Year End Retrospective 2021

In this episode, I reflect Welcome to the platform podcast where we talk to coaches, athletes, experts, and real people to learn about their approaches to training, nutrition, mindset, and much more. I'm your host, Jordan Kundey-Rite, founder and head coach of the Twin Cities-Countable Club. I'm on a mission to help others build sustainable healthy lifestyles. Before we jump into this episode, I'm very excited to announce the registration is open, the Twin Cities-Countable open on October 22nd in Little Canada, Minnesota. Just like we did last year, we will be accepting video submissions for participants who are unable to make the trip in person. You'll be able to submit your videos until midnight central time on October 21st, and eligible for all of the same prizes as our in-person competitors. Just go to our website, twincidscountableclub.com for details. This week, I'm walking through my framework for a year and retrospective in looking back at 2021. Now it ties back to the goal setting framework I went through last year all the way back in episode 9. If you haven't listened to that episode, maybe go back and give that one a listen first. I also want to say, I'm incredibly grateful that you listened to this podcast. The best way you can support me is to register for the Twin Cities-Countable open, and maybe tell a friend or two too. Just go to our website for details. And if you haven't already, please be sure to leave a rating and review platform podcast in your app of choice. And support my work by supporting our sponsors whose affiliate links you'll find in the episode notes. And of course, if you want to step on the platform in competing kettlebell sport, or if you need help with your nutrition, please reach out to me. I help athletes of all levels reach their goals without wasting time using my integrated online coaching approach. You can follow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube at twincidscountableclub, or email me at twincidscountableclub at gmail.com. And now without further ado, let's get into a year-end retrospective on 2021. All right, welcome into this week's episode of the platform podcast. I am your host, Jordan Kunde-Wright, right? It has been a minute. Took a little break because I needed it. And it was the holidays as I'm sure you are all well aware. And I'm excited to be back. I love this time of year. There is just something in my nerd brain that gets super excited about planning and looking back, reflecting on the year that has passed. And I just really enjoy this time of year. For a number of reasons, not just that. Obviously the holidays are great. I love any opportunity I get to spend time with my family and focus on the things that are most important in life, which of course are family and friends and connections. Those things mean a lot to me, hopefully they mean a lot to you too, but I love this time of year. Because of that, you get to take stock of the year that has transpired and you get to look optimistically on the future. It's a human nature to really enjoy clean checkpoints. And we like we like those even numbers. We like five tens and five tens and zeros. And you know, we like those. We like having clean checkpoints. We like month end quarter and year end. We create these benchmarks. And we can help human race created the concept of time so that we can keep track of things. And we could measure. Because we like having structure. We like structuring our world. We like structuring our existence. So I am particularly right brain oriented in that regard that I really enjoy. I know structure and the opportunity when a benchmark comes up or a phase gate comes up or, you know, anything that gives us a chance to reflect and look back on on the year that has been or look back on a period of time that has been. So that is part of the reason I love this time of year so much. And in case the title of the episode didn't give it away already or in case my little random ranting diatribe didn't give it away. The topic of today's podcast is how to do a retrospective on your year. And for people that are unfamiliar with the term retrospective, I'm going to I'm going to nerd out on you a little bit. I got to warn you. So I am by trading training a scrum master and what that means is I am an agile coach and agile scrum master. And I'm sure people outside of the software development world and outside of the business world might might not know even what that means. I don't mean agile in the physiological sense of being able to change directions quickly, although that is in the spirit of what agile means agile is actually a framework for that was created for software development. That says instead of planning very, very rigidly and taking so much time and investing so much time on the front end to try and get the plan right for how we're going to develop a new piece of software instead of doing that and trying to build out the perfect plan for how we're going to build the thing. Let's create a framework or a structure that plans in much smaller increments and creates opportunities for iterative feedback where we reflect on what we've done in much smaller increments of time so that we can change directions more quickly and create things that are more valuable to our customers more quickly. That's the basic premise of agile and so in the same sense agility in the physiological definition is the ability to change direction quickly so that's what made Barry Sanders arguably the greatest running back that ever played is his ability to change direction quickly and accelerate away from defenders right so agility is the ability to change direction quickly. And that is part of what I do for a living is trying implement the principles of agile into my business and into my daily life and I really like the approach because instead of planning the entire year and trying to control. The entire year you really focus on what is the smallest increment of time within which I can make significant progress and what what is the definition of what