Whatever holiday you celebrate and however you enjoy it, inevitably the rhythm of business changes during the last few weeks of the year. You can use this time to your advantage to bring a strong close to 2009 and an even more powerful start to 2010 whether you are a business owner or employee. You don’t even have to work hard to make it happen.

The secret is to gear your activities to answer one of two questions:

1) What do I need to do to bring the current year to powerful completion?

2) What can I do to set myself up for success in the year ahead?

Here are my top 5 tips of how you can do that based on my own experience and that of the experts I cite below.

1) Create a Clean Slate

Wrap up all those little hanging chads from 2009. That includes bookkeeping, invoicing, unfinished client communications, and filing. Nothing sends you into 2010 with cinder blocks tied to your feet more than a whole bunch of unfinished business from 2009. If you have outstanding items far too big to bring to full completion then simply organize, prioritize, and communicate with a firm date of when it will be handled in January. Finances have a natural end of year deadline for business planning and tax purposes. Some good tips on how to organize finances as a freelancer can be found here.

2) Organize, File, and Purge

While you’re grooving from number one, adopt the do it or dump it mentality with all your files and records including financial ones.  Get organized for tax season (it’ll be here before you know it!).  Purge old client files.  Empty your entire inbox.  Shred sensitive paper files you no longer need.  Clean the closet and filing cabinets.  Anything you can do to clear your space and simplify will reap rewards and replenish you with energy and space (literally and emotionally).  Here are some filing system tips to consider.

3) Celebrate Your Accomplishments

Now is the time to take stock of what you accomplished in 2009.  Even though it was a tough year for many, you have things to celebrate.  Take stock of 2009:

• What did you accomplish?
• What did you earn? what did you save? what debt do you have?
• What new skills did you learn?
• In what ways did you grow and evolve as a person?

You can’t get where you want to go without knowing where you are.  This step is about getting clear on where “here” is.  And here’s a hint – you don’t have to have a “save the world” accomplishment to create and savor your list.  Zandria sets a great example of celebrating in “Five Things I’m Proud Of (From 2009)”. You need to celebrate not only the tangible professional and financial milestones but also the personal ones.

4) Plan for 2010

“Those who fail to plan, plan to fail.”  It’s that simple. What are your goals for 2010?  I’m not a huge goal setting person in terms of hard-core goals all mapped on paper.  Yet I am a huge proponent of setting your intentions for the year and putting that in writing.  Your intentions of what you want to see happen in your life and business (from vacation ideas to income goals) as well as how you want to feel and BE as you go about your year.  Now is the time to do it.  If you wait until January, you’ll likely get swept into the wave of “same-old, same-old” and find yourself at the whims of everyone and everything else.

Create your learning plan.  If the past few years have taught us anything it is that learning and growing is the key to long-term success as a business owner or employee.  The landscape keeps changing and you need to keep your skills fresh and expanding. Here’s an excellent article on creating your learning plan for 2010.  One way to keep learning is to devour books regularly. Check out Melinda Emerson’s small business reading list Part I and Part II.

5) Rest & Relax

By all means you work your tail off all year — chill out for a bit. Create some breathing space.  Reconnect with family and friends. Take a nap.  Indulge with some extra time spent on your hobbies.  The point of the holidays is to make them meaningful
so do it.  Don’t let a to-do list or itch to get a jump on 2010 derail you from the here and now.  Handle items one through four the best you can and then let go.

What are your best tips for using the holiday time to your advantage for your business or career?

Once you’ve laid the groundwork over the last few weeks: setting your intentions, planning in some free time, and aligning your spending with what you most desire, it is time to sit back and enjoy the holidays to the fullest. I’m not living in a fantasy land, I realize things are still going to pop up. After all,the visits with family begin and that brings with it a whole new ball of emotionally charged wax. What I do know is that how you show up for these days are the truest test of your commitment to what you said you wanted (the intentions you set).

For instance, if your intention is to have a holiday filled with peace, love, connection, and some fun and the inevitable hiccups in plans show up (as they will), you get to choose your reaction. Will you choose something consistent with your intention? Or will you revert to jumping into frantic, angry, or stressed out mode? It may sound easy on paper, but I know it is not as easy as it sounds. When faced with a moment that makes you want to run away screaming, I know it is so much harder to take a few breaths and stay present with what is happening. I also know that flying off the handle does nothing but create a bigger mess to clean up later.

Here are my tips for staying cool and stress free during the holidays. And remember, if you are feeling good on the inside you won’t be tempted to throw money at a situation and binge eat, drink, shop, or whatever other unhealthy coping mechanism you’re tempted to fall back on.

