What if you're not the problem after all?
When being under-prepared worked in my favor
Hi Soul Minimalist!
Yesterday I sat down with my little team for a day-long Quarterly Planning Meeting (QPM if you will. I will!) for Q1 of 2025. We do this once per quarter and one time a year we combine our quarterly planning with our annual planning for a two-day retreat.
In these meetings we always talk about our personal and professional best of the last 90 days, what’s working and what’s not working from each of our seats, and what we plan to focus on for the next quarter of the year.
Typically before our meetings I try to get clear on a few things for myself and my business, including asking myself some important vocational questions. One of them was the subject of this week’s podcast episode: What is mine to do? I spent 19 minutes offering some strong reminders (for myself) that this is a discernment question which means at least 5 things will be true:
Discernment questions require space.
Discernment questions often lead to arrows, not straight answers.
Discernment questions rarely end in binaries.
Discernment questions are an invitation to revisit desire.
Discernment questions are spiritual questions.
I get into each of these in more detail on the episode which you can listen to here: The Most Important Vocational Question for the End of the Year.
This week, though, because we are in the middle of our Advent Collection launch and because of a few other things and stuff and what-nots that have kept me distracted, I didn’t feel as fully prepared for our meeting as I have in the past. Surprisingly I think this actually served me well this time.
As I sat with my (small, brilliant, collaborative) team yesterday, a handful of things became clear to me: