Tag Archive for: coaching

The Year End Review

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

 

 

As we approach the end of 2024, it’s tempting to dive straight into setting new goals for the new year without reflecting on the past. But what if a simple 10-minute practice of leveraging the success and wisdom from the past twelve months can confidently accelerate growth and happiness in 2025?  Would you take the 10-minutes to try it?

In this episode, I’m sharing one of my all-time favorite practices, the Year-End Review. For over a decade, this practice has guided me and countless others toward better decision-making, stronger relationships, and heightened performance. The best part is it’s based on proven success – your own – and it doesn’t require any expensive new strategies. 

Whether you’re an individual looking to grow or a team aiming for improving performance or alignment, this simple exercise is your ticket to extracting the wisdom from your past and using it to fuel a better future.

Why Reflection Is Essential

We often think our next breakthrough lies in the future, but our past holds invaluable clues. By reflecting on what worked, what didn’t, and the lessons we’ve learned, we can gain clarity,  uncover patterns, amplify successes, and course-correct missteps for the year ahead.

This practice of reflecting isn’t about dwelling on the past. It’s about celebrating wins, uncovering the gold in our mistakes, and crafting a success formula for the next year.

Real Results from Reflection

Take my client Jennifer, for instance. In her year-end review at the end of 2023, she noticed that her greatest professional wins stemmed from unexpected, genuine interactions.

You see, Jennifer loves sharing useful resources and recommendations with her clients. Whether that is a podcast on the topic her client mentioned or suggesting the best wine from a restaurant. Jennifer would make a meaningful connection with people. She realized that her simple act of authentically sharing resources with a CEO led her to have a recurring revenue stream worth several hundred dollars for 2 years.

Another is John, who recognized a leadership gap while running a manufacturing company. His newfound awareness prompted him to make pivotal changes, resulting in significant improvements.

Both Jennifer’s and John’s results were born out of reflection, which is a vital but often neglected step in our fast-paced lives.  

Now, let’s explore the year-end review exercise.

Four Steps Year-End Review

Step 1: List Your Wins and Celebrate Successes

I notice week to week in my conversations with people that we are really fast moving beyond our wins or not taking time to celebrate. It can be very unfulfilling to live that kind of life. So, it’s important to acknowledge your wins, celebrate your successes, and give yourself an opportunity to recognize who you have become along the way.

Start by jotting down 10-20 successes or experiences that made you feel good this past year. These can range from major milestones to small yet meaningful moments, personal or professional. From landing a dream client to sharing a memorable trip with loved ones or getting your child into a better-suited school, own your best moments and celebrate unapologetically.

Step 2: Acknowledge Mistakes and Setbacks

Next, list the mistakes, setbacks, and disappointments you encountered in this past year. What are those things that didn’t go your way? Maybe right now you are feeling sick and uncomfortable just thinking about it, but remember that those mistakes are crucial learning opportunities. Consider them a good thing, write them down, and learn from them to create better results next year.

Step 3: Extract Insights and Awareness

For each win and mistake, write down the insights or new awareness you gained. Consider what each experience taught you. An insight could be to assess where you need to leverage your time better or be aware that you were not able to delegate properly. Hence, your project failed. This step clarifies patterns and behaviors that either support or hinder you.

Step 4: Identify Themes and Create Your Success Formula

Finally, review your lists and identify 2 to 3 best themes and learnings from 2024 that you can leverage in the next year. What lessons are most significant? What behaviors led to success, and which ones slow down your progress? For instance, you might find that “When I commit to work with others, things happen” or “When I give myself permission to take a break, I am revived and can do better.” Summarize these to create your key success formula.

Beyond Reflection: Setting Goals and Taking Action

The year-end review is not just about looking back. It’s your success formula for future planning. Use them as your foundation in setting goals in the new year to ensure your goals are aligned with what truly drives your success and fulfillment.

Start Your Year-End Review Today

Begin your year-end review now by downloading the Year-End Review Exercise from the show notes. Spend ten minutes jotting down your initial thoughts, and revisit these questions over the next few days. By embracing this reflective practice, you set the stage for a more intentional, fulfilling, and successful year ahead.

Unlock your potential by leveraging the wisdom of your past. Today’s evolved leaders are using a different approach. You can too. See how this simple practice can transform your life in 2025 and beyond.

Additionally, if you are ready to play full out on your goals in 2025 and you’ve been toying with the idea of adding a coach to your team to support your growth in every area of work and life, I am opening limited slots for my 1:1 coaching to help you navigate the transition, build clarity and confidence, so that you can guarantee you live your ultimate future guided by your design.   Don’t miss out on this opportunity in the year ahead. Send me an email or book a connection call to see if this is right for you.

