If I could choose only one lesson from 2023, it would be the power of compounding.

Compounding small actions has helped me resolve 2.5 years of hamstring pain, spend quality, consistent time with family and friends, and get me through an intense business pinch point earlier this year.

I dropped the bar for action so low I couldn’t fail and I took a much longer view on the time horizon to results.

I’ll keep reinforcing this for myself because I’ve finally realised the pattern.

The work on what matters most to me is never done.

Whether it’s building and maintaining my relationships, business, health, energy or living in accordance with my purpose, values and priorities – they are all a set of ongoing practices. (Atomic Habits by James Clear helped.)

Because of that, I’m going to invert my approach to planning for 2024.

Rather than goal setting, I’m going to focus on defining practices first.

A question to guide and filter what I choose is:

Do I think this is a practice I can see my self continuing for the rest of my life?

If yes, then I’ll experiment with setting these up for next year.

Then I’ll set goals as milestones along the way to see how I’m tracking.

They can move and change and I’ll nearly certainly not hit them all the time.

But it’s not about perfection. It’s about deliberate practice.

What follows are the notes from my review and the practices I’ll look to continue and evolve into 2024.

My 2023 Review

I used Kelly Wilson’s Valued Living Questionnaire as the framework for my 2023 reflection (download it here).

Immediate action

The results of a self-assessment like this are always a snap shot in time. They ebb and flow so I asked myself a few follow up questions:

1. Did any of your answers surprise you? Why?
2. If you could focus only on one of these domains, which would it be?
3. What specific action might you take to improve this domain’s satisfaction score by just 1 or 2 points in the next 24-48 hours?(What, Who, Where, When…)
4. How might you combine your high importance domains into a single activity?

Friends/Social and Environmental Issues surprised me in their satisfaction scores. It may be a stage of life thing with young children, but I want to make a concerted effort to improve these.

I chose Friends/Social to take a specific action on and sent a text message to a mate immediately about booking a regular time in our diaries to catch up rather than trying to do the diary dance each time.

Even knowing this was a seed planted increased my satisfaction score. I’ll need to follow it up and make sure it happens.

Since then I’ve thought about how that catch up might be exercise focussed eg a gym session rather than another coffee in the week which would also help me nurture my Physical self-care. It also could be a chance to reconnect to nature if we turned it into a hike, so I’ll propose that as we figure it out together too.

Going deeper

Because I’m using this in the context of a deeper reflection rather than simply a quick fix, this time round I choose to reflect on each of the categories above with three questions:

• What worked well?
• What could be improved?
• What could I do differently next year?

I also broke down Physical self care into three subcategories: Exercise, Nutrition and Sleep.

Here are my notes.

Family

What worked well?

• Tuesday afternoons at mum’s for catch up w Mum, siblings, nieces and nephews.
• Sharing a sport between my kids and my sister’s kids helped for extra overlap time.
• Phone call to Mum on way to work most mornings.

What could be improved?

• Face time with siblings

What would I do differently?

• Schedule sibling dinners monthly/qtrly

Intimate relationships

What worked well?

• Supportive and real – especially through the pinch points.
• Our daily morning coffee together aka Coffee Special Time. Managed to hold this line even in the midst of a whirlwind at times.

What could be improved?

• Make sure Luce has time for herself. Help structure and continue to update the family diary so it happens.
• Despite having it scheduled, our weekly date night hardly ever happened.
• I could definitely do better with presents for anniversary, birthday.

What could be done differently?

• Find a babysitter and lock in a regular time for date night rather than trying to do it last minute or a few days before each time.
• Possibly change up some of the date formats to include exercise.
• Need to get make up presents.

Parenting

What worked well?

