Reflect and Recalibrate: Using Emotional Intelligence to Close the Year Strong

As the year draws to a close, now is the perfect time to reflect on what worked, and what didn’t, and how to recalibrate goals for a stronger start in the new year. In this episode, discover how to harness emotional intelligence (EQ) as a powerful tool to guide your year-end reflection and planning process.

We’ll explore practical strategies for using self-awareness, empathy, and emotional regulation to maintain clarity and composure during the annual review. Learn how a balanced blend of logic and emotion can help identify key wins, address challenges, and adapt strategies moving into 2025.

Tune in as we cover:

• Reflecting with EQ: How self-awareness and emotional regulation can provide clearer insights into the past year’s performance.
• Leveraging Empathy: Using empathetic communication to engage teams, gain their buy-in, and create a collaborative plan for the future.
• Turning Challenges into Opportunities: Applying a solution-oriented mindset to reframe setbacks and create actionable strategies for next year.
• Building for 2025: Establishing step-by-step goals, timelines, and accountability measures to ensure hitting the ground running in the coming year.

If you’re ready to close out 2024 on a high note and position yourself and your team for unprecedented success in 2025, this episode is your blueprint for reflective growth and forward-thinking execution.

Listen in, recalibrate, and get ready to embrace the best year yet!

Introduction (00:00)
Preparing for Year-End Reflection (00:28)
The Process of Annual Planning (01:03)
Understanding Emotional Intelligence (EQ) (01:54)
Key Pillars of EQ: Self-awareness, Self-regulation, Empathy (02:39)
Importance of Reflection and Celebration of Wins (05:51)
Starting Recalibration Now for 2025 (07:12)
Recalibrating Goals with Emotional Intelligence (09:04)
Building Rituals for Reflection and Gratitude (11:05)
Clear Action Plan for Long-term Success (12:52)