In this episode, I share how to:

  • Know when to take time to pause and reflect to amplify your growth.
  • Acknowledge your achievements that fuel momentum and fight stress and burnout.
  • Grow from the lesson of each misstep that can shape future success.

Resources and related episodes:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

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About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Inside Out Method, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

strong coach

How To Hire a Strong Coach In Your Corner

strong coach

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future.

 

Do you feel like life is going too fast? Are you tolerating things?  Perhaps you’re going through a transitional phase, or, as a leader, you understand more than ever that it’s lonely at the top.

Imagine how great it would feel to have someone by your side, offering support, and lifting some of that weight off your shoulders. No matter who you are and what stage of your career, business, or life, every one of us deserves to have a strong coach in our corner.

In this episode, I’m sharing what it’s like to receive professional coaching when it’s a good time to hire a coach, and how to identify a strong coach that’s right for you. I’m giving you the gritty and remarkably relevant information you need to know and what those driven to excel are doing differently, so you can achieve your own success. 

Not all coaches are the same.

With varying levels of experience, expertise, methodologies, and styles, the sheer number of options can sometimes feel overwhelming. However, the one common goal shared by all coaches is to help you achieve results more efficiently and with less difficulty than if you were doing things on your own.

When looking for the right coach, knowing what results you want from the process is imperative to determine which type of coach you need.

The Business Coach

A business coach helps you set goals, identify opportunities, and grow your business. Unlike a consultant or boss, a coach holds you accountable and draws out your expertise, experience, and insights. They enable you to see beyond the day-to-day tasks to better understand your business.

The Health Coach

A health coach helps you achieve greater energy and vitality. They assist in developing a strategy for optimal health and hold you accountable. There are various subsets within this category, such as weight coaches and strength coaches, so clarity about your specific goals will make it easier to identify the right health coach for you.

The Personal Life Coach

A life coach is dedicated to helping you overcome both visible and invisible limitations. They assist in increasing self-awareness and eliminating repetitive self-sabotaging patterns or blind spots holding you back. The goal of a personal life coach is to align your life with your priorities, ensuring that all areas of your life are in balance. 

The Leadership Coach

A leadership coach helps you develop the skills to stay motivated, even in challenging times, and positively influence those around you. Personal life coaching and leadership are interconnected because you can’t lead beyond who you are. The extent to which you expand yourself and increase self-awareness directly correlates with your leadership growth, enabling you to support others in reaching higher performance levels.

So, what exactly does a strong coach do?

Coaches are guides to help bring forth your wisdom, your expertise, your existing levels of intelligence, and the resources you already have. They help you achieve higher-level results with less pain and in less time than if you did it alone. Strong coaches engage you in a way that encourages you to show up as a higher version of yourself, to think bigger, and to unleash your potential.

There are five qualities of a strong coach:

  1. They focus on and get real results for their clients.
  2. They support and challenge you in equal measure.
  3. They listen and ask questions that evoke new ideas and expose opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise.
  4. They have their own coach and continue to grow themselves.
  5. They reflect you accurately, rather than project themselves and their own values onto you. 

The most important criteria for finding the right coach is not who has the most training, certifications or the most followers but who is the best fit for you.

To start your search, reach out to your place of work or ask others if they’ve worked with a coach. When conversing with a coach, ask questions about their methodology or style to determine if it aligns with your goals. Do they meet in the way you want to meet? Do they have one-on-ones or group coaching? Who is their ideal client?

How to know it’s a good time to hire a coach:

  1. You feel stuck. Some category of your life is off, and you can’t progress using the same means as you have in the past.
  2. You’re ready to get to the next level. You’re already successful but want to elevate or expand your abilities.
  3. You’re in a position of leadership. You need new ideas, thoughts, perspectives, and someone to challenge you.
  4. You’re in a transitional period. This can be a divorce, a birth, a death, or a number of things.
  5. You want to change a specific area of your life. This can be a habit or something that is holding you back.
  6. You’re experiencing burnout. The way you live isn’t sustainable, or you’re indecisive and unable to take action.
  7. Fear is getting the better of you. It’s thwarting you and not allowing you to move forward.

Many believe they should be able to do everything on their own. However, this mindset can be a hindrance to personal growth and fulfillment. Putting yourself into a silo limits progress, enjoyment, and overall experience. Our brains often resist change and uncertainty, leading us to believe that things won’t work out. To overcome this, we must ask ourselves, “What if it did work out?” and explore the potential positive outcomes to move past stagnation and allow ourselves to move forward.

Hiring the right coach for you can be one of the most rewarding and life-changing experiences. Let this be the year you come alive and think bigger about yourself and what you have to add to every aspect of your life.

