As we near the end of 2017, it’s a great time to reflect on all that’s happened. Being the creative person I am, I crave artistic rituals that help me authentically honor my experiences. I thought I’d invite you into my process this year to help give you some ideas, especially if you’re looking for a ritual that focuses on your internal process and successes rather than the extrinsic rewards we’re conditioned to strive for.

Since 2008 I’ve made a fun Year-in-Review Exploding Box – a fantastic (and flamboyant!) visual structure for celebrating your year, especially if you’ve had an “explosive” year full of exciting milestones. I’ve loved it as a way to capture many of my “external” accomplishments over the years. I’ll share a link below.

2017, however, has been a much more introspective both by design and by circumstance. I experienced several losses, including the devastating loss of my dad to cancer. I also let go of a program I ran for years to proactively invite more spaciousness and simplicity into my work. I got booted out of my beloved studio when the building got bought, which meant I lost my creative sanctuary where I was painting through my grief.

While these and other losses this year have been challenging and some quite painful, they’ve also brought some relief, and much growth and transformation. I knew my ritual needed to honor not only my losses but also the gifts that are blooming as I let go and consciously shed old ways. I also wanted it to be organic to symbolize life’s impermanence.

Loss and Letting Go Leaves

I found a branch on the ground that was the perfect form and size for what I’d been envisioning. It’s like it was waiting there just for me! Then I picked a few fresh leaves from a tree for my “letting go” leaves.

I punched the fresh leaves with a special shaped paper punch to create smaller leaves. Then on each leaf I wrote something I’d lost or let go of this year.

Next, I used a needle and thread to tie each leaf to the branch.

I spent some time journaling about the losses, what I’ve learned from them, and how they’ve helped to change me.

I’ve been letting the leaves dry and at the very end of the year I plan to let them go in a ceremony out in my yard so they can return to the earth.

Blooming and Becoming Blossoms

Next, I punched out pink and yellow blossoms from construction paper using a flower shaped punch. On each blossom I wrote what has grown out of shedding old ways or a gift from loss – intangibles like: ease, self-compassion, simplicity, exquisite self-care, deeper relationships plus tangibles like: awesome VIP clients, online licensing, leveraging existing resources, and learning to play the ukulele ;).

Then I strung blossoms together with yarn and tied them to the branches near the losses they related to.

It’s been so helpful for me to see how letting things go creates room for new things to bloom and to journal about what I’m learning and what I’m opening up to.

Once I let the loss leaves go, I’ll keep the branch with the blossoms to remind me of who I am becoming.

Prompts for your own end of year reflection

What ritual will you create to reflect on your year? What losses are important to acknowledge? What outer success will you celebrate? What inner successes are blooming? And most importantly, who are you becoming?

Think of metaphor or symbol that would honor your experiences and accomplishments. Perhaps something like what I’ve described here will inspire you to lovingly witness your inner journey. Or if you want something to celebrate a bold and big year, check out my Exploding Box Year-in-Review video class.

Here’s to a wonderful new year!

Lots of you look to self-help materials for guidance and growth. We benefit from other people’s knowledge and expertise, the trials and tribulations that they’ve already worked through, the systems and processes developed over time, the staffing considerations, the software and hardware they’ve already tested, the marketing that has worked for them, and the techniques they use the solutions they recommend.

The programs available to you are tremendously varied, covering topics from mindset to balancing your budget to doing hot yoga and fixing your car. They’re also delivered in a myriad of ways from hardcover books to DVDs and videos and online training in order to make it easy for you.

The reasons for the huge self-help industry include the endless search for the quick fix to a desire to do it yourself to a real thirst for knowledge. The common thread through many programs is the requirement that you do the work on your own. The question then becomes, how to you add yet another task to your already full plate?

The best of intentions surround your desire to do the work, but how many of you actually crack open the self-help materials, much less get through the programs, much less put the suggestions into action. The percentage is quite small.

If you’re reading this post, you’re likely a right-brain businessperson. You’re a creative and you’re in service to others. It also probably means your plate is overfull. You have good intentions to help everyone AND get some self-help squeezed in between serving others. Yet, you end up feeling overextended and overwhelmed. Your heart is in the right place, but your reality and your 24 hours are not synching up.