i'm trying to accomplish within that period of time. And then when you get to the end of said increment of progress which you are said increment of effort which we call sprints right you do things in sprints typically two weeks to a month or six weeks maybe two months but you try and keep the increment of time very small or relatively small so that you can do a retrospective on each sprint. And look at how did we do relative to what we said we were going to try and accomplish in this small increment of time and so we look at what were the winds and what were the challenges and what are the opportunities for going forward how can we improve so that you get better over time ideally. So you you take time to reflect on your progress reflect on your goals and how what your current approaches are doing are working towards that goal and if they're going well, then you change very little if they're going terribly then maybe you change quite a bit. The idea being stop take inventory of what's happened and what's and what's working what's not and make changes accordingly right and doing that in increments of time that are smaller that that is what agile basically is all about but also when you get to one of these major milestones like. The end of the year you retrospect you do a retrospective at the end of each sprint but you can also do a retrospective on the project itself so the whole life of the project so this would be an increment of time that I would highly recommend that everyone should do a retrospective on their year. Because 2021 was a ride that's the best thing I could think to say about it it was a fucking roller coaster man let's just call it what it is. It was it was it was so fun especially like the first the first six months right you know when when we thought the coronavirus was was being put behind us and there was so much optimism going into the summer. It seemed like we had gotten through the dark winter that was the fucking entire year of 2020 we had we had fought our way through it we huddled together we you know we we went through that we went through that wilderness together with all that. Terribleness and death and just isolation and despair and uncertainty and fear and we banded together and we really pulled through and in 2021 everything was going to be better and for the first half of the year it really seemed like that was the case. It really did things were looking so good we were feeling so good going into the summer we were ready to clear ourselves free of corona we were going to have the vaccines and everybody was going to get vaccinated and the restrictions were all going to go away everybody was going to be fine and you know everything was going to be great. And then reality set in about two months later and we got kicked in the groin by the Delta variant by people not getting vaccinated and the spread of the virus continuing to be a problem by fighting about what's the right way to handle the spread of the virus. Because once we alleviated restrictions to control the virus then what should we do you know it's hard to put them back in place once they've already been alleviated everybody really is enjoying their return to normal you know et cetera. And and then now we have Omicron and you know optimism has really waned recently you know we really we really are dealing with dealing with some shit man so 2021 has been a roller coaster it really really has but I hope I hope for you. As it has been for me that there have been silver linings throughout all of it because it's adversity that reveals character that's what I was always told coming up. That adversity doesn't adversity doesn't form character it reveals character I'm not I'm not sure that that's fully true I think it both forms and reveals character I think I think who we are is revealed in adversity but I also feel like we're dynamic and that we're always evolving and changing and how things go and how we respond to adversity. Is not just revelatory of our past experiences but it's also revelatory of our choices in those moments so we can make changes during periods of adversity we can choose to be different we can choose to evolve or devolve and honestly the devolving is usually not a choice it's more of a reversion back to simpler more evolutionary based brain mechanics but setting that comment aside I really think that the adversity we went through in 2021 was terrible in a lot of ways but also very very useful I hope it was useful it was useful for me. I hope it was useful for you I hope it really helped clarify and crystallize for you what are the areas that are most important I think we're seeing those changes actually I think it's I think we're seeing that you're seeing people that are willing to walk away from jobs that seemed so important until it was like doing this job might cost you your life and then people are like maybe maybe not no. Maybe I'm going to go home and putting your health on the line to do something really makes you take stock of is this something I really want to do is this really worth it to me right when the when the fucking table stakes are getting corona or not getting corona you know how important is going to the gym how important is going to work how important is seeing family how important is you know and I know that's not predetermined I know that I'm being hyperbolic intentionally I realized that that it wasn't a choice of getting corona or not getting corona wasn't predetermined but the risk was there right the risk was present in we all had to go to really take stock of what's most important inner life and how important are these things that you do how important is going to church how important is going to the bar how important is is, you know, is there another way to do this? Is there a better way to do this? And I think one of the silver linings that has come out of this is that we really had to take stock of those things and things that we were told were necessary and had to be done a certain way because that's the way that it always been done. Once the choice was