Remember Your Intentions

If need be, get out that list of intentions and read it over and over. Remind yourself of the experience you most want to create over the holidays and use that as a guide to keep yourself on track. It is so easy to get off track in an instant and then wonder how the hell you got there. I’ve experienced momentary bouts of that already. The key is being aware enough to notice when you are straying from your intentions and make a course correction as quickly as possible.

Be Present

Nothing eases your fears and stresses faster than being fully present in the moment. All is well in this moment is more than just a mantra. Take some deep breaths. Get quiet. Feel your body in the chair, your feet on the ground. Notice your surroundings. All these are tools to pop you out of the swirl of crazy making and into the present moment with a quieter mind.

Keep Things in Perspective

When emotions run high it is so easy to blow things out of perspective. What might be as simple as an overcooked holiday meal can turn into a family crisis at the drop of a turkey baster. Before you know it things escalate, people are yelling, crying, and saying things they don’t mean. Whatever the upheaval, remember that the earth will not fall off of its axis. Take things with a grain of salt and know that you do not have to change the world when visiting for the holidays. Lively discussion is encouraged, but a knock down drag ‘em out fight with your politically divisive cousin over a hot topic is not a recipe for staying cool. By keeping things in perspective, I’m not advocating dropping your boundaries or allowing others to walk all over you. You can take a stand, just do so with grace and love. Remember to pick your battles.

Navigate the Season with Curiosity

You know how kids are so wide-eyed with the spirit of magic at this time? That is because they naturally have a beginner’s mind and see everything through fresh eyes. No matter your age you too can choose to be curious rather than curmudgeon. Rather than feeling like you know how everything has to be, just allow it to unfold. If you think you already know someone (especially family) allow them to be who they are but be curious about it. Like “Hmmmm I wonder how Aunt Sally got to be so stuck in the past” rather than “That damn Aunt Sally of mine never talks about anything that happened after 1943″. I guarantee if you choose to go about your activities with curiosity it will feel lighter and you open yourself to far more possibilities.

Rest and Create Space

Get plenty of rest and create space in your schedule to just BE. When you’re rushed and tired you are automatically more stressed. Pad your schedule so you can get a proper amount of sleep, have plenty of time to get where you need to be, and don’t feel like a slave to the clock. Your body AND those you are visiting will thank you for it.

Give Yourself Permission to Enjoy

Above all give yourself permission to just enjoy whatever you’re doing at the moment. Nothing “has” to be a certain way. Cut yourself some slack and allow yourself to enjoy the experience. It’ll not only make the holidays more fun, but it’ll set you up for a fresh start to the New Year rather than feeling like you just got hit by a bus.

Wishing you an outstanding holiday!!

Now that you’ve set your intentions and planned some spontaneity , it’s time to get even more serious with ensuring your spending aligns with your intentions. Conscious spending is the key at all times of the year but no time can be more dicey than the holidays. With emotions running high, retailers on full attack, and the extra desire for convenience during the hustle and bustle of the season, the temptations and opportunities to blow it are many.

The biggest pitfall people fall into has little to do with money itself at all. Our emotions fuel all our spending. Once we’ve got our basic needs met, the rest is all about emotions and perceptions. Where we get hung up is when we don’t tend to our own emotional housekeeping. Instead, we attempt to spend our way to fulfillment. It just isn’t possible, not at the holidays, not ever. We feel that if we don’t buy this or that or give a gift (the “right” gift”, a “good enough” gift, etc.) to people that somehow we’ve failed. Instead of the holidays being a peaceful time of connection it becomes a stressful time focused upon a bunch of external circumstances and spending while our true desires fall by the wayside.

Cutting back on spending often feels like a sacrifice. Much for the same reasons diets don’t work – because it is all about deprivation – if you feel like your approach to money is nothing but sacrifice you’ll fall into the same yo-yo trap. What I can say with certainty is that if you align your spending with your intentions, values, and means, that feeling of sacrifice melts away and is replaced with a feeling of personal power. The power to make choices that honor you.

I get the fact that there is stuff out there that we want and would enjoy. I know I have a list! There’s nothing wrong with buying it, enjoying it, and wanting it. However, when this desire for stuff and our spending is out of whack with our values and financial means that’s where the holiday overspending and buyer’s remorse taked hold. With the burn of the crash of the financial and housing markets fresh on our skin, let us not forget where buying more than you can truly afford will lead you.

No one tells it like it is quite the way Suze Orman does. In her article on Yahoo Money Matters “Five Ways to Avoid Holiday Overspending” she calls the holidays season the danger season.

I’m talking about the five weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas, when 20 percent of our country’s annual retail spending occurs. Jamming one-fifth of our spending into a frenzied window of shopping time can lead to some ugly financial results: A whole lot of bills we have no way of paying off come January.

