As I've said before, there's nothing magical about the first of January. And you can decide to start over and create your new year, any day of the year. And so if it just happens to be January 17th, 2022, or a date in the future, my friend, let's decide that today is your fresh start. And I have tons of resources to help you with that. A few weeks ago, I shared my process for planning out my new year, you can catch that in episodes 90 and 91. And last year, I did a special episode on how to plan your ideal week. That's episode 45. So even if you want to just take it one week at a time, I think you'll find that episode really helpful. One of the things I talk about when it comes to planning your ideal year, or quarter, or month, or week is how important it is to know what you are saying No to and what you are saying Yes to. In fact, that is an entire step in my annual planning process, giving yourself time to sit down and brainstorm all of the things that you want to say yes to in the coming year. And all of the things that you are saying, “Absolutely not, no way I'm doing it”. When we know our non-negotiables, and when we know our priorities, we can then take action and make decisions in our business that are fully aligned with our priorities and our values. So if you haven't already taken the time to chart out your hell yes and your hell no’s for the year, I am going to encourage you to do so. And maybe today's episode can be a little bit of inspiration because today I want to share the things that I am saying yes to in 2022. And what my yes’s may mean for you in the coming year. So when I sat down and did my hell yes list, I started grouping together the things that fit with each other. And essentially, I came up with four areas of my business that I'm saying yes to. So I'm going to walk you through those four things. And I'll be honest with you, part of the reason I am doing this podcast episode is to create a time capsule, if you will. I will be really interested to see how this turns out over 2022. And maybe even towards the end of the year. I will revisit this in a podcast episode and we'll see how things worked. And I think you'll come to see how this approach is very much in keeping with one of the things I am saying yes to this year, but I am getting ahead of myself. Let me start with the very first thing I am saying yes to in my business and 2022 and it's what I'm calling “structured spaciousness”. I absolutely love the word spacious. In fact, when I say it, it just gives me the sense of freedom and flexibility. It feels like I am taking a deep cleansing breath and creating all of the room I need within myself and within my business, to create whatever it is I want to bring forth. The word spaciousness really got me through 2021 actually. Both the happy times when I was hitting my goals, and the disappointing times when maybe things weren't working out to plan. I could anchor myself in this idea of spaciousness, and what it is like to create a business that is grounded in bringing that spacious feeling, not just to myself, but to my clients, my listeners, my students, and my members. What I have found though, is that when it comes to cultivating that spacious feeling, we need to have some parameters around it. We need to have some structure. Otherwise that spaciousness can become really amorphous. And before we know it, we've blown through our boundaries. And we're not really following through on the things we've committed to. I say we, I'm really talking about me here, you get the idea. If I don't have some sort of container in which to hold all of this spacious, creative energy, I feel unmoored, unanchored, and like I'm floating through my business, and not in a good way. It makes me feel very ungrounded. So I started thinking about the marriage between structure and spaciousness. And so this idea of structured spaciousness for me is very much about creating intentional boundaries that are not too rigid, nor are they narrow, but they exist to ensure that I am giving myself that freedom and that flexibility. And I know what I'm measuring, I know where my milestones are. And I'm creating the beginning and the end points to that spaciousness. I realized, as I'm saying this out loud, it sounds a bit theoretical. So let me give you some examples of what structured spaciousness looks like in my business. First and foremost, I have a very clear structure that I use with regard to my calendar. I know the given hours in a day that I'm working, and I know what I'm working on each day. Now, this is definitely a concept I talked about in episode 45 about planning your ideal week. I have found that when I have themed days in my business, things work so much more smoothly. So for example, Mondays are my CEO days, those are the days where if I need to have any meetings with my team, if I have any planning or preparing that happens on Mondays. That also gives me some flexibility so that if I have appointments, or meetings in my personal life or my family life, I can schedule those for Mondays as well. So Mondays have a lot of flexibility for me. And I also have time carved out to do that back end working on your business type activities. So Mondays are carved out as my admin days. Wednesdays are carved out for my content creation. That might look like conducting podcast interviews, whether for my own podcast or for someone else's. It's also when I am working on emails, or social media, or things going on in my Facebook group. Anything related to content, I carve out time on Wednesdays to address. And if you have questions about what content might look like in your business, I want you to head back one episode to my interview with Abby Herman, where we talk all about what content is, and how we can create and utilize a content strategy in our business to connect with our clients. So Mondays are admin days, Wednesdays are content days.Tuesdays, well, I love Tuesdays. Because that is the day when the Coach with Clarity Membership meets. So I know every Tuesday afternoon, I am spending time with my members, we are meeting each other live in our private Zoom room. And whether it's a Hot Seat