no longer there or the choice was do it this way and people will die, suddenly it laid bare some pretty gaping holes and the things that we had assumed to be true or assumed to be valid assumptions. And we really had to take stock of those things. So I think there's a lot of silver linings to come out of 2021. And I hope it was that way for you too. I hope it made you value the relationships that you really care about more. And really made you take stock of your priorities because it did a lot of that for me. It really truly did. And I know I'm being a bit rambling but it is a retrospective on an entire year and it's hard to stay cogent and coherent when you think about an entire year. But that is why we have frameworks. So with that said, I'm going to divert to my notes a little bit and talk about how do I think about an entire year when I'm looking back on my year? And hopefully you've already listened to my goal setting framework episode. I think it was like episode 19 or 20 but you can go back to that. I'll put the link in the show notes. But I went through the Chris Duffin's goal setting frame or Chris Duffin from Kabuki Strength World record holding power lifter and just an awesome dude. Somebody I super admire. You can go back to that episode and I walk through a lot of those things. I walk through my framework and how we introspect to determine what are our priorities in life and then build our goals around the most important things and how do you break those down into outcome goals. So you start with the outcome goal, which is the highest level thing and then you break it down into smaller and smaller increments. And you really look at what are the things I need to do on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis to get the outcome that I'm going for and then tracking progress from there. So that episode is already out there. I'm not going to rehash that but I am going to reference it because it's how I organize my goal setting. It's how I organize my life already. So I'm going to continue with that. So when you hear me talk about drivers or drives, the drives are the wise. Why do you do the things that you do, right? And those can be, those are personal, they're individualized. So like my drives that I know that I have from my introspection are passion, recognition, independence, growth, impact, creativity, and security. Those are kind of my seven drivers that came out from my goal setting from last year and going through that framework. But all of those map to motivation, aspects of motivation, which this comes from Daniel Pink's book, Drive, which if you haven't read it, I highly recommend. It's a great, great look at how human motivation in the modern world is different than what it was or how it was thought about during the industrial age. So moving from an economy that was based on productivity in very rote manufacturing style jobs. So now we're in like the information economy and the service economy and being able to deliver things and create value with our minds as much with our hands. Right? So Daniel Pink said that the aspects of motivation map to only three areas, basically. Autonomy, the ability to control your own destiny, autonomy, mastery, can you learn a skill and seek to master it and many skills, not necessarily just one, especially in today's world. You have to be able to pursue mastery in a domain which usually requires a wealth of skills in several areas and the ability to integrate across many areas and then purpose. Does what I do matter? Does it matter on any larger level than just myself? Right? And so purpose is a big one. Does it matter to me? It's like the lowest level. Does it matter to my family? Okay, that's the next level up. Doesn't matter. Am I part of something larger than just my family? Am I part of a community? Am I part of a mission? Am I part of a greater purpose? Is there a calling for me? Is there something that I'm doing that gives my life purpose? Right? And purpose is that's one of those that's very individual. For some people it's like, I need to have a large impact on the world. That's what really makes my life feel meaningful. And for some people it's like, I need to have a large impact on my family. You know, that's much more individual, right? But there's nothing wrong with that. That doesn't come from a place of judgment. That's just, you have to assess what purpose means to you, right? So those are the three areas of motivation that Daniel Pink says goes across. Those are really the three key areas of, you know, the aspects of motivation, autonomy, mastery, and purpose, right? So my drives, passion, recognition, you know, those probably go as much towards purpose, independence, autonomy, growth. That goes towards mastery, impact. That's purpose, creativity. That probably maps to, I would say both, maybe both purpose and mastery kind of depends on how you interpret creativity, but then security, autonomy, right? So all of the things that I identified as drivers for myself map to those three aspects of motivation that Daniel Pink talks about, the fundamental aspects of motivation, which I really like, right? So you can think about those things in that way. And I'm not trying to overly complicate this. You can, I'm trying to show you that there are more, there's more than one framework to think about these things in, right? And you can take it to the level of granularity or macro that makes the most sense for you. And so from my, from my drives, I met my drives to what are my pillars of importance? And so this is where I really think about like, how do I express those drives that I have? That I know those are the, the drives are very personal to me, right? Those are very personal things to me. And how do I manifest those in the world in a way that goes beyond me, right? What are the pillars of important? What are the behaviors, right? So number one for me is health. And in my podcast episode, I think I said a family first, but upon reflection, I realized that you can't be there for your family if you're not healthy. You