Finish the Year Strong: No More, Many More, and Planning for 2027

Can I say it? It's after the first of November. It's the hap-happiest time of the year. Can I say it? Remember that Andy Williams song? When I was a kid, he said, it's the hap-happiest time.

I just love that song. And all the radio stations are playing Christmas music, some of them anyway, right now. Must be that time. By the way, if you're under 25 years old, a radio station is, ever drive down the road, see these big, tall antennas?

Forget it. I'll explain that later. I had a client today. He said a couple of days ago, he said, Scott, it's time for some year in planning. I usually do it in November.

Do you have ideas you can help me with? I've had him about six months. I said, yes, sir, I can. And I will. That's today's show. Help you too. It is a daily boost from motivation to move.com.

The positive boost you need every single day to grow your life and to grow your business. That's what I do as a guy who's basically been a producer my entire life, radio, TV, business production, all kinds of things like that. It's kind of what I do. Always been a guy that people come to and they go, Hey man, I got this idea.

I want to start a show. I want to start a business. I want to make my life better. Can you help me? And I said, yes. And I put the producer hat on. I come in and I kind of wrangle it all together and I help you put the pieces together, pull the resource together and essentially produce your life.

You get to do it. We all get to have fun together, right? That's kind of what I've been doing. And over the years, I've learned something. I've learned that the people that are most capable, that are most successful in reaching their goals, that kind of get all the things that maybe you want, you already have.

I don't know who's listening right now. But those people you look at and say, they got their act together. And let's, can we get a little just materialistic? They got the car, man.

They're making some money. Life is good. They're taking vacations. What are they doing that I'm not doing? Is that real enough for you? Well, I'll tell you what they're doing.

They're doing planning. And most of those people are planning in November. And the reason I do it is because I can see the year beginning to unwind. I want to get my planning done.

I want to kind of know what happened this year and I want to know where I'm heading next year. But I know that after Thanksgiving, I'm going to get busy. I want to relax and just kind of enjoy my family and the holiday season. Right.

And then in December or January, I want to get busy and get it done. So that's what we'll do today. We're going to go through that a little bit as much as I can. We're going to try to create the average perfect year.

Now, when I say average perfect year, what I mean is that on average, if your years could be pretty good, you kind of have a perfect life, wouldn't you?

So we just want to create that, but we do that by planning in advance. By the way, I am doing a lot of that with my clients right now. My personal clients, we're going through that heavy duty, my inner circle, the same thing, even deeper level. But a place you may want to start is someplace we're doing every Thursday at 11 a.m. Eastern time.

That's my school group called Face Your Passion. It's legitimately put together for you to come in and work really hard for about 90 minutes a week with me live. I don't care if you do anything else, work live, you're getting up to the homework assignments, and then you're going to go off and do your own thing for the week and come back and meet again. Put together for that.

For the month of November, we are moving in on year-end planning. We're going to get you ready for next year. So it's a great place to start. FaceYourPassion.com.

All right, let's get into this. This will be very different. If you're the kind of person who wants the typical hack, the typical Reddit list, the typical Instagram, TikTok thing about how to plan your year, you will be very unhappy with this show.

Why is that? Because that doesn't work for anybody. I mean, it works a little bit here or there, but we want things to work really well. And there are certain things in life, certain things in the universe.

If you're a believer in God, there's a certain rule set that you probably ought to follow, right? Guys, there are certain things that work. You might like to break the law every single day in your community, but eventually you're going to get busted. Eventually that doesn't work.

We just all know in our heart, there are things that work and things that don't work. And people try to take the easy, fast way out and it just doesn't hold up.

So I tend to go the other way. I tend to build, you know, some of the stuff in the ritualistic behaviors that I like. I know those things have to work. You got to be disciplined.

You got to execute all that kind of stuff. And you got to plan. So when I plan, I accept something. I accept that we are humans and we are emotional creatures to begin with.

And it doesn't matter how much we decide to execute. It doesn't matter how much we decide to do what we need to do, how disciplined we get. As soon as the emotions get in the way, we are foobarred.

Just accept it. That's how it is. Now in the world of coaching, what I'm about to go through might be called an untangling moment. And what I want to do is untangle the year, untangle your thinking.

And this is where I'll start with everybody. So I'll tell you what I do today. I can't go too deep. I only got nine, 10 minutes here, but I'll go deep enough.

The first thing I like to do is debrief the year. So let me put a heading on this. I do a retrospective year-end debrief. Retrospective is a word you'll hear me say a lot.

I'm one of the few that says it. If they say it, they're copying me. I'm just going to say it. I've been saying this for many, many years now. And here's why I do it.

Because it made sense to me that if I look back over my shoulder for 2026 and retrospectively just say, well, how do I feel about what I did this year?

Not what goals had accomplished, not how much money I made. That stuff's going to be there anyway. But how do I feel about what I did? I mean, I set off and lived a whole year.

I presumably was going after something. Did I get it? Did I not get it? Did I make a mistake? What was I thinking? All that stuff. I'm just looking at the year.

If I did a whole year and it went great, do I want to do it again or do I want to make some changes? So retrospectively, I'm just kind of untangling. And I've got to tell you, if you were to talk to me personally, I'd want to know that from you.

