Productive Flourishing

In the first part of this series, we explored how Reviewing helps you understand where you are. Now we turn to the second phase: Visioning, figuring out where you want to go.

Some people naturally live in this phase. If you’ve taken our Momentum Quiz, you might recognize yourself as a Visionary:

💡 Visionary: Big-picture thinker with endless ideas, always focused on the “why.” Visionaries get projects started quickly but may need support in breaking ideas into actionable steps.

Others find this phase uncomfortable or unnecessary. Designers (master planners) might rush through visioning to get to the detailed planning they love. Creators (action-oriented doers) might skip it entirely, preferring clear steps over dreaming about destinations.

But here’s the truth: all roles are needed in the planning process. And just as skipping Reviewing makes progress unnecessarily difficult, skipping Visioning leaves you rudderless:

• Reviewing: You’ll have a starting point but no destination or direction

• Planning: You can’t chart a course if you don’t know where you’re heading

• Executing: You might get a lot done, but you won’t know if it’s moving you in the right direction

Visioning isn’t just picking a goal and moving on. It has two distinct parts:

This is blue-sky thinking, considering all possibilities without getting lost in the how. It requires taking off the...

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I’ve been using Toku McCree’s new Coaches Tarot deck to help with my morning journaling. (Toku’s a member of our community and sent me a review copy; go here for more information and to sign up to be notified when the Kickstarter goes live.)

A recent card pull was “Guilty Goodness.” The question it posed was:

Are you willing to feel the guilt of getting what you want?

You might be saying to yourself, “I don’t have any guilt around that.” And yet, when we look around at what’s going on in the world, when we look at all the different challenges, all the different needs, it can be difficult to prioritize yourself.

So much about the Start Finishing work and what we do at PF is a call for you to say, “My work matters. I matter, and I’m making space for myself.” Sometimes we don’t make that space for ourselves because we get what we want and then we feel some way about that — often guilty.

As you’re thinking about 2026, I want you to really play with the idea that you might get exactly what you want. How are you going to deal with the feelings that come up with that?

If this question really resonates about a certain project, a certain goal, a certain aspect of your life — beginning or ending a relationship, getting a promotion, making a move, starting a business (or ending one), having a child — ask yourself: are you willing to sit with the guilt or other feelings that might come from...

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of our Annual Reflection Workshop! We're sharing a short snippet from this unique 90-minute session. Instead of our usual Monthly Momentum Call format, we created extended space for year-end reflection — because understanding where you've been is essential for knowing where you're going.

Thank you to everyone who joined our Annual Reflection Workshop last week!

This time of year pulls us in competing directions. There’s pressure to “finish strong” and crush year-end goals, while also feeling pulled toward rest. What often gets lost is the work of actually looking back at the year that was.

It’s easy to skip reflection and jump straight to planning as if January 1st is a clean slate. But you can’t plot a clear path forward if you don’t first understand where you’ve been and what you’ve learned along the way.

During this 90-minute workshop, we explored:

• Honoring Your 2025 Celebrations and Challenges: Recognizing what you’re most proud of and what most challenged you, because both shape who you are today

• Identifying Your Learnings: Understanding the patterns, environments, and people that supported your best work this year

• Recognizing Your Success Pack: The people who created space for your work and who you might need in your corner as you move forward

• Visioning (Not Planning) 2026: Creating space for broad goal-setting without getting lost in detailed planning that often expires by January...

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January arrives with its familiar mix of possibility and pressure. The cultural machinery of “New Year, New You” kicks into high gear, creating urgency around goals and resolutions before we’ve fully processed what last year taught us.

If you’re leading a team, you may have already set organizational goals for the year ahead. But your team returns from the holidays scattered, carrying outdated plans and unclear about how their work connects to where you’re heading. Before execution can be effective, alignment is essential.

That same pressure exists at the individual level: the push to immediately commit to ambitious goals before clarifying what you genuinely want. Goals without vision are just tasks on a list. Vision without grounding becomes fantasy disconnected from work that matters.

If you took time in December to reflect on where you’ve been, January is when that reflection pays dividends. The insights from last year become the foundation for vision — whether that’s organizational clarity that brings your team into alignment, or personal clarity that grounds your planning in what truly matters.

This month, our Leadership Strategy Session explores how to reorganize your team around shared vision after the holiday disruption. And our Monthly Momentum Call focuses on crafting personal vision that serves as a home for your energy and intentions.

Note: If you missed our December Annual Reflection Workshop, the replay will be...

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To be a leader means managing constant complexity. Shifting priorities, team dynamics, capacity challenges, and the pressure to execute while everything keeps changing.

Our Leadership Strategy Sessions are supportive, no-fluff monthly virtual meetings for leaders navigating the real challenges of modern team life.

Each session blends practical guidance, coaching, and peer Q&A. We tackle what’s most timely and relevant, from clarifying team roles and managing capacity to leading through change and building trust.

You don’t need to prep. You just need to show up as you are, with whatever’s on your plate. These sessions are designed to meet you where you are.

The holidays scatter focus. People return with different energy levels, shifted priorities, and outdated plans still lingering from last year. Before you can plan effectively or execute with clarity, your team needs to reorganize around a shared vision of where you’re going.

This session is about bringing your team into alignment after the holiday disruption. We’ll explore themes like:

• Articulating vision in ways that create clarity without overwhelming

• Helping your team let go of outdated plans while preserving valuable momentum

• Bridging the gap between big-picture direction and executable priorities

• Creating conditions for your team to plan effectively rather than reactively

January isn’t about diving straight into execution....