Call, or a Q&A call, or Guest Expert training, or even coworking, my afternoons on Tuesdays are devoted to my members. So that means Tuesday morning, I may be able to complete any prep that I need to do for the membership. Or sometimes I'm able to see a private coaching client in the morning. So Tuesdays are membership days, and maybe a little bit of client work in there as well. I have also reserved Thursdays for work with my clients, whether it's one-on-one or some of my small groups. And every other Friday is also a client day. That's when I meet with the first cohort of my mastermind group. And it's also when I see a few of my private coaching clients. But I do try to reserve every other Friday as a day off, because I want some time to recharge my batteries and to take care of any pending matters professional or personal that need my attention. So you can see that in a given week. I have some clearly defined boundaries around my time and what it's being used for. And that works so well for me because it gives me a sense of structure and purpose, but it's not so restrictive that I feel confined. For me, that's my sweet spot. And so I would encourage you to figure out what your sweet spot is. When it comes to your calendar and your schedule. What does it look like to create structured spaciousness with your time? This is an approach I take not just day to day, week to week, but I'm also thinking about structured spaciousness when it comes to planning my year. For example, I have a year-long launch calendar, where I know in a given month, which of my programs I will be launching or offering to my people. And I designed that calendar so that I am not launching more than one major program every quarter. Because launching takes a lot of work, there's a lot of prep, and a lot of planning that goes into it, then you're actually launching for one week, two weeks, sometimes even longer. And then of course, after the launch, you've got your post launch work, and you need to actually provide the program or service that you've just offered. So there's a lot that goes into launching. And I've learned the hard way that if I am trying to do too much in a given quarter, I'm going to burn myself out. So I created that launch calendar with the concept of structured spaciousness in mind. And whether it is looking broadly at my launch calendar, or narrowly at my given week, the main thing I'm cluing into is when things feel rushed, or forced. If I feel any sort of force, or urgency, I know that I am not tapping into that sense of spaciousness that I want to guide my business. So that is definitely one of those red flags for me: any sense of urgency, of compulsion or feeling forced. I need to stop, I need to check myself. And I need to reassess or revise what I've got going on. So that is the first thing that I am saying yes to in my business in 2022. I am anchoring all of my decisions and actions in this concept of structured spaciousness. The second thing I'm saying yes to in my business this year, is what I'm calling “curated visibility”. Now, visibility has always been a priority of mine in my business, this is how we stay top of mind with the people we most want to serve. There are so many ways that we can build our own visibility. But one strategy that has never failed for me, is getting myself in front of someone else's audience. Traditionally, the best outlet for me to do that has been through podcasting, which should come as no surprise, I am a podcaster. I love this medium, and I absolutely love being on other people's podcasts. So for 2022, I am really doubling down on my podcast guest appearances. And in fact, I made one of the largest investments I've ever made in my business, and decided to work with an amazing podcast PR firm called Interview Connections. I have been working with them for a few months now. And I am so impressed by every single person affiliated with Interview Connections, they have really taken the time to get to know me, my business, my values, my goals. And they are taking all of that information and playing matchmaker, they're helping me find exactly the podcasts that are best suited for me and vice versa, where I would be a high quality guest for that show. So I decided this was where I was going to invest my time, my energy and yes, my financial resources this year. Because podcast guest appearances are such a wonderful vehicle for me to build my visibility and my credibility. Now while I am turning the volume dial up on podcasting, if you will, there are other areas where I may be turning the volume down, not necessarily all the way down. I'm not muting, but I am starting to think about what it looks like to spend less time and energy on various social media platforms. Up until now, I have spent the majority of my time and energy on Facebook and Instagram. And when I look at my metrics, and I look at my business growth, and I relate that to my social media presence, I'm not entirely convinced that Facebook and Instagram are the right places for me to spend my time. So early in 2022, I'm going to be trying a few new things. I'm still kind of hammering out what that's going to look like, but I am approaching it with a very specific intention. And this actually leads me to the third thing I am saying yes to in my business in 2022.

