Redefining Goals for a Joyful Year Ahead | EP290

As we wrap up this year, I’m embracing the holiday spirit with an extended break until January 9th, leaving you with the gift of reflection and goal reassessment. This thoughtful pause is not just for me but for you too, as we prepare to kick off a phenomenal new year together.

I reminisce about some of the top episodes that resonated with our community. As this year comes to a close, I want to send heartfelt holiday wishes your way, encouraging you to treasure time with your loved ones and embrace the present. Life's unpredictability serves as a reminder of the importance of health, wealth, and happiness, to carry us into a prosperous 2025. Looking forward to reconnecting and sharing more insights with you in January.

TOP 5 EPISODES

Ep185 Overcoming Fear of Judgment to Empower Business Growth Mindset Mini Series 1

Ep163 Setting the Stage for Success:Tips for Crafting a Remarkable Introduction and Dodging Common Missteps

Ep153 Overcoming Business Challenges - The Dawn of a New Era

EP158 Mastering Marketing Strategy: The Power of Consistent Weekly Content

Ep165 Embracing Vit

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Chapters

• 0:00 Setting Yearly Goals
• 10:01 Top Episodes of the Year
• 25:51 Holiday Greetings and Well Wishes

Transcript

Donna Eade: 0:30

You're listening to the Mindset in Action podcast, the place to be to grow and streamline your business. I'm your host, donna Eade. Let's jump into the show. The only time you should ever look back is to see how far you've come. Bangtang Boys butterfly. Welcome back to the podcast, everybody for the final podcast of the year. No, you don't need to check your diaries.

Donna Eade: 1:09

I know that this is earlier than anticipated. For those of you who have listened for a long time, you know that every Christmas I take two weeks off because I believe that we should all be spending time with our families and we all need a break. So I do take two weeks off over Christmas and I have said before you know it doesn't really matter if I'm batching my podcast episodes etc. I could continue over the Christmas period, but I feel like everybody should be with their families doing family things and not listening to business podcasts, and I don't want you to feel that you've got FOMO, missing out on two episodes over the Christmas period and then feeling that you've got to try and find time for them in January. So I take a break, you take a break and we all come back bigger and better next year. So this year is slightly different. I am actually taking a extended sabbatical from the podcast and I will be back on the 9th of January. So it's almost a month we're going to be taking off and I am starting the year with a guest episode. We are talking to a wonderful lady called Cam and we're going to be talking about accounting. Now don't, don't not come back for the new year. Because I said the word accounting? Because it follows on from the fantastic episode we had with diane watson where we were talking about personal finance. I brought cam in to talk about, you know, the biggest mistakes that she sees with people when it comes to their accounts and how we can all get really overwhelmed with it, and she is here to help us make it simple. So come and join me for that episode on the 9th of January. So back to today.

Donna Eade: 2:44

What are we doing to end out the year? Normally I would be doing my end of quarter goal setting review and obviously bringing that into the year as a whole, but you know by now that I don't see December as my new year start. End of that's April for me. So I'm not going to do that this time. What I'm going to do is I'm going to save my goal setting review for that second episode in January, so it will be coming out a little bit later towards the end of January for that quarter because I actually need to take some time to sit and think for myself what is it that I want to do, to reflect back and, even though I don't like to do a full year like oh my gosh, start to plan. I feel like it's inevitable. I feel like it is ingrained in us to do it, even though I feel much better about starting anew in April. But to me it's almost like I do this every quarter. I sit and I look back and I go where do I want to be? What do I want to do? Okay, we're going to go forward. So it's almost like I don't have a new year, I just have these quarterly goal settings that I do and it's just a rolling thing.

Donna Eade: 3:58

So I will be taking a bit of an extended break, sitting down, really looking at what I've been doing with the podcast, what I've been doing in terms of the business, how things have been running for the last quarter. As most of you know, I started a part-time job in September, which is a 15 hour a week role and that has been really busy actually over this last part of the quarter. With Christmas coming up, it's been a very busy time in the business, so it's been a lot to juggle and I feel like I just need to kind of take a breath. So we're actually finishing with that part-time job quite early in December in comparison to most people, and I am looking at sort of wrapping up my business stuff fairly in par with that, so that I've got more time to sort of sit down and really hone in on these goals, on what I want to do going forward. So we will come back to that in January, I promise.

