Picture shows: 2025 Lifestyle Planning

What does your ideal 2025 look like?

How can you craft a year filled with purpose, progress, and balance?

In today’s episode of The Effective Statistician podcast, my co-host Alun Bedding tackles these important questions, guiding you through the process of planning for the year ahead. Together, we’ll explore transformative strategies inspired by lifestyle-centric career planning, vision boards, and the principle of “beginning with the end in mind.” Whether you want to elevate your career, achieve personal goals, or simply create a vision that resonates with your values, this episode is packed with actionable insights.

Join us as Alun shares his expertise to help you approach 2025 with clarity and confidence!

Key Points:
  • Lifestyle-Centric Career Planning
  • Vision Boards
  • Goal Setting
  • Quality Over Quantity
  • Periodic Review
  • Books and Inspirations
  • Balance and Avoiding Burnout
  • Coaching Insights

Planning for 2025 doesn’t have to be overwhelming—it can be a powerful exercise in aligning your goals with your ideal lifestyle and long-term aspirations. In this episode, Alun Bedding provides actionable strategies and thoughtful insights to help you approach the year ahead with clarity and purpose. Whether you’re aiming to elevate your career, find balance, or simply refine your approach to goal-setting, this episode is packed with ideas you won’t want to miss.

So, listen now and take the first step toward making 2025 your most impactful year yet. And if you found this episode valuable, don’t keep it to yourself—share it with friends and colleagues who could benefit from these transformative strategies!

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Alun Bedding

Executive and Team Coach | Leadership Consultant | Statistical Consultant

Alun is dedicated to helping professionals make significant shifts in their thinking on various topics. He understands that each individual is unique and tailors his approach to meet each person’s specific needs. Alun works with professionals at all stages of their careers, including neurodiverse ones.

He specializes in guiding new leaders through the challenges of their roles and believes that everyone has the potential to achieve their vision. Acting as a thinking partner, Alun empowers individuals to reach their goals.

The most common subjects Alun addresses include:

  • Navigating the uncertainties of starting a new leadership position
  • Managing career transitions
  • Building confidence
  • Prioritizing important tasks
  • Enhancing teamwork
  • Preparing for job applications and interviews
  • Understanding the impact of climate change

With a background as a leader in statistics and the pharmaceutical industry, Alun brings firsthand experience to his coaching. He also works as a statistical consultant, focusing on early clinical development and pre-clinical drug discovery. His expertise lies in dose-finding, dose-escalation, adaptive designs, and Bayesian methods. Additionally, Alun supervises PhD students working on basket and platform trials.

If you’re ready to work with Alun and believe he can help you, contact him on LinkedIn or at alun@alunbeddingcoaching.com.

Transcript

2025 Lifestyle Planning

Alun: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Friday edition of the Effective Statistician Podcast. My name’s Alun Bedding and I’m once again sitting in for Alexander on this Friday episode where I’ll explore things that can help a statistician become more effective. Now when I think about being more effective I think about extra skills that we might need and a lot of people call these soft skills but I’m going to steer clear of that term because I feel there’s nothing soft about them.

Simon Sinek has referred to these as human skills. I believe that’s a much better way of thinking about these skills. So these human skills can make you more effective as a statistician. So this week I’m going to talk about something which is probably on everybody’s mind, planning for 2025. This episode comes soon, out soon before the holiday season and the new year.

And it’s usually a time when we start making plans in both our professional and our personal life. This is [00:01:00] all very good for our work life, where we might reflect on the previous year during an annual review with our manager, highlighting what we did right, where we could go better, and what could we do in the future.

And in the new year, we then start to make plans. We then start to think okay, what am I going to do in the coming year? And these might be linked to things like New Year’s resolutions, which if you’re lucky, will last through the whole year. But in most cases, they may last a few months. When we think of these goals for the year, we may do so on the spur of the moment.

So we may think, early in January, what is it I want to do? I need to get something down on paper because my boss has told me I need to have goals in my system before the end of January, for example. Now when I was in the pharmaceutical industry as a leader in statistics, I often told people that I didn’t really care what their goals were as long [00:02:00] as they Were for them personally as long as they resonated with them personally I don’t care if they Whatever they put in there as their goal to me It was a case of the goal is for them whether it’s right or not That to me is they decide whether that is right.

It’s individual to that particular person But it is useful to have goals to know where you’re heading. So I would say yes for 2025, have some goals, but I’m going to talk a little bit more about how you might actually think more about these goals. So this idea that has come up in, in several of my coaching sessions recently, what do I want to do with the coming year?

And maybe what do I want to do with the rest of my career? That’s quite a big goal. That’s quite a big plan. How do I know I’m on the right path? And what other things do I need to think about for my career progression? One of the things we always ask in a [00:03:00] coaching conversation at the start of any coaching engagement is to ask the thinker what’s important for them to think on.

What would they like the outcome to be after our time together? And how will they know this has been useful? It’s a classic Stephen Covey habit to begin with the end in mind. So how can we apply this thinking to our annual goals? Now I’ve taken a few thoughts from a number of books, which are my favorite books 4, 000 weeks by Oliver Bergman, So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Slow Productivity by Cal Newport.