In an earlier post, I wrote about owning your time. So hold off adding anything else to your plate. Instead, this holiday season I’d like to recommend not self-help, but “elf” help.

Turn to the elves around you and ask for help getting all the seasonal stuff done. And I don’t mean the imaginary elves, I mean your friends, family, colleagues, contractors. From cleaning your house to cooking your meals to shopping and decorating, there are people who can help you just as you help others all year long.

You need to recharge yourself in order to create and to serve. You need to take care of yourself before taking care of everybody else. Remember the flight attendants tell you to put on YOUR oxygen mask FIRST. So offload some of those tasks and put yourself first for a change.

If you choose to do the same way you’ve always done it you could easily end up starting the new year exhausted and mentally shut down. Remember that you have the power of choice. You could choose to do everything yourself, and, ultimately pay the consequences. Instead, I seriously recommend that you choose to ask for elf help and delegate a number of tasks in front of you. That way you have time to enjoy the season, and get that recharge you desperately need.

Cass Mullane is an artist with an MBA. Cass Mullane’s calm, comfortable approach consistently yields positive results for clients. Her business and personal coaching practice, www.ProsperCreatively.com, specializes in delivering solid left brain business skills to right brainers and creatives in a fun, visual way. She’s a best selling author, a contemporary abstract artist and creator of the Cool Stuff Jar™ Retreats.You can also visit Cass on Facebook!

I’ve just returned from leading my first overseas retreat in beautiful Barcelona. It was a delightful adventure and I will definitely do overseas retreats again. There’s nothing like a complete change of scenery to help you lift your head up and look at your business and your life more clearly.

The purpose of the retreat was two-fold: 1) to get the attendees out of their regular environments and routines to allow them to clear their minds and give them an opportunity to really look at their world with fresh eyes, and 2) to introduce them to the joys of Barcelona.

The group that attended was comprised of businesswomen with varied backgrounds and levels of experience. Some were solopreneurs, some were parts of larger teams. All were exploring options in an effort to make changes and to move ahead.

Barcelona is a beautiful, vibrant city that combines art and business in a most elegant fashion. Centuries old buildings sitting adjacent to wonkily stacked modern apartments challenges our normal architectural expectations. Being in an urban environment with small food markets and cafes on practically every corner provides a different neighborhood experience for many of us. The sights, smells and sounds were unfamiliar and forced our brains to fire on different cylinders.

I took advantage of this during my three business workshops. I asked people to look carefully at their mindsets, the people they spent the most time with, their teams, and at what was really most important to them. I also asked them to identify a few specific action items to take back and accountability partners to ensure they took the actions they said they were going to take. Because they were in an unfamiliar place, their minds were already open and ready to consider new thoughts and possibilities. The result was deeper introspection, more laser focus on what was really important to them, a lot of ‘ahas’ and a lot of openness to making changes when they returned to the States.

What do you do to step back and take an unbiased look at your business and your life? How to do clear your mind to strategically consider what your next steps will be? While you do not need to travel all the way to Barcelona, where will you go to have a retreat to focus on your business for 2018, even if it’s only with yourself?

Normally, the fourth quarter is when you should make time to think about the coming year and lay out your plan for success. In order be most effective, I would highly recommend that you get out of your normal environment, clear your mind and carve out time specifically for dreaming and planning. Then, laser in on what’s really important to you and build a plan to start moving in that direction.

Cass Mullane is an artist with an MBA. Cass Mullane’s calm, comfortable approach consistently yields positive results for clients. Her business and personal coaching practice, www.ProsperCreatively.com, specializes in delivering solid left brain business skills to right brainers and creatives in a fun, visual way. She’s a best selling author, a contemporary abstract artist and creator of the Cool Stuff Jar™ Retreats.You can also visit Cass on Facebook!

Guest post by by Lisa Dolce, Right-Brain Business Plan® Licensed Facilitator,

Can you imagine what your business and life would be like if you spent most of your day doing things you are naturally good at and totally enjoy?

Pretty sweet, right?

And for us heart-centered folks using our gifts is what gives our work the most meaning.  Yet many of us spend loads of time, money, and brain energy on seminars, podcasts, webinars and other ways to “fix” our weaknesses.