While Suze can often seem a little dramatic, she’s got the numbers to back it up. Think about it – since Black Friday all we’ve heard about are the retailers’ tales of woe. Why do you think that is? Because they count on every one of us overspending at the holiday to make money. Each year we need to spend more and more for them to remain profitable. So the very behavior that has taken us to the cleaners over the past few months is the very behavior retailers rely on for their business model. Now there’s conundrum that Obama’s team can start sorting through right now. In business they call that an unsustainable business model. Remember the dot com boom and bust?

The good news is that perhaps all of this drama and financial pain has helped many heed its wake up call. The National Retail Federation reports:

In order to stick to a budget this holiday season, consumers continue to set aside plastic. According to the survey, two-thirds of shoppers (66.2%) have primarily used cash, debit cards, or checks to pay for holiday purchases, up from 64.5 percent last year.

All these numbers and strategies are great. What I know as a coach, however is that our relationship with money and spending has a lot less to do with budgets and numbers than with our relationship with ourselves. If you’re not treating yourself well, clear on who you are and what you really want, and honest with yourself, no amount of financial strategies are going to help you. You will continue to overspend and self-sabotage even if you were “good” and following a plan for a period of time. Unless you do the inner work required to shift your relationships (starting with the one you have with yourself) everything is just a temporary bandaid fix.

Through all of Suze’s tough talk she has from day one maintained the mantra: people first, then money. In her holiday spending article she sums it up nicely in her fifth tip:

You can’t buy friends or love.

An important relationship is not defined by what you spend on a holiday gift. So often, people tell me they feel pressure to shower their friends and family with holiday gifts even though they can’t really afford it.

Slow down and really think through where the pressure is coming from. It’s often self-inflicted, so keep in mind that the best gift you can ever give to yourself is one of financial honesty. If you want to make a dent in your debt load this year rather than add to it, just be honest about your situation. No one is going to love you less or devalue a treasured friendship just because you’re not exchanging expensive gifts this year.

And I’d add to that — you can’t buy your own self-love either. So this holiday – give yourself the gift of honesty and personal power. Align your spending with your intentions and be honest with your financial situation. You truly can save money without feeling pinched or deprived. Quite the opposite in fact — when you feel solid in your own self, you feel rich beyond words – and you can’t get THAT on sale at the mall.

Photo Credit: Stock.xchng

Does planned spontaneity sound like an oxymoron to you? Well, it isn’t necessarily so. Our lives, especially around the holidays can be so filled to the brim with activities that spontaneity has become a dying art. By spontaneity I don’t mean the chaos created when you fail to plan and launch into crisis mode. I mean a chunk of time and space in which you can choose to do whatever you want or do nothing at all.

Why do you need to plan it? Well, if you’ve ever said the phrase “When I have spare time I will …” and then years later never gotten to do it, you have experienced being steamrolled by your own schedule. I’m here to tell you that spare time and spare money do not just appear magically out of the air. Sure, sometimes you will find a gift of unexpected free time (like when an appointment gets canceled) or extra money (like when a rebate check shows up) but if you are not conscious about how you spend them they vanish as fast as they arrived and you wonder where it went.

In Part I of this series I talked about the power of intentions. Now that you have a sense of some of the things you’d like to do and more importantly how you’d like the holidays to feel, it’s time to take action to bring those intentions to life. This is where the planned spontaneity comes in.

To me planned spontaneity is simply taking a set amount of time and leaving that open to use as you see fit. What I’ve found works best is to make sure you set aside at least a few hours at a minimum for the spaciousness to be sufficient for the process to unfold. The other key is that you must commit that when your scheduled free time arrives that you will not fill it with obligations or more to-do’s. This time is not for catching up on all the things that slipped through the cracks because you were overbooked all the rest of the time. That defeats the purpose and sends yourself the message that your needs to not matter. It is a recipe for misery and getting the opposite of what you really want. What you DO want to do with this time is to give yourself the gift of doing whatever your own mood moves you to do. Just allow whatever possibilities are there to show up in the space you created. Some possible uses of this free time might include:

• Enjoying a hobby you don’t usually have time for
• Engaging in any creative activity that fuels you
• Spending the day as a tourist in your own town
• Adopting a vacation mode mindset for the day at home (maybe kicking back and reading a good book, indulge in a leisurely brunch, etc.)
• Watching a movie in the middle of the afternoon

It doesn’t matter what you do or even if you do anything at all (sometimes a long afternoon nap equates to a much needed guilty pleasure), just that you create some space for yourself to actually stop and just enjoy. It’s about consciously making time to break the routine so you can actually enjoy the season in the way you most desire.

