Regular fans of plans and this Philosopher-In-Residence blog will recall the last fortnight’s edition was talking about mettle and the kind of seeming fallacy of wishing people a Happy New Year in these times of COVID.

So, for this edition I wanted to talk about how to make the concept of newness work for you, even if everything is seeming bleak and like you just would like January to well, stop being January.

A while ago I did a values elicitation. If you haven’t done one of these before, basically it’s an interesting exercise which helps to see just what your kind of inherent values are.

I’ll explain a little further. You can do your own values elicitation at home, by just jotting down on a piece of paper you have handy. You just need to list out a number of values - I’d suggest starting with 10 or 20, and you then have to use a tally chart to compare each value against the other 9 or 19, depending on whether you have (this is much easier to do in practice than it is to explain in prose I promise!)

Each time you compare one value to another you have to make a binary choice as to which you would rank highest if you absolutely had to choose between the two. Once you have done this for all of the pairs of values, you should then have the most tallies against the values that are most important to you.

When this Philosopher-In-Residence undertook this exercise on herself, a while back, her top three values came out as freedom, improvement and achievement. So as January ticked around and I wanted to try and put some strategies into place to help me deal with a New Year not seeming all that new in the times of the pandemic, I went back to the values elicitation and had a little head-scratching session to see what I could do to still enable me to feel that sense of freedom, the sense of improving and achieving things, despite the fact that we don’t live in (and I hate this phrase) normal times at the moment.

Of course your values will be different to mine, but if any of you come up with one of those three as being one of your main guiding principles, I did something really simple and what regular readers of this blog will know is quite Make Me A Plan-esque: I simply spent about 10 minutes jotting down on slips of paper in my notebook a bunch of things that I either haven’t done before, or haven’t done for a long time or knew how to do but was for me really rusty or had been putting off.

A lot of these are simple things like finding a recipe and try it out and/or invite friends around for dinner. I’ve also tried to jot down things that I wouldn’t say were normally my forte, for example going along to a sewing social, attending a class to try out a new instrument or joining a hobby club.

My family always nicknamed me “not the practical one” out of me and my sister, so although this may seem a little like gaming those values that are important to me, starting from a low base line when it comes to those arts and crafts or new hobbies involving nature is certainly helping with the sense of improvement and achievement. Whilst all of these are obviously being undertaken in line with current Covid rules and guidance, it’s surprising how that trying something new can turn on those freedom triggers in your brain that may have been sitting a little dormant or rusty, certainly over the winter period and possibly since Covid 19 began to darken our doors nearly 2 years ago.

Do you try your own values elicitation and do let me know how it works for you.

Next fortnight, as we near the dreaded/much-awaited/delete as applicable Valentines Day, I’ll be musing On Love. I promise this will be a classical irreverent take on the subject, so if rose petals and flowers aren’t your thing, this next blog just might be!

Please get in touch with any particular aspects of this topic you’d like me to write about.

In the meantime,

Happy Planning

PS If you want some other free tips for your business life, check out the Working Well blog – out fortnightly on Wednesdays, courtesy of Make Me A Plan’s Productivity Expert, Penny Le Kelly. Browse the latest edition here: https://www.makemeaplan.com/news/new-year-new-networking-opportunities/