Transcript

0:10

Welcome to the end game podcast season two, where I bet you didn't know what you didn't know. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. I invite you to sit back, relax, and tune into today's episode, reflect and recalibrate. Using emotional intelligence to close the year strong. As we've talked about recently, turning into the end of the year, closing out 2024, entering into 2025, there are just a certain number of things you as an entrepreneur, business owner, and owner operator, or personally, Should be doing and part of that is reflecting on the year past or this year to date really looking at how you might recalibrate and then kind of focus into the future for 2025 and we've talked a little bit about some of those pieces separately among some of the other podcasts and some of the other content and that is this idea that there's a reflection piece on on the last year. There's a moment in time now to do an annual planning or really to to think through what did this last year teach us. How do we then recalibrate reposition, pivot our strategy, put a plan in place, but do it through the lens of the next year, right? And again, there's a couple of different pieces to that. There's the reflection piece. There's the planning piece. There's the pivoting piece. And then there's the kind of move forward strategy. In terms of what is your business, what is your personal or professional life need as you think about being successful next year, all of those things are great in their own silos, but you really have to intertwine them together to make them a successful long term strategy to continue to be reached kind of your optimum potential in this episode. We're going to explore a little bit more how not just to do that, but what are the tools to help you do that most efficiently and effectively? And some of that comes down to emotional intelligence. We're gonna learn practical ways to use self-awareness, empathy and emotional regulation to close out this year on a high note, and then prepare ourselves for next year. So as we look back, we've, we've talked a bit about emotional intelligence or EQ in the past, and just to review that again, your eq, unlike your iq, you know, your IQ is. How do you do on tests? Right? If someone were to give you 100 standardized questions, what is your score? What is your standard deviation from the mean? You know, are you above average, below average, one or two standard deviations? Are you truly a genius or not so much? And IQ matters. But when we look at truly successful individuals in life in general, whether that's personal or professional, It's often the intersection between IQ and EQ that leads to that success. Meaning someone can have incredible emotional intelligence and not so great intellectual intelligence and be quite successful. Someone can have the opposite of that. Someone can be incredibly intelligent and have almost very little EQ and also be successful. But if you can truly blend the two and be You know, have both a reasonable IQ and a reasonable EQ that tends to create synergies that will take you beyond success right into starting to talk about compounding and generational wealth and truly, you know, being a difference maker and a disruptor in your space. And so, again, just EQ lives in a couple of different fashions. So. EQ involves your ability to have self awareness, self assessment. So how do you feel in given situations? Or how do you, how are you emotionally kind of engaged in situations? So your self awareness and situational awareness, so not just yourself, but also yourself in a situation. So yourself in a group or in an environment, or again, in a given situation. Other facets of emotional intelligence, going back to the prior podcast are self regulation. So not just an ability to be self aware. But then be able to do something about that. So you can be self aware that you're getting overly frustrated with a given individual or given situation. And if you don't have really great, what's called state management or your ability to truly self regulate your emotions and not take an emotional situation and turn it into an even more emotional situation, then that would be kind of a mark against having EQ. So EQ is not just self awareness and situational awareness. It's also your ability to self regulate. In the moments of self awareness and situational awareness. And finally, the other kind of pillar of EQ is that empathy piece, the ability to really build rapport, to align with others in a way that is both empathetic, compassionate, and in, in the fashion of a partnership, not in the fashion of a dictatorship, right? So emotional intelligence really involves those three key pillars, self awareness, self regulation, and empathetic communication. As I said, EQ then becomes, as you can imagine, a really important piece of the kind of reflection and recalibration as you swing from one year into the next, right? So in order to truly be reflective, you have to encompass some of these same skill sets. You have to have self awareness. You can't do a great job reflecting on your past year if you don't understand situational or self awareness, right? You, you probably are not seeing the forest. For the trees, so to speak, then this ability to self regulate again, some individuals who think about their past, especially things that may have been challenging in recent past may become emotionally dysregulated, you know, may become emotionally distraught. And what we don't want to do is we reflect is turn it into, again, some sort of emotional chaos. We want to be able to reflect on the, you know, on the recent past, what were our learnings from those situations? How do we think about that? Very clear headed and not from an emotional state. And how do we approach that as we think about recalibrating and pivoting into next year, right? So these, these same pillars of EQ are really important in how we view our, you know, how we perform our reflection and how we will likely come up with a strategy to pivot and recalibrate for next year. Looking just basically at reflection, you want to look or identify what were your wins, right? And what were your challenges, you know, or better put yes, being successful is great. And you should absolutely. Celebrate even small wins, right? That is something you should be doing with your team, with your family, you know, whoever you're whoever those individuals are around you that you want to share it with. So wins are important because we, as we've mentioned before, you're just naturally more likely to err on the side of negativity. Your brain is more likely to pick up on what you're saying. Risks and negatives and, and kind of the, the not so positive things, you know, sometimes up to 10 times more likely than something positive. So celebrating small wins is important. Identifying wins through the year is important, right? So you have to have a strong foundation of success and wins and accomplishments. And I guarantee you in this past year, you've had challenges. And again, when you kind of intersect the two, you come up with. One of my favorite words, which is opportunities, right? So you've had wins, you've had challenges and what then becomes your opportunities. And it's the opportunities that you then take into your recalibration. It's the opportunities that you take into next year. And by the way, next year doesn't just mean, Hey, we're, you know, we're doing this in November. And so we're going to hang a hat on what we've done. We're kind of kind of coast through the rest of the holiday. And next year is sometime. You know, after I've recovered from New Year's Eve, that's not the case if you're reflecting now and you're pivoting and recalibrating now for next year, that doesn't mean you shouldn't start thinking about or even putting into action some small steps now that will get you closer to your pivot or recalibration in 25, meaning it's unlikely that you're just going to flip a switch come January 3rd. And all of a sudden things will be different or all of a sudden your strategy will go into place. What you probably want to do is think about how do you within the next 4, 6, 8 weeks transition over so that when January 1st, 2nd, 3rd occurs, you can. You're already positionally ready to do what it is you're setting out to do. So again, reflection now and planning now doesn't mean a break until 2025. It just means now's the time