Planning can be extremely freeing. Once you handle the details and create a framework in which to work, you are then freed up to be fully present for whatever you are doing. You might consider using a Holiday Planning Notebook While I personally find it would add stress to my life to go to the level of detail presented in the author’s notebook, having a section for budgeting and receipts as well as a general written down game plan can work wonders. I personally keep all holiday receipts in one envelope for easy tracking and returning. In addition, my partner and I have a written list of who we want to visit, when we are doing so, and any other fun holiday activities we want to partake in, such as visiting a local light display, and what date (and accompanying rain/snow date if need be) we are going to go.

You may feel like you don’t have time to think things through or plan. However if you don’t plan at all you’ll find yourself running around like a chicken with its head cut off and arrive in January wondering “What just happened!?” full of remorse and possible full of debt you don’t even remember incurring.

I guarantee that if you do a little thoughtful planning up front and include some free time for spontaneity in that planning you will feel less stressed, spend less or at least stay within budget, and enjoy the holidays a whole lot more. If that doesn’t sound like a good deal, I don’t know what is!

Photo Credit: stock.xchng

When it comes to making the most of the holidays intentions are everything. Intentions are like a compass; they point you in a direction and give you something to refer back to along your journey so you can make sure you know where you are and where you would like to go.  If the two are not aligned you can make adjustments on the spot rather than waiting to find yourself completely lost and unhinged.

As you approach this holiday season, are you clear on your intentions for it? Meaning do you have a sense of what your inner desire is in terms of:

• Activities you want to partake
• People you wish to connect with
• How you want to feel as you participate in holiday activities
• What you choose to spend your money on (and why)
• How much you can spend while staying in financial integrity

While the holidays can be a very busy time, the bottom line is you get to choose what you do (or not do) and how you show up.  Meaning, you are in charge of how you will feel this holiday season: stressed or unstressed, a slave to your money or in control of it, enjoying the season or just putting up with it.  Does that mean you will love every last thing you do this year? Hell no.  If you are in a relationship, work or part of an extended family, you may do things out of love that aren’t first choice on your list, but the people you are doing it for are at the tops of your list.  For example, your idea of fun may not be traveling to some distant state to spend a few days with your partner’s eclectic family.  Yet you love your partner deeply and your relationship is at the top of the list of things that matter most to you.  So, you go.  Even so, you get to choose whether you approach the trip with curiosity and treat it as an adventure (consider it your own live reality show!) or sulk through it and make everyone including yourself feel like you’re taking a trip through purgatory.

I want to take a moment to talk about the distinction between intentions and expectations.  Intentions are key to having a meaningful experience, expectations are the short path to disappointment and suffering.  Intentions arise out of our inner desire.  You couple intentions with actions to create experiences you most desire in your life.  It is an integral part of the law of attraction in action.  Intentions are made with an open heart and spirit.  You leave the door open for what you want to occur or something better.  You are not attached to exact outcome or things looking a certain way. On the other hand, expectations are born out of our mind.  You get an exact picture of what you want and it comes tinged with a bit of neediness and entitlement.  You do not leave the door open for something different or better to occur because you want THIS and only THIS and you want it when you want it.  You are fully attached to the outcome and of course if it doesn’t happen exactly as you wish, you are frustrated, disappointed, and you suffer.

As you might imagine, having a lot of expectations for the holiday are a recipe for disaster. They are part of the reason so many people get so stressed over the holiday.  People expect others to show up at every last function. People expect certain types or amounts of gifts. People expect that the house will be decorated a certain way.  People expect that so and so will visit at a particular time and while visiting will do x, y, and z. People expect that you must spend a certain amount of money or buy the latest  gadget.  People expect that you must spend time with distant family members you have no connection with (or worse yet that disapprove of your relationship or lifestyle).  All these expectations leave a trail of guilt, stress, “not-enoughness”, and obligation.  No wonder the holidays are so emotionally charged!

I’m here to tell you it doesn’t have to be that way.  The secret to creating a different, more satisfying experience lies in getting clear on your intentions.  What do you most want to experience from the holidays?  Do you want them to be full of love? Relaxation? Connection? Fun? Joy? Ease?  Perhaps you simply want to feel good or happy throughout the season.  The good news is if you get clear on your intentions, put in motion the actions you need to bring this experience about, and then adopt a mindset of openness and curiosity you can’t help but have a great season.  Short of some personal or family tragedy (and I mean real tragedy like illness or death not some man made crisis) this approach is a foolproof approach to thriving and actually enjoying the magic of the holidays.

Photo Credit: The Author