What would happen if we used that time and money to develop our gifts and talents instead?

Turns out a pathway to success:

• Studies show that the #1 success factor for business leaders is knowing your strengths and focusing on the strengths in others.
• People who focus on their strengths are 3x more likely to be engaged in their jobs, and are 6x more productive in those jobs.
• From a neuroscience standpoint, working in your zone of genius engages the area of the brain that creates ease, flow, creativity and joy. (By contrast, focusing on your weaknesses can easily put you in fight or flight mode!)

So how can YOU maximize your strengths in business?

First thing’s first: You need to clearly articulate what your gifts and talents are.

Here are a few questions to get your wheels turning:

• What do people come to you for?
• What did you like to do as a child?
• What is your soul calling you to do?

You can also brainstorm your gifts and talents by making a list of activities where you:

• Felt energized, in the flow, and excited to do it again
• Did something no one taught you to do
• Did something that you couldn’t believe you got paid for doing!

For a deeper dive, I recommend checking out a formal assessment like the Clifton StrengthsFinder.

Once you have a list of your strengths, notice how you use them in your day to day work. Watch how easily your tasks seem to flow—and how much happier and more productive you feel.

The next step is to think about how you can use your strengths more intentionally. Think about how can you apply them in other areas of your business to make your work even easier?

And a word about those pesky weaknesses…manage around them. Start by delegating tasks that drain your energy and you will watch your productivity soar.

For years I dreaded doing my bookkeeping. I would procrastinate to the point where I would have to spend days organizing papers to meet IRS deadlines. Finally, I hired someone whose strength was working with numbers, and it changed everything. Best of all, it wasn’t as costly as I thought it might be, and it left me free to work in my zone of genius, which brought in enough income to pay for the service several times over.

Each of us has been blessed with gifts that are uniquely ours. Within these gifts lies our greatest power and potential to make an impact—not only in our business but in the lives of those we serve.

When you tap into gifts and strengths, you can transform not only your life but the lives of those around you.

Just imagine: how beautiful could the world be if all of us were operating from our best selves?

Lisa Dolce is a Strengths Coach, Business Mentor and Licensed Facilitator of the Right Brain Business Plan ®. She is the founder of The Launch Studio and loves to help sensitive entrepreneurs start and grow soul centered-businesses that make a deep and lasting impact in this world.

I’ve had the pleasure of working with several clients who develop and present online training. My job has been to take a look at their programs with a fresh set of eyes either before they launch, or afterwards, and present my assessment and suggestions. I truly enjoy this work as it is stimulating both in content and in intellectual challenge.

One thing I found to be consistent across these clients is the question of whether or not they were targeting the right people with the right program. Sometimes the audience was perfect, but the content missed the mark. Other times the content was solid, but they were marketing to the wrong audience.

One of my clients specialized in transitioning senior executives from the corporate world into their own consulting practices. He had developed a webinar series on where to find clients and how to build a successful business infrastructure. His marketing was directed at senior executives who were looking for a change and he had a number of people register for his training.

Yet the clients were not satisfied with the training. Why? Because, these were people who were currently employed and who did not know what to do in advance of their transition. For example, most of them were used to having support teams (like admin, IT, accounting) always available to them. When they left their positions, suddenly they had to go out and find that support fast or spend their valuable time doing it themselves. Neither was an optimal solution.

What my client did was develop an additional webinar series that suggested things to do, like lining up admin, IT and accounting contractors, before his clients left their organizations for the world of entrepreneurship. Once he made ‘what to do before you leave’ part of his training, his client satisfaction, and client retention, went up. He had the right audience and his content was right for the audience.

In addition, my client changed up his marketing to specifically target executives who had already left the corporate world, but who were experiencing difficulties running their businesses because they were not fully prepared to be the boss. He used language that hit the pain points of leaving a fully structured and staffed organization for the wild world of lean and nimble entrepreneurship. He tweaked his existing content a little and repurposed it for a different audience. Again, his client satisfaction went up as did his retention. He had hit that marketing sweet spot of delivering the right content to the right audience.

Who is your perfect audience? Have you spent the time to clearly identify who they are, what their pain points are and what you can do to help eliminate their pain?