• 1:1 “dates” with my older two daughters were fun and helped to surface issues on a few occasions.
• “What if this is the last time?” This question was a useful tool when I was feeling irritated, frustrated or angry.
• Writing regular journals for each the girls
• Focusing on Love and Adventure as core values to live as a family. Linking opportunities/activities to those words and celebrating them around the dinner table. Using those words in daily life to reinforce.
• Expressing frustration framed from my own experience rather than framed as what they are doing or need to do. Eg: “We’re all going home from the park now because I’m tired and hungry.” rather than “We’re leaving now because you need to have dinner and go to bed.” (The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read by Phillipa Perry)

What could be improved?

• Making the 1:1 time walk and talks rather than more meals/treats etc. Especially in summer when it’s still light.
• I have more work to do to not yell at the girls. Will continue the practice of recognizing and welcoming in “Mara” showing up as red, hot, lava-esque, “piece of rebar in the chest” experience of anger in my chest. Definitely easier when other things – work, health etc are going well.

What could be done differently?

• Walk and talk 1:1 time
• Schedule more drop offs/pick ups in a week.
• Plan more experiences with the girls to share the love and adventure.

Friends/Social

What worked well?

• Combining social and other activities eg swimming, ice baths, breath work
• Father and kids weekend away
• Making friends a part of what I want to do work-wise from a travel standpoint – eg NYC, London, Austin all have good friends to combine with the visits.

What could be improved?

• Find new ways to combine friends in activities that I want to do more of and then diarise as default rather than chance

What would I do differently?

• Get fathers and kids in diary earlier
• Bit more design of activities to include mates eg: exercise, surfs, chess, music

Work

What worked well?

• Having two programs I love to deliver and know get results and great feedback: Executive Reinvention coaching program and Reinventing Mindset workshop.
• Launch process in May (Launch – Jeff Walker)
• Clarifying engagement model and pricing.
• Speaking practice w Yoodli – made the live engagements much tighter.
• Running small size “pilots” with client organisations.
• Using speaking as a means of making a contribution.
• Virtual delivery improved enormously even if it feels more energetically intensive.
• Content creation
• The long game is the only game to play.
• Exciting to explore NYC, Austin, London and Europe. Being able to meet in person was hugely valuable from a relationship building standpoint and frankly much more enjoyable for me too. I loved the combination of travel, family, work, friendship. I need to continue to design for more of this.

What could be improved?

• I have capacity for 3-5 more 1:1 clients
• Hitting my content creation cadence
• Dial up accountability and transparency of progress through ways of working.

What could I do differently?

• Keep doubling down on high conviction activity – coaching, speaking, content.
• Find ninjas to support me in: content publishing and distribution (articles, socials) and speaking bookings.
• Run live, in-person events
• Run more digital events
• Rehearse speaking more and more frequently.
• Start my own podcast.
• Hire a business coach to continue to develop vision > strategy > execution

Finances

What worked well?

• Weekly finance meetings to review forecast, accounts receivable, sales pipeline.
• Shifting from quarterly to monthly tax and super payments.
• Increased comms w accountant to improve predictability and transparency.

What could be improved?

• Continue to develop my systems, structures and practices around financial management both personally and in the business.

What could I do differently?

• Hire a financial coach to help me tune it all up

Spirituality

What worked well?

• Hit the nightly meditation w good consistency
• Reading Tao Te Ching or other religious/philosophical books at night time before sleep.

What could be improved?

• Deepen exploration of breathwork
• Lost meditation momentum when we travelled OS.

What would I do differently?

• Breathwork courses, classes with interested people.

Education/training

What worked well?

• Reading. My stand out book this year was legendary music producer Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way Of Being. It was a ripper. I’ll be revisiting it.

What could be improved?

• Reading. The blocks of time for deep dive reading were limited this year. When I did, I loved it.
• Possibly revisiting old books and programs that have made an impact rather than pursuing more total books.

What would I do differently?

• Start a podcast as a vehicle for self-directed learning.

Leisure/Recreation/Fun

What worked well?

• Matildas football games.
• Frozen The Musical.
• Travel – Switzerland, New York, London, Austin. Loved exploring new places and languages with the girls and helping them to see how the big the world truly is.
• Getting back to surfing after the injury.

What could be improved?