can't show up well for your family if you're not healthy first. You actually can be a burden to your family if you're unhealthy. Other people have to take care of you when you're unhealthy. And sometimes there's nothing you can do about that and that's beyond your control. That's one of the things that was clarified for me during COVID, frankly, is taking care of yourself, taking care of your health, making sure that you're doing what you can to be there and be healthy for your family, or for others, or for anyone, but health is number one, at least for me. I feel like it should be for everybody, but that's, if you don't have your healthy, you don't have the other things become much less important and you just want to be healthy again. I can tell you that from personal experience witnessing it and seeing what it's like when someone within your family or a adjacent to your family is not healthy and what pressure that puts on other people, right? Because your family cares about you and wants you to be healthy. So when you're not, other people sacrifice in order to support you. And so being healthy is my number one pillar of importance. Number two, then is family and being there for my family and trying to take care of my family. And building meaningful relationships with my family be the best, most present father I can be, be the best, most present and caring spouse that I can be, the best partner that I can be because ultimately, those two things are the most important. Third, for me, then is work or my career. That's my day job, right? How do you spend a lot of time working? Because that's how I provide for my family. So you spend a lot of time working. How can you make sure that you're showing up at work and you want your work to express your passion? You want to get recognition at work, right? Or I want to get recognition at work. And I want to be recognized for being competent and contributing important things to my company. I want my work to facilitate independence, right? I want to make enough money doing the work that I do that it helps me gain financial independence, right? And I want growth. I want to learn new skills. I want to be challenged. I am intellectually curious to a fault. I want to learn new things. All the time. I love learning new things. I need to be challenged, right? So that growth is super important, right? And work is a great place for me to express that. Impact, does my work matter? How does my work impact the larger world outside of me? Well, my family is first. It helps me. It helps me take care of my family. But then does it do anything beyond just my family, right? Does the work I do matter, right? Impact on the larger world. Creativity does what I do. Give me a vehicle. Do I get to be creative at work? Can I create things? Can I create content? Can I create solutions, right? Can I think? Can I synthesize new things that hadn't been there previously? That creativity piece is important for me. And then security, right? I think that dovetails pretty well into the independence piece, right? Security and independence are pretty, maybe not synonymous, but yeah, they're pretty synonymous, I think, right? Being secure. You have to be secure to be independent, right? If you're not secure, you're not independent. So having a level of security, right? So that's work, right? Thank you for tuning into this episode of the platform podcast. We will return to the episode shortly. I just want to take a second to thank everyone who has made 2021 such a special year for me here at the platform podcast and the Twinsities kettlebell club. Everyone who trusts me to be the coach, those of you who came to the Twinsities kettlebell open, our sponsors, bellevator belts, barefoot athletic shoes, pro kettlebell, 27 degrees apparel, camera customs. Thank you all so much for your support, and I cannot wait to see what 2022 holds for us all. And then coaching, for me, coaching is super important and that really ties to the impact piece, right? Impact recognition, passion, you know, and then my side business, my entrepreneurial ventures, right? That's important for me because it is very independent. It's independent of my work and it's creative and it's another way to have impact and to grow. It's skills that I need to acquire skills. I need to acquire skills that aren't necessarily required for me at work, right? So there's a lot of things and it helps me be creative and ideally, by expanding my ability to make money outside of just my day job, it creates a greater level of security, right? So that's where the business piece comes in and then finances, right? Finances are obviously an important pillar when you look at how are you going to be independent? How are you going to be secure? Those are both tied to your finances. Growth, I want to grow my finances, obviously. I want to use my finances to create impact. That is one thing that I learned working at a nonprofit, all of the people that were my targets when I was trying to cultivate relationships and do fundraising for a nonprofit were people that were financially successful. So being able to be financially successful allows you to have an impact. It allows you to be able to give back, right? You can leverage that financial success to help others. That's just the nature and you don't have to be financial successful to help others. I also help others with my coaching and hopefully with this podcast, but financial success also facilitates the ability to help others, right? So mapping the wise, the drives that you have to your pillars of importance, I think, is a really good way to look at how your year mapped out. If you don't like the pillars of importance, you can also use other frameworks another one that I think Dovetail's pretty well into the framework that I use, but one from Brennan-Brushart, who's a high-level life coach and business coach, he has nine dimensions that he has people retrospect on, which is physical health, mental health, romantic slash partner health, your family health, your social connections, your mission, your