Donna Eade: 5:02

But that doesn't stop you from having a check on your goals and looking at what you have seen. Especially if you are an annual planner, then this is the perfect time to sort of sit back, reflect what have I done this year and what do I need to do going forward. And I loved that quote at the beginning because when I looked at quotes for looking back, I was just like looking back quotes and they all said don't look back or, you know, don't call the past. It's got nothing new to say all these kind of things, and I think that is an important thing to remember is the past is gone, it's done. It's what we do now, going forward. That's important, and really it's what we're doing now in the present. That's important because nothing is guaranteed in life, as we know. So it is really important to remember that. The past is where it is for a reason. We can learn from it and we can move on, but we don't need to keep talking to it.

Donna Eade: 6:01

So have a look what have you done this year? What were your goals at the beginning of the year? Now I'm sitting here looking at my beautiful what's it called? Oh, my God, my mind just went blank. It's my vision board. Looking at my vision board and seeing that I have actually managed to tick things off, and I don't think I've ever done that. There are some things on there that haven't been ticked off and I really need to actually sit down and think about if those are actually things that I want or just things that I think I should be having, because that might help. And yeah, there were some things that I didn't get ticked off on there, which does make me sad, like I didn't get on an aeroplane this year and I really wanted to. That could have happened at the end of this year, but then we had that huge storm where my house started to leak water and we needed to buy new windows, so that was a little bit of where my travel money went to. New windows was not on my vision board, but we move Anyway.

Donna Eade: 7:05

So do have a look at your vision board, look at your goals, look at what you set out to do this year and write down then what you did do, because oftentimes I think we look at our goals and if we didn't achieve those goals, we think we failed on the year, but what we often forget is what we actually did do, and there is so much that we do do. Life pulls us off track often and we have to consistently bring ourselves back to those main goals, but sometimes life has a plan of its own and we end up on a completely different path and we complete many more different things than what our goal setting said and we don't actually celebrate those because those weren't the goals that we wrote down at the beginning. So please, please, celebrate all of your wins and achievements over the course of this year and have a drink for me at Christmas to celebrate. So I actually won a silver at the Shining Star Awards this year for Business Women Unlimited, so I was really proud of that. I've entered for the last five years and I have five trophies three silvers and two golds and to me this award ceremony is really about that reflection on what the past year has been. What have I achieved, what have I done. And getting a trophy to celebrate really does make me smile.

Donna Eade: 8:29

So if you are interested in entering an award that is free to enter, then come and join me for my Business Women Unlimited online meetings, which are held generally on the third Tuesday of the month. But you can go to businesswomenunlimitedcouk businesswomenunlimitedcouk and all of the events are there. So if there is an in-person one local to you, feel free to go along to that. You get mine as a bonus then. But if you don't, then you can come to my online meeting and as long as you've been to three meetings before the awards kick off, so in the 12 months before the awards, then you get get to enter, and the next Shining Star Awards is going to be held in the summer of 2026. So come along, join me. My last one of the year is the 17th of December and that is going to be a Christmas quiz and breakout room networking. So if you are interested in coming along to that, then go along to the website and book it. I'll leave it in the show notes for you. But that is a great awards. It's free to enter. You just have to come to those three meetings and so it's a great way to reflect on your business and obviously you get to get together with amazing business women to celebrate your business when it comes to the Shining Star Awards being given out. So that is my little hurrah for the end of the year, which I was really, really pleased about.

Donna Eade: 10:01

What I wanted to do in today's episode was something that I've done before, which is look back at like the top episodes of the year and that I really enjoy doing and looking back again. Is that looking back, reflecting what are the things that you've really enjoyed listening to this year, and I'm going to share those with you now. So the first one, which is actually now my all-time most listened to episode, is episode 185. Episode 185 was called Overcoming the Fear of Judgment to Empower Business Growth, and it was part of my mini mindset series that happened and that was episode one. I think there was four in that series. So you can go back and listen to that. It's episode 185. And if I just look at the episode details, it says, yeah, is it time to push past that fear and embrace growth. So that is what we are looking at in that episode. Really great episode to have a listen to. It's a shorty, it's only seven minutes and it is part of that mini series. So there are other short episodes to listen to if you wanna listen to those as well. So that was episode 185.

Donna Eade: 11:33

Now let's have a little look at the other episodes. The next episode was episode 163. So episode 163, I'm just trying to scroll down to it while I'm talking to you. Episode 163 was called. So it was called setting the stage for success, tips for crafting a remarkable introduction and dodging common missteps. So this was a really, really fantastic episode and it was with the lovely Grace Fogarty. So if you want to take a listen to that, she was talking all about how we show up for ourselves and looking at the common missteps that people make when it comes to their first impressions. So first impressions, as we know, are really, really important and Grace is all about showing up with confidence and really introducing yourself in a powerful way where you can be remembered. So great episode to listen to Go ahead and take a listen. That is episode 163 with Grace, and that was a nice long episode, 46 minute episode that one and that was number two on this year's downloads.

