End well

We all know what this time of the year feels like.  It’s called the silly season for a reason.  But even in the extra busyness of end of the year things, we still get choices.  We get to choose what’s really important; we get to choose what we say yes to, we get to choose how we prioritise how we manage our mindset.  We get to choose to end well.

Here are five things you can do to help you navigate this silly season more purposefully.

Create the vision

If you don’t decide what’s important to you, someone else will, and before long you’ll be rushing around like a frazzled headless chicken, trying to please everyone but slowly crumbling inside.   Sit down and think about what is really important to you in this season.  Create the vision.

Here are some prompts to get you thinking:

• Use five words to describe your best-case scenario final two months of the year.
• What activities would help you create that scenario?
• What are you doing now that will support you in creating that scenario? (think of the rituals or good habits you’ve built or are building)
• What are you going to have to work on to help you create that scenario? (think about the habits that keep you stuck)

This exercise will help you sketch out your vision for this season.  It will highlight the activities that will be joyful for you and help you create the vision you’re after.  It will also highlight to you the rituals and habits that will help you navigate the busyness and the bad habits that will make this time for stressful and hold you back from creating the season you’ve envisioned.

Prioritise purposefully

We all have balls in the air and this time of the year adds a few more balls to that juggling act.  Yes, the juggle is real, but the choice to put balls down is very real too.

You can’t do it all. You have to choose what get’s prioritised and what gets delayed, or even deleted.

Every day, decide which balls are priorities and which balls can be put down.  Then, put those balls down.  Pick them up again when the time is right, which might well be tomorrow, next week, or never!

Get better at saying no

Most of us have a real problem with saying no. It’s often much easier to just grit your teeth, with a plastered smile and say yes.  But this just adds more balls to the juggle.

Having created your vision and then considering what activities would help you bring that vision to life, gives you some guardrails to point out what you should be saying yes to and what you should be saying no to.

Try these three things to help you get better at saying no:

1. What’s the why? Consider the real reason why you’re saying yes. If that yes is in any way related to how someone else will feel or think, at a cost to you or your family, it should probably be a no.
2. What’s the trade-off? Every time you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. That no could be to rest, or family time, or your mental health.
3. What’s the timeline? No isn’t always no forever.  Maybe you could postpone that get-together to early next year, or that dinner to during the holidays.

Stick with the rituals that root you

In busier seasons, we tend to put aside the rituals and healthy habits that usually help us, thinking that we don’t have the time.  The problem is that these rituals and healthy habits are actually the exact things that we need to help us feel calmer and more energised for navigating the busyness.

If you’ve got rhythms that include things like morning quiet times, exercise and nutritious mealtimes, midday check-ins to check your mindset or evening routines to avoid scrolling or screen time – make sure that you stick with these things!  Don’t push them aside hoping to save yourself some time.  You won’t.  You’ll just become more anxious and frazzled.  Stick to the rituals that root you.

Manage your mindset

If we go into this season telling ourselves it’s going to be “stressful” and “busy” and “too much”, it will be.  We’ve got to manage our mindsets.  One way to do this is to keep going back to the words you used to describe your vision for this season (number 1 above).  If you choose “happy”, then ask yourself often, “what made my happy today?”.  Look for the good.  What you focus on, gets emphasised.

So, as you approach the end of the year, remember that you have more choice than you might think. By creating your vision for this season and then bringing it to life with these five steps, I hope you can finish this year well.