but might not tell them intimate things such as troubled relationships or hard times at work.
Now you have the people most important to you inside and everyone else is outside the circle. Focus your time, intimate gatherings, gifts and handwritten cards on the people inside the circle and think of the others outside as those you send regular cards to or invite to a large party. Learn to say no graciously to those on the outside so you have more time for those on the inside. Hopefully, it will make your holidays even more meaningful this year.
The Circle Goals exercises in our book, Reboot Your Life. It and The Retirement Boom also make good gifts for friends going through transitions and taking time to reflect. You can order them on Amazon.com or find them in your local independent bookstores.
Another gift idea for the most important people in your life is a Reboot Your Life Retreat in 2020…a weekend to focus on themselves and what they want to do to reinvent themselves or move to their next chapter. We have retreats in Sag Harbor, New York, April 17-19 and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 6-8.
Our last retreat in Santa Fe was very much focused on people getting ready to transition from their current careers or jobs to sabbaticals and new opportunities. From commercial pilot to wine enthusiast, from Development executive to consultant and from Human Resources executive to corporate board service.
We wish for you the very best this holiday season and look forward to seeing many of you next year!
Sincerely,
Catherine Allen, Nancy Bearg and Jaye Smith