Donna Eade: 12:49

So let's go back and have a look at the others. So number three on my list and I'm just doing the top five is episode 153, overcoming Business Challenges the Dawn of a New Era. Now, this was an episode that I had done something slightly different, and what I did was I asked some people to give me some of their tips on, you know, things that they had struggled with in their business, and so I had Michelle Kuklinski, lisa Baptiste, debbie Stewart and Carly will share on the show. I also went through my business journey what it looked like, tips for new business owners on things to avoid and things that you can improve on, and those guests shared as well. So, even though social media might not have you believe you're the only one struggling. I wanted to show you that we all struggle at different times, and so I shared pretty openly and honestly in that episode and had some ladies share with me as well. So that's a great, inspirational episode to take a listen to.

Donna Eade: 14:06

If you want to go back and listen to that one, it was episode 153, overcoming Business Challenges. Episode 153, overcoming Business Challenges the Dawn of a New Era. The next episode was episode 158. So it's all quite close together and you've got to remember, guys, that the current episodes that have just gone out obviously have less downloads because they've been up for less time. So all of these are going to be more like a year or more old because of the fact that you know they've been up longer and therefore people have listened to it. The wonderful thing about podcasting is that people will go back and listen to old episodes. So the downloads for past episodes is always going up, so they're always likely to have more downloads than episodes that are only a week or two old. So the episodes that have come out in the last sort of two, three months you'll probably see some of those episodes in next year's top five and things like that. So it's no surprise to me that these are older episodes, but really powerful, really important episodes to listen to.

Donna Eade: 15:10

So Mastering Marketing Strategy the Power of Consistent Weekly Content episode 158. So let's have a look at this. It is Mastering Marketing the Power of Consistent Weekly Content, so it says. Are you ready to ramp up your marketing game and accelerate your business growth? We have got the perfect episode for you. Join me as we dive into the essential role of weekly content in your marketing strategy. We'll unpack the potency of consistency and the magic of evergreen content, regularly updated to keep it fresh and relevant. Harness the power of a well-planned schedule, building audience engagement and fueling your business expansion like never before Now.

Donna Eade: 16:02

I have spoken on this podcast a number of times about the importance of weekly content, in my view, so a great one to listen to if you are interested in what weekly content looks like and how you can utilize it and how that impacts your business. So that was actually one with a guest. This was Emma Louise Fellows, who came on to my podcast, so let me just open this one up. Emma Louise came on to talk about her journey from like transforming from a job that is seen as such a good job. She was a lawyer a really good job, really good income and then she transitioned into wellness and she spoke about her journey to that and what happened, and I think it is a story that a lot of people can relate to that.

Donna Eade: 17:16

I certainly have come to relate to even more in the last few months with my health journey I've spoken about it briefly on the show a few times where I've been having tests done and we've been looking at things and realising that actually my body has kind of been in a complete shutdown and has therefore not been functioning as it should, but functioning like almost overcompensating for that in terms of sort of letting me live a life but not really giving me that energy, that spark that we should be having, or you know, there's no ups and downs, it's just very monotone my life so, yeah, I don't get those low lows, but I don't really get the high highs either. It's just very monotone my life. So, yeah, I don't get those low lows, but I don't really get the high highs either. It's just all a bit blah in my world. So I can really relate to this story where Emma was having issues with her health that led her to her medicinal side, where she now helps other people to really work with their health to bring them to a better balance inside, and I loved this episode. So if you want to go and listen to it, it's episode 165 will be linked in the show notes and the little blurb bit says ever found yourself stuck in the handster wheel of life, always on the move but somehow feeling like you're going nowhere? Take a leaf out of emma louise fellow's book, a former lawyer turned medical herbalist who advocates for holistic health. We explore her fascinating journey from high stress legal career to the world of natural healing with eat what live wellness. So if you want to go and listen to that one, I highly recommend it. Great listen. I will link that one in the show notes.