experiences, your finances and your skills, right? So those map pretty closely to what I'm talking about. So when we look at going into a retrospective, right, I like to always start with the wins, what did we succeed with in the year? What were the big wins for the year? So what I do is I take those pillars of importance and I write them on the y-axis vertically, and then on the x-axis, I just divide it in half, and I say wins and challenges, and I look at my year. And so when I'm talking about, when I'm looking back on my year, I'm gonna look at, my physical health, my mental health, I do actually dividing those two. I just had health as the pillar of importance, but another thing that's been clarified for me in COVID is that physical health and mental health are two, not different, they're interconnected dimensions. So health is an interconnected dimension, but I like to bifurcate it because the things you're doing to take care of your physical health are often, not the same as what you need to do for your mental health. They coincide, but I think they're two different dimensions. So physical health, mental health, relationship health, family health, work, health, and then coaching and business, or entrepreneurial business, and then finances, right? So those same pillars of importance that I was just talking about, and I put those on the y-axis, and then I put just wins and challenges on the x-axis. So it's really just dividing your page into, and putting your pillars of importance on the side, going through those. And I like to first go through my wins because I feel like it's easier to work vertically down the list, than it is to try and go wins, then challenges, wins, then challenges, wins, then challenges, because then you go from positive to negative, positive to negative, positive to negative, feel like it's much easier to stay in a positive focus first, and just try and collect, you know, wins. What were the wins? What were the things that really went well this year, right? And talk through those things, collect those things on your page, and really think about those things. And then you toggle to challenges and start thinking about what are the things that didn't go as well as I would like, and what are those things across each of those dimensions, right? So, you know, I can all be transparent and vulnerable as much as that can always be scary. But so, you know, for me, wins in 2021, you know, physical health, you know, I maintained my weight throughout the year. Maintenance is always important, right? So, I maintained my weight, you know, within a reasonable variance. I didn't have any new injuries this year, which for me is a huge fucking win. If you've listened to the episode I had with Matt Boris about our collection of injuries from, you know, football, rugby, stupidity, MMA, you know, just various things, I don't have any new injuries this year, which is great, to not have any new injuries to add to the list is a win for me and a huge one, because that allows me to focus on improving other things. So, you know, improving my, I improved my spinal, my spinal health in my neck and my, in my lumbar region. I have a great chiropractor who's just across the road from my house, and he's been super helpful for me, you know, with exercises and regular adjustments and things, and you know, we have, we actually have x-ray measurements of how much I've improved the curvature of my lumbar region and of my cervical region of my spine, which were two pretty major areas of concern for me, especially, you know, having, especially having, you know, smash my head into other large humans for many, many years playing football, restoring the curve in my neck has been huge. I've made like a 20 degree improvement in restoring the curvature of my neck, which is huge, is I've had many, much, I've had many fewer headaches, I've had a much greater risk of incidents with having headaches and pain in my neck, which is great, you know, so huge win for me there, mental health. I said, you know, no major depressive episodes and resilience through COVID. I've had my ups and downs, I'm sure just like, a lot of you have, you know, but I haven't had any major depressive episodes, which is, which is great. I'm not prone to major depression, but I am prone to feeling all the feelings and I feel like I've done pretty well staying even keel throughout this and it's been a struggle at times, but I've done the work to stay connected to other people and that's been super, super important for me. You know, and then in my marriage, I feel like, you know, that's none of your fucking business, but no, I'm getting, I'm gonna share a couple of things, but, you know, like my wife and I made it a point to start scheduling time to go on day dates is what I call them, where because both of our kids are now in school, don't think God, the schools have been open again. Our kids are in school full time, Monday through Friday and like once every two weeks, we schedule a lunch date where we go to lunch together, which seems like such a small thing, but I can't tell you like that one hour, two hours of time that we get to spend together, connecting just the two of us away from our kids and not having pressure has been huge. It's been so good for me. I hope it's good for staff as it has been for me, but like just making it a priority to carve out time to spend some time together during the week because I have that flexibility and I really appreciate that my job gives me that flexibility and I've just blocked out a chunk of time in my schedule every two weeks where I go on a date with my wife, I go to lunch with my wife, right? That's fantastic, you know, that's been super, super helpful. You know, and then family parenting, you know, with we've got my kids in sports and my daughter is reading all the Harry Potter books she's well ahead of her reading level. My son is, you know, improved in so many, in so many areas, you know, so I've got wins there and then at work, I've gotten new certifications and I've got, you know, things that