 I am saying yes to curiosity and experimentation. I have always talked about treating the decisions we make in our businesses like experiments. We have a hypothesis, we're going to put it in play. We're going to test it. We're going to observe what happens, we're going to gather data, and we are going to allow that data to inform whether our hypothesis was correct or whether we need to revise it a bit. When I approach my business from that perspective, like I'm a curious scientist, it actually promotes that feeling of spaciousness that I talked about before. It's very liberating to look at the actions you take in your business not as being a personal reflection of who you are or how successful you are. But instead, we're just looking at it like an experiment, there's a level of detachment there. And in that detachment, we create space. So even when things don't go the way I'd hoped, even when my hypothesis is disproved, I don't necessarily feel as tied to the outcome. I mean, of course, it's disappointing when something you want doesn't come through. But when we don't make it about who we are and instead we look at it as just an event, something we were testing, it creates that sense of spaciousness, and it's a very compassionate stance to take as well. Because if something doesn't go your way, it's not because you're bad or wrong, or you shouldn't be in business. It's simply that maybe your hypothesis was a little off. And so we need to go back and revise it. That approach of being curious and approaching everything like an experiment, is what will guide my decisions in 2022. And probably beyond. And I have some big experiments that I will be testing this coming year, the biggest has to do with the Coach with Clarity Membership. So I'm going to be talking about this a little more in the coming weeks, because I do plan on reopening membership to the general public, at some point, this first quarter of 2022. And when I do, I am experimenting, I am trying something new. In the past, I have offered membership on a monthly or quarterly or annual basis. Moving forward, I am going to test out a lifetime access strategy. Now there's all sorts of reasons that I'm doing that and they are very much anchored in my data and in my metrics. And I know that there are a lot of people out there who are not in favor of a lifetime strategy. But you know what, I want to try this, I want to give this a go. Based on everything that I've looked at and everything I've considered, I think this is going to be not just the right strategy for my business. But I also think it will serve my members even more powerfully. For them to know that they will always have access to the membership for as long as it exists, and they're not going to have to always keep paying in order to attend the calls or download the guides or have connections with me, that just feels really good. So more to come on that. And if you've been thinking about joining the Coach with Clarity Membership, I highly, highly recommend you head over to CoachwithClarity.com/membership and get on the waitlist. There are buttons all over the page. As soon as you get there, in the upper right hand corner, there's a button that says, “Get on the waitlist”, go ahead and do that now. Because before I launched to the general public, I will be sharing some special offers with people who are on the waitlist. So consider this your invitation to get on the waitlist and expect an email from me in the next couple of weeks about what that means for your lifetime access to the membership. So that is one huge experiment that I will be trying out at least in the first quarter of 2022. And possibly the entire year. This is another experiment that I'm doing. I am moving to a defined open enrollment period for the membership versus having it always open. So I had an always open membership since I began it in 2019. I closed enrollment for the very first time in September of 2021. So that I could spend some time really refreshing and revamping the membership. I'm super excited by some of what I've created. It's going to be so amazing when we open it up for the general public in just a few weeks. And having that time where I didn't have to worry about finding new members or launching my program, where I could really focus on serving my members and creating content for them, that felt so good. It felt spacious, and it felt right. So for 2022 I am experimenting with not having an always open membership, but instead having defined enrollment periods. So again, something we're going to experiment with in 2022 to see how it works. There are a few other things I'll be experimenting with this year. One of them being the Certification Program. Now I've talked about the Certification Program quite a bit on the podcast in the past. And when I first offered it, it was as one huge 125 hour coach training program. It basically gave you everything you needed to complete their training requirements for the mid-level certification through the International Coaching Federation. So the mid-level certification is the PCC, the Professional Certified Coach, you need a minimum of 125 training hours for that. And that's what my program offered. The feedback that I have heard from potential students is that, while that's all fine and good, they may not necessarily need or want or be ready for a full 125 hour program. In fact, many of the people I spoke to were looking for something more in the 30 to 60 hour range. So what I will be experimenting with this year is transitioning away from a single 125 hour program into a three stage program. So level one will be 30 hours, and that will be kind of coaching fundamentals. Level two will be another 30 hours, give or take. And that'll be more intermediate coaching with some specialty coaching work included as well. And then the remaining part, the third stage will really focus on coaching mastery. Now I am literally revising the curriculum at the time of recording this podcast episode. So it is still a work in progress. It's still under development, but that is the direction we're heading. So if you need or want fewer coach training hours, you will still be able to do that within the Certified Clarity Coach Training Program. My intention is to offer the Certified Clarity Coach distinction to students who successfully complete the first two phases. And then students who complete all three phases will be eligible to receive the Master Certified Clarity Coach designation. So pretty exciting stuff, it's still in the works. I'm sure I will be sharing more about that in episodes to come. But I'm sharing it now as an example of how I'm approaching things from the sense of experimentation and curiosity. And those decisions are based in part on the data that I am receiving from my students, my members, my listeners, and my clients. When I am approaching my work from that place of curiosity, it allows me to be more responsive to my clients. It allows me to be more creative and innovative, to come