Donna Eade: 19:13

So that is our five episodes and I'll just give you a quick rundown. It was episode 185, overcoming Fear of Judgment. Episode 163, creating that Awesome Introduction Setting Yourself Up for Success. Episode 153, overcoming Business Challenges the Dawn of a New Era. Episode 158, mastering your Marketing Strategy the Power of Consistent Content. And then episode 165, embracing Vitality with Emma Louise follows from law to wellness. So those are some episodes that if you haven't heard them or if you want to re-listen to them, those would be great episodes to listen to between now and the new year when my new episode comes out. So you could definitely listen to one or two of those a week over the Christmas break, especially as I'm giving you an extended break. You can almost listen to those one a week and then you will be caught up to date. So one of the things that I did want to tell you before we close out this episode is that I will be going back to one episode a week, so there will be no mini mindset Monday anymore. We are going straight back to Thursdays only. You are still going to get the mini mindset. It's just going to be included in that main episode, having reviewed it and this is what I always do, and I tell you guys to do as well is to review things and adjust as necessary.

Donna Eade: 20:43

It was a lot of extra effort on my part to create the blog post, to schedule the blog post, to schedule the episode, to edit the episode separately. So putting the outro and intro on both episodes a week separately, so putting the outro and intro on both episodes a week it was doubling my workload, even though the episode was shorter. It just meant that the editing of the episode didn't take me as long. But everything else putting the intro, outro on takes the same time for both. Doing the blog post takes the same time for both. So all of the other things took the same time and I really didn't feel like it has helped my podcast grow in the way that I hoped it would for this year.

Donna Eade: 21:28

It was an idea of mine that if people could get hooked in on a shorter episode, that they would want to come back and listen to the longer episodes and that would bring more listeners in who perhaps aren't used to listening to longer episodes. But it hasn't really seemed that that has worked in that way from the stats, so the stats haven't really made a big difference this year compared to last year. So I am going to go back to my once a week tried and tested true blue tested once a week episode. It will probably be slightly longer because I am going to be adding in that 10 minutes, so they will be 40 to 50 minute episodes. I'm really excited about it just because it gives me that time back that enables me to make sure that I am making the best of the episodes that I'm putting out there.

Donna Eade: 22:26

The other thing that I am going to announce is that I am going to be quote unquote leaving Instagram Something that I've alluded to over this year a couple of times looking at potentially coming away from the platform. I really enjoy the platform personally, but I don't feel that it actually brings me any benefit business wise. Now I will probably still be sharing stories, sharing my podcast in my stories, but I'm not going to hold myself accountable to posting on my wall. So what you will see coming up over the next couple of weeks is a nine grid that you will be able to click on and find out lots of information about me and where you can find me, which will be my website or LinkedIn and all of the stuff that I do in my business. It will all be there in a nice nine up grid that will look pretty on the front cover and then I will be in the stories only from that point, and we're going to see how that goes. You know, I might change it, I might decide that that's not working for me, I might decide to come back to it at some point, but for me right now, I need to streamline my processes and I want to focus on LinkedIn and I want to lessen the cognitive load of social media for me.

Donna Eade: 23:55

So make sure you are following this podcast wherever you are listening so that you can stay in touch with me. There is a text to me button under this podcast episode where you can actually send me a message and communicate with me. I am absolutely happy for you to do that. It would be great to hear from you. Let me know what your thoughts are on these changes that I'm making. Let me know what your favourite episode this year has been and make sure that you're connected with me over on LinkedIn if you would like to be socially connected with me. Still and yeah, that is it for today's episode. I am so grateful and so thankful for you listening. If you've listened at any other point in the year, if you are a continual listener and have been with me since the beginning. Thank you so much for your company this year on the podcast. I am really excited to come back bigger and better next year with more podcast interviews and more fantastic episodes for you to listen to to help you grow and streamline your business.

Donna Eade: 25:04

One final thing before I go today is my masterclass the five power pillars of podcasting masterclass. So if you go to DonnaEdecom forward slash five power pillars, you can still sign up for the class and get your link for Zoom. It's at 1pm today as this is released, so if you are listening after Thursday, you won't be able to get in on this one, but listen out to the content at the beginning of the podcast, because it will change. It will tell you exactly what is going on this month as you're listening to it, in terms of getting into one of my master classes or one of my challenges. So listen out for that and I hope to see you on one of those soon.

Donna Eade: 25:51

And other than that, have a very, very merry Christmas. I wish you health and wealth and prosperity for 2025. I really hope that you get to spend time with your loved ones this Christmas and just hold them tight, because it is an absolute, not a guarantee, that you get to do that, and there's so many people out there that find this time of year really, really tough. If you are one of those people, I am sending you a massive, massive hug, my friend. But, yeah, do give your loved ones a hug and a squeeze and, until next time, have a very, very merry Christmas. Bye for now.