to begin putting in the step, the strategy and the steps so that you enter 25 off to the right foot, recalibrating goals with emotional intelligence. As I said, when you think about not just reflection, EQ is important in reflection. It's also really important in goal recalibration. And that is again, just like we can skew towards the negative when we're thinking about forward looking goals and strategy. Sometimes negativity to come in, or we can, we can kind of sell ourselves short. Right? And so if you recall the amount you can change in any given one day, we often overestimate what we can change in a day or a week or a month and underestimate what we can achieve in a year. And so baby steps, chunking it down again, having that playbook and strategy, what were your lessons learned and how does that impact your playbook for next year? All of that is really critically important. So using the same kind of tools of EQ as we need to use with reflection, We need to also implement those or apply those to our recalibration for next year. We don't want to sell ourselves short. We don't want to overestimate and therefore set us up for failure in the first month or two. And we often underestimate what we'll achieve by the end of next year. If we stick to a plan and we're committed to that plan and goal and we write it down and we have a strategy against it. So just balancing that out and again, thinking about that through your EQ, self awareness, emotional regulation, and your ability to be empathetic and be able to communicate appropriately with your team because successful empathetic communication is ultimately where you're going to win with the change, right? Because if you, if your company is going to make a change and you're the CEO at the top. Do you think you need to be committed to the change? Or do you think your team needs to be committed and responsible and accountable for that change, right? So delegation is important here. And so your team has to have the same buy in and that comes down to the way in which you enroll them in your strategy and goal for next year, and that definitely involves having strong EQ other thing to think about, you know, if you are a company looking to grow, which if you're a company not looking to grow next year, uh, you might not be a company after next year. So growth mindset is important. Always at the forefront of who we are and what we do as entrepreneurs, and you can apply EQ to growth and motivation as well. Again, what do you think is more motivating optimism and positivity and having that ability to be empathetic, but also hold people accountable or the opposite of that? Right? And we think about motivation for teams. It often involves. Again, some of these very same pillars of EQ, um, as the team wants to feel part of something bigger, they want to feel part of a team and a community and a culture in the way in which you build that is often through again, rapport building, emotional intelligence and you and they're not. Dichotomous to one another, meaning you can have the appropriate amount of growth and motivation and expectations and a great culture, a great team and great rapport with your team. So using EQ and really enrolling your team through some of those same techniques becomes really important for success as you're looking to next year and what are your opportunities and what's your strategy and how are you recalibrating or pivoting from what you learned and reflected upon. From this past year, a couple of final practical tips here, there's this idea of building rituals for reflection and gratitude. We've talked a little bit about that before, you know, again, setting up that kind of core health set and mindset so that when you wake up every morning, the foundation is strong. We've talked about if you try to build. Rapid growth and large companies or whatever your goal is, if you're trying to build off of a cracked foundation, if you wake up every morning talking like Scrooge, the chances that you're going to achieve things beyond your wildest desires is low. You're less likely to do that, right? People who don't have strong EQ, people who are not optimist, people who do not work towards a team and a culture. Don't tend to get very far, right? So if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, do it with the team. And so building rituals of reflection and gratitude, what are you grateful for every morning? That could be mindfulness exercises. That could be journaling. That could be meditation. It could truly just be asking yourself a question every single morning. What am I grateful for? Right? As soon as your eyes open, it is not down the rabbit hole of negativity. It is what am I grateful for today? So building those rituals as part of your EQ and long term strategy will certainly help you be successful. We talked about communication and effective nonjudgmental kind of two way communication with teams is the number one way to build. To help again, build that strong foundation, because if you're going to get there, you're going to need to do it with your team and they're going to have to be bought in. And the way in which they often are bought in is around a strong leader with great EQ who helps to promote not degrade the culture of that organization. So effectively communicating with empathy and compassion and strong EQ with your teams and with your loved ones. And doing that on a regular cadence is really important to long term success. And then create steps where you can get to a clear action plan for next year. As I said, or as I've talked about many times in the past, the kind of goal or a wish without an actual strategy and plan is truly just a dream. Right. So, or, or, or will remain a wish. And so it's, it's great to dream. And certainly you want to dream outside your comfort zone and stretch and have audacious goals and you think big or dream big and you'll never get to big if you don't do something and chunk it down and use some of these tools to take it one day at a time to compound the interest or compound the investment inevitably gets to where you want to be, but you got to do it in baby steps and you got to start somewhere. So create a clear step by step plan with your team. And those plans or strategies need to be incredibly have immense amount of clarity. Meaning one of the kind of hardest things in change management, change management, as we think about how do we get from where we are today? Okay, we've reflected we've put a plan in place. We have a good strategy. We believe, but now you have to actually implement the changes. As I said, it's not a vacation from now until the end of the year. 1 of the clear pitfalls, or 1 of the things we see creating the biggest resistance to change or the least likely to be successful with change. Is just lack of absolute clarity around what the different steps are and mean, and that's as simple as it isn't a, we're going to do X by sometime next month. It is by this day in this time, we're going to do this specific thing, which is step one in our process of 10 steps to get to this end point by this date, by this time through this Avenue, right? So absolute clarity around timelines. So the, you know, it's really tough to hold your team or your loved ones accountable. If it's vague. Right. So make it incredibly specific and create unbelievable amounts of clarity around it so that there can't be questions later, or there can't be an actual accountability to it. In closing, as we think about how we reflect. And how we recalibrate, we really need to be tapping into some of these core ideas we've shared throughout the year that includes, you know, just incredibly grateful health set and mindset that strong ecosystem and foundation it then builds upon that using strong EQ. And that again becomes kind of the core pillars of communication, your ability to be situationally and self aware in this ability to have self regulation, the ability to actually be able to manage your emotional state. So you can make very clear, very concise, very important decisions about how you pivot, recalibrate and how you conquer 2025. A level up from how you conquer 2024. Thanks again for listening. Please like, subscribe, share the episode. Once again, I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. I'm here to teach you how to exist today. So you may expand tomorrow and create the ultimate end game of your wildest desires. Talk to you soon.