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Monthly Momentum Calls are designed to help you focus on what matters most, offering a supportive space to clarify goals, overcome challenges, and make meaningful progress — whether you’re pursuing a creative project, growing your business, or balancing life responsibilities.

Each 60-minute session blends teaching, hot- support-seat coaching, and interactive Q&A, providing real-time support and actionable insights to help you move forward with clarity and purpose.

January’s cultural pressure pushes us toward immediate goal-setting before we’ve clarified what we actually want. The result? Resolutions that don’t survive February because they were never connected to work that genuinely matters.

This call is about creating vision before diving into planning. We’ll explore:

• Distinguishing between goals that truly serve you and goals you think you “should” have

• Creating vision that grounds your planning in what matters most

• Using December’s reflection insights to shape a vision that’s both inspiring and realistic

• Avoiding the New Year trap of frantic goal-setting that leads to burnout

Vision is a home for your energy, intentions, and dreams. Get this right, and everything else — the planning, the prioritizing, the executing — becomes clearer.

Bring questions about: Translating reflection insights...

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We talk a lot about planning around here, but something we don’t talk enough about is that planning isn’t a singular activity. It’s actually a continuous process of four distinct phases: Reviewing, Visioning, Planning, and Executing.

This post is the first in a series exploring each phase of the planning process. We’re starting with the one that’s most often skipped: Reviewing.

It may seem counterintuitive to start with a review since we typically think of that as something you do at the end. And that’s true. But a review of a past project or time period provides the starting point for what comes next.

Below, we’ll explore why reviews matter and the basic structure of a good review. Then you’ll find a curated collection of our best resources organized by when you might need them, whether you’re looking to review your day, your quarter, a specific project, or your entire business.

Contrary to what you might think, the first step in reaching your goals isn’t figuring out where you want to go. The most essential step is figuring out where you’re starting from.

Skip the review step, and you’ll struggle with the other three:

• Visioning: You might set goals that are unreachable from where you actually are, or set your expectations so low you won’t even bother trying

• Planning: How can you chart a course if you don’t know your real starting point?

• Executing: It’s hard to...

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🌟 While we no longer record the Q&A discussions during our Leadership Strategy Sessions, we continue to record the opening teaching. Enjoy a special preview of what we shared about finishing December with integrity. If you want to see the complete teaching and take part in upcoming sessions, consider upgrading to join us live next month.

“Finish the year strong!”

It’s December, which means this phrase is everywhere. But what does “strong” actually mean for you and your team?

We understand “finish strong” often gets associated with hustle-bro culture: push harder, do more, squeeze every last drop. But true strength comes from a place of integrity. It means standing strong in your values, your priorities, and in the work you have with each other.

So when you think of finishing the year strong, don’t think of pushing yourself and your team to the point of exhaustion. Instead, think of it as:

Strong in your values and priorities. Not strong in output at any cost. This might mean rallying to close out a project so it doesn’t carry into next year. Or it might mean releasing fever-dream strategic plans that no longer serve you.

Strong in the integrity of the work you have with each other. Recommitting to what matters and what you’re not going to do, without blame or running with scissors at each other.

Strong in spirit. Creating space for your team to arrive at the end of the year, not just survive it.

Strong can mean...

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The last couple months have been about regrouping, resetting, and replanning our ambitious (sometimes too ambitious) goals for the last quarter of the year into some thing more realistic to the time and capacity we actually have.

And now we’re in December, where that time and capacity amounts to, for most of us, about two workweeks before the year-end holiday festivities claim what’s left.

Plus there’s the year-end push for many companies, trying to hit revenue numbers in the calendar (and fiscal) year, which usually means other projects you had on deck get dropped or delayed to focus on the bottom line.

So rather than trying to “finish everything,” let’s do our best to finish well. Which means things like these (which we’ll be talking about at our next Leadership Strategy Session — call details below):

• Ending the year without overstretching

• Creating rituals of completion and learning

• Setting conditions now that make January less chaotic

Key among those is setting aside time now (yes, even in the shortened, hyper-busy of December) to review and reflect, as the first step to planning a smarter, stronger 2026.

Which is why Charlie and Maghan will be facilitating an Annual Reflection Workshop on December 17 (call details below), to help you with this important step toward finishing 2025 well and starting 2026 stronger.

~Steve

• Check out October’s and November’s resources for some...

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🌟 Enjoy a special preview of this month's call replay! We're sharing a short snippet to give our free subscribers a taste of the rich discussions and timely insights we explored together. If you're not already a paid subscriber, consider upgrading to access the full recording and be part of upcoming sessions.

Thank you to everyone who joined our November Monthly Momentum Call!

With the year’s end in sight, this session centered on a powerful question: What can you let go of so you can step into what’s present for you now?

Rather than adding more pressure to “finish strong,” we explored how letting go of outdated stories, unrealistic commitments, and versions of ourselves we’ve outgrown creates space for what truly matters. From strategic project decisions to releasing narratives that no longer serve us, our conversation offered practical ways to move through the final weeks of the year with clarity and grace.

Here are some of the key themes we explored this month:

• Making Strategic End-of-Year Decisions: Getting clear on how you want the final weeks of the year to go rather than trying to force everything across the finish line.

• Thinking in Seasons, Not Years: Why three-to-five-year “Seasons” (capital S) create healthier context than trying to force transformation within a single calendar year.

• Choosing Devotion Over Discipline: Recognizing when it’s time to shift your customer base or business model toward work you’re...

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