have gone well with clients and accounts that I manage and, you know, things going well and then, you know, coaching, that's been, that was honestly one of the biggest wins of the year for me was the kettlebell, the Twin Cities kettlebell open was honestly one of the highlights of my year. It really was seeing my team come in and just crush, getting to meet so many people that I've connected with through this podcast or through the kettlebell sport community that I hadn't ever met before. Seeing those people in person for the first time and successfully running my first competition and learning so much from that experience was just awesome. And there's way too many wins in that column, even then I could, then I could list I honestly put, you know, many, many more just as a, just as a, as a yada, yada, yada basically because there was just too many for me to list out like I'm so happy about how much went well from a coaching perspective, you know, and then business side hustle, you know, I've got much better systems in place than I had last year. I'm serving more people than I had, you know, and previously, and there's just a lot of growth potential there and I have a new partnership with a close friend of mine that I'm really excited about where we're working on some stuff. I can't speak about it yet or, you know, we're still very much in stealth mode, but there's some cool things that I'm working on that really I'm excited about because it keeps my entrepreneurial fire burning, which is great and I love it, you know, and then, you know, financially, like, you know, all of these things that these other things that I've done create wins at home and, you know, I'm increasing my stability and I'm increasing my security and taking care of those things and taking care of my family. So, you know, that's kind of how I go through it is I stack those wins and then I go over to challenges, right? And, you know, again, I'll be vulnerable and I'll talk about, you know, some of my challenges, you know, look across each of these dimensions and I'm going to try and be courageous and tell you about those things. Like, you know, I put some weight back on at the end of the year, not much, but I still stayed within my acceptable range, but, you know, I put some weight back on at the end of the year, but like, the bigger challenge for me was, you know, I came into this year saying, you know, I was 270 pounds at the start of the year and I wanted, you know, I wanted to, I wanted to lose 50 or 60 pounds before the twins they just kept about open in October and that did not happen, you know, that was a huge challenge for me, but I had to assess where I was at and I had to listen to my coaches. When they were telling me I'd been dieting too hard for too long and I'd been too overtaxed for too long and that my, you know, I was seeing thyroid issues, I got my thyroid levels checked, you know, based on some suggestion from my nutrition coach and, you know, I was having thyroid issues because my body had adapted to being in a deficit for too long, you know, so I didn't lose weight and I didn't lose weight like I wanted to in 2021. I was not as successful with my physical changes that I wanted to make, but I will say one of the things I didn't mention in my mental health and this is where it kind of goes across the two dimensions and it's a win that I definitely want to capture and I'm doing it kind of right now live is my relationship with food is better and my awareness is better and I'm actually a lot more comfortable with the fact that I wasn't successful with that this year than I would have been previously and the reason I'm okay with it is because I know so much more now than I did before, you know, even a couple of years ago, I've improved my skills and my knowledge and I know that listening to my coaches and I know that it was the right thing to do to throw the breaks on trying to lose weight because I could have continued down that path and it would have just led to more extreme behavior. It would have just led me down a path of further restricting, exercising too much, really wreaking havoc on my body to try and force my way, I was gonna try and bludgeon my way to the target that I had set and that would not have been long-term sustainable or good for me. So I actually feel like I'm in a much better place mentally with that decision than it would have been even in 2020. So, you know, shout out to Liz Larson and shout out to Samantha Burr, my nutrition coach is in 2021 for helping support me to reach that conclusion and to be okay with that and to be great coaches and good support systems because this is a long-term game. It's not just about hitting the goal at any cost because the cost would have been too much. So, you know, the win was still that I maintained my weight within my acceptable range of variance but I didn't lose the weight that I wanted was the challenge, right? I didn't change my body because I'm composition and the way that I wanted. But again, another win was that mentally, I'm in a much better place and much better relationship with food, still working on the relationship with my body. That's one of my challenges for mental health, right? You know, managing that relationship with how I look and how I feel like I look more so than how I actually look. Managing that thought distortion, you know. Yeah, you know, challenges and in marriage are always, you know, communication and not enough time together. That's the biggest problem my wife and I have. Honestly, I laugh about it. I don't know, she finds it funny but, you know, I said like my biggest problem I have with our marriage is I don't get to see you enough. She works nights at the hospital. I work days and I, you know, do my day job and then I have my side hustle, you know, doing the coaching and my entrepreneurial ventures and, you know, I just, I don't sit still well. So, I create my own bottlenecks there by limiting my own time because I don't do well with idle hands but then she's also busy and we're on different schedules so not