An Exercise for Success in 2015

It’s amazing how quickly that calendar year flips. For months, 2015 felt like it was far off in the distance. And then suddenly we’re signing a cheque with a “5” at the end.

And that’s when we realized that we hadn’t really taken the time to reflect on 2014. It’s something that we’ve talked about in the past: how important it is to take stock of the previous year’s running season (especially what worked) as a way of building a foundation for next year’s success.

But here we were going into the second week of 2015, and we still hadn’t yet had our personal year-end reflection/celebration. The wake-up call came from our friend Kira Schoch, who is also a Certified Executive Coach and owner of local leadership consulting firm:

Kira sent us the following exercise with the title “Celebrating 2014”. Kira writes:

Take a pen and a piece of paper. Write down the things that went well for you last year. Narrow the list down to three. Now here’s the hard part…cross two off the list until you come to the one thing you feel had the most positive impact on your life. Write one or two sentences describing how it served you last year and how you can sustain or build on the impact of that experience in 2015. List two activities and one person to support you. Happy 2015!

Now maybe your list won’t include running. But maybe it will. For many of us, running is not only a great way to stay in shape, it’s also a symbol of deep personal accomplishment with a lot of life lessons thrown in. Whether it’s a first-ever 5K or a Boston Qualifying marathon time, we prove something to ourselves through our running.

So, if you haven’t yet put an exclamation point on 2014, give that exercise a try. Maybe you’ll find that a running event ends up at the top of your list (it did for us) and that what you’ve learned from that experience will set you up for success in 2015. Or maybe what you’ve learned from your other accomplishments will help you with running!

Either way it’s a great start to 2015!