Also, given your current client base (or the audience you’d like to develop), what is it that they actually need in terms of content? Is what you’re currently delivering (or developing), meeting that mark or are you a little off base?

This is the time when you ask for help, a fresh set of eyes. When you’ve developed your own content, often you’re too close to it to have an impartial view of its effectiveness. Find someone who is seriously competent in your field, who has strong business sense and who will tell you the truth. Then listen to what they say and decide whether or not you will make the suggested tweaks or revamps.

When you take the time to carefully and thoughtfully identify your ideal audience for your content and the ideal content for you audience, you will improve your odds of success.

Cass Mullane’s calm, comfortable approach consistently yields positive results for clients. Her business and personal coaching practice, www.ProsperCreatively.com, specializes in delivering solid left brain business skills to right brainers and creatives in a fun, visual way. She’s a best selling author, a contemporary abstract artist and creator of the Cool Stuff Jar™ Retreats.You can also visit Cass on Facebook!

Guest post by Cass Mullane, The Artist with an MBA, Right-Brain Business Plan® Licensed Facilitator, Prosper Creatively, LLC

Here’s a stat you need to be aware of: People who have multiple windows open on their laptops, switch between their windows an average of 37 times per hour. That’s an interruption just about every minute and a half!

Add in the constant notifications from your various devices and it’s no wonder you cannot keep focused on your tasks at hand. I say it’s high time to make a mindset change and take back ownership of your time.

Day to Day Ops

I’d really like you to lift your head up from your screens and push back from your desk. Take a long, deep breath, slowly blink and refocus your eyes. Then, look around your world. If you’re spending your day working on the minutia of running your business, you’re not the boss. You’re letting the business run you.

If you’re the boss, you should be focusing on the big picture, not the day to day operations. Are you the only one who can type? Are you the only one who can post on social media? Are you the only one who can enter a transaction? Are you the only one who can make an appointment? No.

If you’re the boss, are you the one who shapes the vision for your business? Are you the one who establishes your core values as they apply to your business? Are you the final decision maker? Yes.

Then why you would simply give away so much of your unique talent and valuable time on tasks that others can do?

To further refine your time ownership, there is a fundamental mindset shift that you need to make. You need to know what it is that only you can do. This means that you need to look closely at all the tasks that you encounter in a day, a week, a month, a quarter and truly discern what it is that only you can do.

For example, I am the only person who can make my art. I am the only person who can do my podcast. I am the only person who can deliver my keynotes. I am the only one responsible for leadership of my tribe. I am the only one in charge of designing content in my workshops and webinars. I am the only one who can coach my clients directly. I am the only one in charge of my own thoughts and actions. I am the only one who sets the bar for expectations and standards. I am the only one who can set priorities and the direction for my company.

This means that I should spend the majority of my time doing only these things.

What is it that only you can do in your business? Go ahead and make a list.

Look at that list carefully. Have you included items like bookkeeping or managing your own website? If you have, and you’re not in the bookkeeping or site management business, then look inside. Is there a fear or trust issue that you may need to deal with? Do you really believe that no one could do it better than you… not even a professional? Please rethink that assumption and take those things you can hire contractors to do off your list and put them on a list of things to outsource.

If you’re hung up on not having the money to pay someone, you might need to revise your mindset. Henry Ford said “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.” If you think you can’t pay someone, you’re right. If you tell yourself that you can’t do it, then it’s pretty certain that you won’t do it. Feels defeating.

Instead, try shifting what you tell yourself to, “I’m going to figure out how to do this.” Feels energizing, doesn’t it? That simple reframe can set you on a path of growth. All you have to do is feed it to your brain and act on it.

Now, go back to that list of things and refine it some more. When you’re satisfied that you’ve reduced it to things only you can do, make a list of the things that you actually spend time doing on your business. Are they the same or is there room for improvement?

Own your time.

Cass Mullane’s calm, comfortable approach consistently yields positive results for clients. Her business and personal coaching practice, www.ProsperCreatively.com, specializes in delivering solid left brain business skills to right brainers and creatives in a fun, visual way. She’s a best selling author, a contemporary abstract artist and creator of the Cool Stuff Jar™ Retreats.You can also visit Cass on Facebook!