enough quality time together, you know, so. And then, you know, parenting, you know, I'll leave that out because I don't, I don't want to talk about the things that I'm worried about with my kids but I worry more about myself honestly than I worry about my kids. I'm always thinking about like how can I respond with more patience, kindness, calmness? How can I emulate what I want them to become and how can I speak to them in a way that creates the confident, capable human beings that I know that they can become if I do a good job? That's honestly what my challenges are with parenting. It's not so much my kids. I mean, there's always challenges with parenting children but my challenges that I articulate are more centered around what I need to work on because that's, you know, what this framework is about, right? You know, and then at work it's always, how can I do more, how can I create a greater impact? How can I be more valuable this year? How can I just continue to grow my value? And I always want to feel like I'm doing more there. And then coaching, how can I be more consistent? How can I show up for my athletes with the best knowledge possible? How can I make sure that I'm customizing my approach to each athlete? That is a challenge when you're coaching 20 people, making sure that you're taking individual variants into account, their personality, their neuro type, their available equipment, you know, their schedule, all of these things like that, that takes effort. And that is a challenge for me. And that's something I want to get better at is how do I, how do I individualize better and also make sure that I'm showing up consistently for them in the way that they need me to and getting their feedback? The business piece, the, honestly, the biggest challenge there is any success that I build with my business means time away from my family. You know, any entrepreneurial venture, you're doing means time away from family, it means resource away from your family, whether that's financial or time or both. All right, so trying to find balance in a way if that is sustainable. How do I do that? I'm working on that. That's a big one for me. And then, you know, finances, I think anybody that's being honest about their finances, you know, probably looks at me like, eh, I probably could have been more disciplined with my spending, especially in 2021. Probably, probably spend some money on some things I didn't need to spend money on. But then I also look at like, did that bring me joy? Did that bring me happiness? I can't take it with me. I've talked about money in and of itself doesn't mean a ton to me. It's a means to an end, which I struggle with because it makes me undisciplined in my spending sometimes because I really struggle to say no at times. So, but that's honestly the framework that I go through. Hopefully, that made sense, right, is, you know, looking at your drivers, your wives, and then taking that and looking across different dimensions of your life, you know, the pillars of the pillars of well-being and looking back and reflecting on what were your wins, what were your challenges. And then from there, we'll start planning. We'll start looking at how do I take those things that I want to improve on and make changes for next year? How do I get better next year? And we will look at that in another podcast. We will talk about an agile approach to goal setting and incremental check-in and iteration adjustment adaptation, whatever you want to call it. So, we assess, we adapt, and then we move forward. So, what is a shipable increment of progress? I'm nerding out on agile, but that is what we'll look at in another podcast for the coming. I hope this was useful for you. It was useful for me. I know it was probably a bit rambling. Apologize sincerely for the delay in getting out content, but I needed a break. So, I took a break and part of what I'm going to look at the next episode, or maybe it will be the sequential next episode, but in the future episode of looking at goal setting moving forward is how do I show up with consistency for y'all and create content, feed that creativity, while also managing my need to spend time with my family and not take too much time away from my family, because that creates the tension. So, hopefully we can solve that. But I'm going to talk to you about my approach for that and my approach to goal setting and how I'm looking at 2022 and what my focuses are. I don't talk about this just to talk through my own stuff. I hope it's useful for you. I'm putting my own stuff out there as a mechanism or as an example that you can draw from. I realize that most y'all probably don't care what my goals are. But hopefully it's useful to you in serving as some type of a template that you can use yourself or adapt in a way that makes sense to you. So, that's why I do it. It's not that I really want you to know what all of my goals are because honestly, it gives me a little bit of anxiety telling people that the things that I succeeded in failed on last year. But I'm trying to demonstrate courage and be willing to put that out there in the hopes that it generates impact because that is important to me. So, I am willing to be afraid and live in that fear in order to demonstrate courage and create impact. So, hopefully I'm doing that for you. And if you haven't already, leave me a rating and review. Give me feedback. You know how to get at me. It's in the intro. It's in the outro. And without further ado, I will see you next time on the platform podcast. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode of the platform podcast. I'm Jordan Kunde-Wright. We'll be back with a new episode next week. Please don't forget to register for the Twin Cities catapult open on our website twincidiscatapultclub.com. And if you have a question or suggestion, please email me at twincidiscatapultclub at gmail.com. Follow us on social media at twincidiscatapultclub. And of course, if you want to step on to the platform and competing catapult sport, please reach out to me. Until next time.