• Love to have more live events – music, sport
• More surfing!

What would I do differently?

• Plan time for live experiences and organise friends to join.
• Get more organised with holiday plans for the year.
• Diarise a regular surf with my brother and mates.

Physical self care

Exercise

What worked well?

• Maximum Aerobic Function training finally helped me to resolve my hamstring tendinopathy.
• Daily mobility and strength work from an incredibly low starting point. Viewing exercise as a compounding activity and therefore focussing on not missing sessions even if that meant it was only 5 mins.
• Regular pilates – helped with shoulder and achilles pain.
• Daily knees over toes exercises from Knee Ability Zero by Ben Patrick has helped manage knee and achilles soreness.
• Weighted walking – backpack w dumbells
• Integration of exercise and work – walk and talks on the phone and kick offs with clients in the bush.
• Combining exercise and friends – eg Tuesday swim sessions
• Wednesday breathwork and cold sessions

What could be improved?

• now that the baseline management of knee, hamstring, shoulder and achilles is working, it’s time to step up the weights to build some more strength and muscle.

What will I do differently?

• Get a program that uses the gym set up at home – track progress.
• Find a mate to do strength work with once a week
• Look into Whoop band and Lumen as tools for ongoing experiments

Nutrition

What worked well?

• upping protein helped
• Meals were good at the office
• 16/8 time restricted eating most days.
• Fiber supplementation
• Water
• Capping coffees to two
• Meal planning with LJ and the girls each week.

What could be improved?

• sugar and pastry intake 🙂
• Dialling up the preparation required for better food for all of us.

What would I do differently?

• Continue protein supplementation more deliberately (Outlive – Dr Peter Attia)
• Athletic Greens?
• Look to have the girls more involved in the meal preparation

Sleep

What worked well?

• using my watch as feedback to recognize patterns to optimise
• Practicing hands on my chest when I wake through the night with my mind racing or feeling anxious.
• Stopping eating 2hrs before sleep

What could be improved?

• finding great fiction to read before bed
• Continue w the philosophy/religion before bed

What would I do differently?

• Blue tint glasses for night time reading?

Citizenship/Community

What worked well?

• Anti-vape store signage campaign worked out
• Assistant Hockey Manager 🙂
• Loved speaking to junior sporting groups as a way of giving back.

What could be improved?

• Get more actively involved as a manager or coach in my girls’ activities

What could I do differently?

• I could use my workshops and speaking as a means of giving back and having an impact on communities less able to fund an engagement or who may have particular need for the toolkit I teach.

Environment

What worked well?

• Getting out in the mountains has been one of the gifts of our travel to Switzerland.
• Surfing

What could be improved?

• Find ways to weave nature time into activities with friends, work, health etc.

What could I do differently?

• Actively contributing to environmental causes and organisations through my work.
• Getting back to the outback.

Ongoing Practices for 2024

As I pulled these out from my reflection, I realised that the best of these combine multiple categories into single activities to increase the value and decrease the sense of a single activity being a tradeoff.

• Tuesday afternoons at mum’s in diary with kids and Luce. (parenting, intimate relationship)
• Tuesday swims (exercise, friends)
• Date walks w kids (parenting, environment)
• Date nights/walks w Luce (marriage, environment)
• Sibling dinners- lock in every two months? Qtr? (family)
• Fortnightly surfs (environment, exercise, spirituality, family, friends)
• Saturday breaky at our place w fam – add a walk in? (family, parenting, exercise?)
• Gym session w a mate (exercise, friends +)
• Regular hike w a mate (exercise, environment, friends +)
• Daily Protein supplementation (nutrition)
• Coffee – max 2 LBs/day (nutrition, marriage if it’s w LJ)
• Kick off walks w clients (work, environment, exercise)
• Pilates w a mate (exercise, friends +)
• Monthly Reinventing Mindset webinar. (work, community)
• Establish a content cadence and stick to it including podcast (work, community)

If you go through this for yourself, or you have your own process for review, I’d love to hear about it.