up with solutions that maybe I didn't see before but that I know will serve not just me and my business, but also my clients and my students and my members. So that is why in 2022, I am absolutely saying yes to approaching my business with curiosity and treating it like a grand experiment. The last thing that I am saying yes to in my business this year, are my existing offers. So let me explain what I mean by that. And perhaps this is a situation where it might be better to share what I am saying no to, I am saying no to constantly creating new offers and new content. Instead, 2022 is the year that I am diving deep into what I already have. Because I have spent, wow, oh my gosh, almost six years now in my business figuring out who I serve, and what they want, and how I can best meet their needs. And I'm really proud of the spectrum of services that I've created. When I look at everything that I have to offer in my business, from my free content that includes this podcast and my Facebook group, to my paid offerings, whether it's the membership, the Certification Program, my private coaching, I'm so proud of everything that I've created. And I know that there's opportunities to strengthen it, and to make it the best it can be for you. And so that's what I'm doing this year. Instead of feeling like I constantly need to create a new offer or a new program, I'm going to stick with what works. And I'm going to continue to refine it and improve it so that I know you are receiving the very best of what I have to offer. So as you know, I've already been doing that with the Coach with Clarity Membership, taking the last several months to really spruce up the membership itself and essentially rewriting all of the how-to guides that are available only to members. And as I just mentioned, I'm doing that with the Certification Program as well, as I retool some of the content and curriculum in order to better meet the needs of my students. I've also been running a private intimate mastermind for the last several months, it has brought me such joy. I absolutely love this mastermind. I love the five women who are a part of it. It is something that works. And so I will be offering another cohort of the mastermind this year, but following a similar structure and the same principles that I'm already using, because I know that that works. And that's pretty much it. Those are my three core offers: the membership, the Certification Program, and the mastermind. Yes, I do work with a limited number of private coaching clients, but honestly, I'm scaling that back significantly so that I can put my full attention on these three programs that help my clients achieve results. So I am saying yes to them, and I am saying no to feeling like I always have to create something new. I have to have something bright, shiny, and special. No, I'm going to say yes to the creations that already exist in my business. And I'm going to say yes to continually improving them. So, that is what I am saying yes to in my business for 2022. I am saying yes to structured spaciousness, I am saying yes to curated visibility. I am saying yes to curiosity and experimentation. And I am saying yes to my existing offers. Those are the four principles that I will be anchoring myself into for 2022 and probably beyond. And I'm already looking forward to revisiting this episode in about 11 months time to see how I was able to live out these four concepts in my business. But we've got some time before we have to worry about that. For now. Let's move into this week's Clarity in Action moment. For this week's Clarity in Action moment, I am challenging you to determine what you are saying yes to this year. It doesn't have to be for things like mine, it can be one thing. Maybe there's just one thing you really feel passionate about that you want to say yes to this year, maybe that one thing is your guiding light. Whether you have one thing or whether you have a few things you are saying yes to, I want you to commit to them this year, and then I want you to share them with me. You can come find me over on Instagram @CoachwithClarity and send me a DM or if you prefer, you can send me an email. My email address is info@CoachwithClarity.com. And I would love to hear more about what you are saying yes to this year. Whatever it is you are choosing to say yes to, I am in your corner cheering you on every step of the way. And if you'd like my direct support in helping bring your business vision to life, well, there's a few ways we can do that. You can absolutely join the membership when we open enrollment in a few weeks. Again, head to CoachwithClarity.com/membership to get on the waitlist. Or if you are looking for a hybrid of private coaching with me, plus the support of an intimate group of coaches who are also working to build their businesses, you might be a good fit for the next cohort of my Mastermind Program. To date that has been invitation only. But I am starting to open it up to new participants. So if you would like to explore the mastermind in greater depth, let's connect. You can send me an email at info@CoachwithClarity.com and we can talk about what the mastermind entails and whether it's the right choice for you in your business. Well, my friend, that's it for me this week. We've made it to the end of another episode of the Coach with Clarity Podcast and I want to thank you as always for spending your time with me every week. It means so much to me that you choose to spend 30 minutes or so every week with me. It is such an honor to create this show with you and for you. And I'm so excited about what we have in store for the rest of the year. So if you are not already following the Coach with Clarity Podcast, be sure to do so. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, there is an option to follow or subscribe. Just click that button and that way future episodes will show up in your feed and you will never miss an episode of the Coach with Clarity Podcast. I will be back in your feed next Monday. So until then, my name is Lee Chaix McDonough reminding you to get out there and show the world what it means to be a Coach with Clarity.