In this episode, I share:

  • What it’s like to receive professional coaching and how to determine which type of coach you need to achieve your goals
  • The five characteristics of a strong coach and the #1 criteria for choosing the best coach for you
  • The significant signs that it’s time to hire a coach and how you can overcome the mental block of needing to do everything on your own

Resources and related episodes:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

michael quinlan

What Does It Take To Transform with Michael Quinlan

michael quinlan

Listen to the full podcast episode to learn about the science-backed practice that has not only changed my life but also the lives of countless people over the last two decades. This is something you can’t ignore if you want to achieve that great goal you identified for this year and write your new future. I’m incredibly excited to have Michael Quinlan with us for this episode. Michael is a regional vice president of sales at SAP, a transformational leader, a father, and a man I’ve had the pleasure of knowing for several years.

 

Michael is passionate about personal development and has a willingness to consider things from a different vantage point, even if it humbles his ego. After attending the SAP Masters program for leadership in London, he published a paper on transformational leadership called What Does it Take to Transform? Michael is joining us to share his story of personal and professional transformation and what leaders can do to evolve themselves and those they serve. 

“My journey into leadership was something that I really never had intended.” – Michael Quinlan

Michael had always envisioned himself as a salesperson who would make his career out of taking down big deals. After 20 years in his role and accomplishing the goals he wanted to achieve as an individual contributor, he had the itch for something more. When he realized the impact he could make by helping others in his company, he decided to step into a leadership position but quickly hit a wall.

“The training that we received was minimal at best. […] There was never any development around what it takes to lead and motivate and develop a team. So my leadership style, since I really didn’t have one, was just imitating what I had seen from leaders that had been over me in the past.” – Michael Quinlan

It’s common for people who excel as individual contributors to step into a leadership role and struggle because they lack the skill set to motivate and develop others on their team. Often, they rely on hand-me-down leadership approaches without fully understanding their purpose.

Then Michael came across the SAP master’s program on leading sales transformation.

“Transformational leadership is absolutely showing up in front of your team with trust and with vulnerability. In order for somebody to feel like they can transform, you really have to do it yourself first.” – Michael Quinlan

Transformational leadership requires self-evaluation, personal growth and actively engaging with your team to create a supportive environment. When you care for your employees and help them overcome their weaknesses, you build trust and increase productivity and performance.

“The hardest thing to do in coaching is to not give the answer.” – Michael Quinlan

Bosses give the answer; coaching managers ask questions that prompt self-reflection and empower the individual. This approach enables employees to take ownership of their words and actions and fosters personal development. When we give the answers, we reinforce an individual’s insecurity and uncertainty, taking away their power and making them more dependent on us.

There are three obstacles to transformational leadership inside a corporation:

  1. Mislabeling the type of problem
  2. Corporate hierarchies and centralizing decision-making
  3. The perception of risk

“People in middle management positions can have a big impact on the world that we live in.” – Michael Quinlan

Middle managers bridge the gap between resource-rich corporations and individuals who can execute the initiatives that would create positive change. It becomes disconcerting when these corporations have the resources to make these changes happen but aren’t willing to transform.

In a survey of 3,400 people, 70% said that their mental health is as influenced by their boss as by their spouse.

We need to acknowledge the level of influence we have to empower and bring out the best in our employees. By bravely stepping into the role and embracing vulnerability, we enable others to follow suit.

In this episode, we discuss:

  • Michael’s journey into leadership and the challenges he faced
  • The principles of transformational leadership and how they can positively impact teams and organizations
  • The three major obstacles preventing us from the transformative change in the workplace
  • Michael’s advice for transformation as an individual, leader, and team

Resources and related episodes:

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts for more tips, tools, and inspiration to lead the optimal vision of your life, love, and leadership. Remember, a half version of you is not enough. The world needs the fullest version of you at play.

Listen on Apple Podcasts

___

About Rita Hyland

With over 20 years of experience as an executive and leadership coach, Rita helps leaders — emerging and established — excel in corporate and entrepreneurial environments.

Rita believes if leaders were more clear about how transformation really works and more intentional about creating what they want, their impact, success, and influence in the world would be unstoppable.

Through her coaching programs, private coaching, and masterminds, Rita shows leaders how to win consistently and create the impact and legacy they desire.

Central to Rita’s work is the understanding that you will never outperform your current programming, no matter how strong your willpower.

When you learn to use Rita’s proprietary Neuroleadership Growth Code, a technology that uses the best of neuroscience and transformational psychology to hit the brain’s buttons for change, YOU become both the solution and the strategy.

Her mission is to end talented, hard-working, and self-aware leaders spending another day stuck in self-doubt or confusion and not contributing their brilliant work and talent the world so desperately needs.

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