And I'd put my little radar up and I'd start reading between the lines and I would hear what you're saying. So I'm asking you to do the same thing for yourself.

How do you do this? You sit down with a piece of paper on the computer, whatever you want to do. Write a paragraph or two, a page. Don't work too hard at it.

Don't overthink it. Don't make it a masterpiece. That's not a manifesto. It's just a little thought about how I felt about what happened this year. That's the first step.

The second step is to what I call prospectively create what's coming. This is a natural human thing. We use the big words around here, don't we? It's a thing.

It's a natural human thing. Basically, you have the ability to prospectively create what's in front of you. My cat can't do that. My dog can't do that.

They can't get out of bed in the morning because prospectively, I think I'll create a bigger food bowl. You can. You can go to the store and buy one. So since we just looked over a shoulder and retrospectively, we have kind of summed up what happened this past year.

We have the ability to respectively say, well, okay, that's fine. What would I like to do instead? Or what would I like to continue? What would I decorate coming in 2027?

Notice I'm not worried about exactly the goals. I'm not worried about the steps. I'm just going to think, well, from a feeling standpoint, we're all feeling critters, creatures.

At least now I'm grounded. It's like, where is Waldo? I know where I am on the map, right? It's like going to, remember shopping malls? And you see that big sign that says you are here and there's a dot where you are.

We're trying to find the dot right now. This kid's in shopping malls. What's a shopping mall? It's weird. Is that what they call Amazon? I don't know.

So retrospectively, we look over the past year. Prospectively, we can say, what would we like to create in the coming year? Now, here's where it gets a little fun. And we're still not getting real tactical, still not going down the rabbit hole of the actual things you want to do yet.

Because first, we've got to build a foundation. Most people just list the materialistic things, the goals they have, having no foundation for all the other things that are going on in your life, including relationships and how much money you make and all that stuff. They go so fast at the tactical, they can't get things done.

So after I've retrospectively looked over the past year, and now I'm prospectively looking forward, and I know what I want to create now, what I'd like to do,

I have what I call my no mores. I learned this a long time ago, and this is why it's positioned here. I just learned a very long time ago, I could ask you what you want to do next year. And if we talk more than about two minutes, you'll start saying, well, you know what I don't want to do?

I had these clients. I had this thing. I can't believe it took me a year to get out of it. You'll tell me what you don't want anymore. So I'm just getting to the, I'm cutting to the chase as I call it, right?

I'm just saying, all right. Looking over your shoulder last year. What do you don't want anything to do with anymore? Is it a job? Is it a relationship?

What is it? Is it where you live? Is it a lack of money? Is it too much money? God forbid that could happen. Is it possible? What is it? What do you want anything more?

Listen, if you don't know, it's like, I love to say this. Ask a divorced woman what she wants in her new man. She'll say, I'll tell you what I don't want. So I'm saying, what don't you want anymore?

Let's be honest about it, okay? Scott, that's too negative. I could care less what you say. We're not going to leave it there. We're going to leave it in a positive.

But if we don't have some negativity in terms of looking at what's really bad, acknowledge it for bad. We don't want it anymore. We can't fix it, can we?

So that's why it's there. It's in the third position. Just what do you not want anymore? And finally, what I call my many mores. Let me bring the common sense to you.

It just makes sense to me. What we should do to be happy in life is pretty much find the things that we do that make us happy and do them a lot more. Call me silly.

Call me simple. I'll take it all day, every day. It just makes sense. If you got out of bed every single day and you explored your passions and you figured out what just kind of made you happy, made you tick all day long, and you did it more, you'd probably be happier.

You don't believe me? So just think about it this way. You get out of bed every single day and you do stuff you hate to do all day long and you decide you want to do more of it. How's your life going to be?

Are you with me yet? This is what Face Your Passion is all about, by the way. This is why I go this direction. This is nothing that I just made up. This is 60 plus years of me paying attention, 25 plus years of me watching people and seeing the actual impact.

This is years and years and years of clients that I've worked with directly. My average client length for that retention length is about eight years. I have worked with people in their lives and in their businesses for a very long period of time. I've had the chance to kind of relax and to chill and to go through multiple Christmases and multiple New Year's and multiple summer vacations and to see it eventually click.

So do I need to plead with you? Maybe, but it doesn't matter. You're not going to listen anyway. I'm just telling you, if you want to create the average perfect year, it starts with an average perfect day.

And we'll talk about that on another show at some point, okay? But at the end of the day, you're an emotional person. You were born that way. You're not ever going to get away from that.

So if we emotionally just look at the year retrospectively and say, how did I do? And then prospectively start to create something in front of us. And we simply say no more on certain things and just be honest about it. Don't get mad.

Don't get crazy. Just decide. Just got to make a change. That's all it is. And then many more. What do I want? If you can lean into this just a little bit, I promise you if you'll do this this week, it'll change how you think about your planning.

And if you want, join my Face Your Passion group. Go to faceyourpassion.com. It's on school. We'll be there at 11 a.m. on Thursday teaching this in-depth along with a whole lot more and then working with you directly to make sure you get it right.