And these books are available at any good bookstore. Cal Newport discusses the whole idea of lifestyle centric career planning, and he does this quite at length on his podcast, Deep Questions, and I’d encourage you to think about. That particular thing to start with planning, not just your 2025, but also the rest of your career.

So what does [00:04:00] lifestyle centric career planning involve? It revolves around thinking what your ideal lifestyle might be sometime in the future. And my encouragement is to think okay, it might be what? By the end of 2025, what do I want things to look like? But you might actually want to take it out to more than that.

You might want to take it out to two, three, four, five years. And we all know there’s going to be things that come up in the meantime, but this gives you at least a basis for what your life would like to look like. And then work backwards from there. So you work backwards. Let’s say we’re going to take 2025, work back from the end of 2025.

What do I want my life to look like? And then think about what do I want to achieve during the year to get that vision at the end of 2025. Again, there’s another synergy here with a coaching session in that we might ask the question, how will you know this has been useful? We might ask, what do we need to cover to achieve that?[00:05:00]

And so that then comes to we’ve got to the end of the year. What do we need to achieve to get to that vision by the end of the year? So in our planning for 2025, we might ask that question. What do we want to look at by the end of the year? I know I said look further ahead, but let’s start with that as a premise.

And then you can learn to think about how to apply this to greater spans. So in this planning, I would encourage you not to rush it, not to say I need to get this done by the end of January, but to take your time doing it. Maybe take it out for a walk, like I mentioned in the previous episode. Focus on the quality of what you’re creating.

And this is where I’m going to make a reference to slow productivity. One of the principles is obsess over quality. The point being that if we want to produce our best work, we need to focus on the quality of what that does. So I’m going to say you need to be slow and take your [00:06:00] time over the exercise to make this a quality exercise and worthwhile going forward.

Another useful exercise for doing this is to use a vision board, which is a pictorial representation of what your vision looks like. It doesn’t need to be a hundred percent accurate. It needs to resonate with you. Absolutely. But it doesn’t need to be something that is perfect and you should keep it somewhere where it’s visible.

So on your desk in front of you, maybe a picture on your desktop. Maybe it’s a a painting you have somewhere. I first came across this idea when my coach at the time introduced it to me. And recently I’ve done something with my, my, my coach now which uses something similar called the wheel of life, which is a reflection of how 2025 went and what’s my focus for 2024, 2025.

Now, how do we break this down to be more meaningful? Firstly, focus on the areas of your [00:07:00] life which could be similar to what I’ve talked about in the previous episode around sharpening the saw. So think about the four balancing factors that I talked about in that episode and think about keeping that balance together.

It is important to focus. Not just on work. It is important to focus on work. Yes, but that shouldn’t be the sole focus of this planning You need to think about what it is that my life is going to look like from a balanced perspective So you might want to focus on things like community Family hobbies all of these aspects bring this whole thing together But remember it is definitely still personal But it makes sure it is balanced if it’s not balanced if you’re spending so much time in work You might find by the end of next year that you’re in a burnout situation and that’s certainly where we don’t want to be So when we think about [00:08:00] our work Be thinking about to become more effective statisticians And this is where i’m going to encourage the use of the three books I mentioned And take some of those ideas from that book.

So here we’re focusing on Our work primarily, but we can also apply this in other areas, but let’s take our work So if we look at the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, one of the focuses for there is not following your passion, not having this I’ve got this grand goal. It’s more about building up those rare and valuable skills.

So think about what skill do I want to have by the end of 2025 and then building that skill up. How do I go about that? I need to do a bit of research. Maybe I do need to look into some papers. Maybe I need to look into some books, but what do I want to, what do I want that to look like by the end of 25?

Maybe look at things like the current trends in the pharmaceutical industry and focus on something there. [00:09:00] You want this to be by the end of 25, that something where you’re considered the expert. Maybe you’re the, now the go to person within the company, or at least you’re working towards that goal. This always goes against the follow your passion directive, which we sit, we’re here and we see everywhere.

Following your passion may be interesting, but it also may be going in the wrong direction. And I’m going to argue we don’t always follow our passion anyway. If I followed my passion, I certainly wouldn’t be a statistician or be a coach. Not going to share what it would be. So to take something then from another book, the 4, 000 weeks, focus on adopting a fixed volume approach to productivity.

So you only have a certain amount of time in your life. Oliver Bergman argues that if we live to a certain age, we’re only going to have 4, 000 weeks. And how best do we want to do we want to use those 4, 000 weeks? We can adopt the same for the year [00:10:00] 2025. We only have a certain amount of time within that framework.

So why not focus on those things that are going to have the most impact? This is also similar to the whole so productivity idea of doing fewer things. It doesn’t mean we, we achieve fewer things. It means we do fewer things at once. Like I said, we only have a fixed amount of time. We cannot manage time.

Time will take away no matter what happens. We can only manage ourselves against time. So think about what can you realistically achieve during the year. But again, coming back to that point of focusing on the quality, try not to do too many things and risk the quality of the things you do. You will read in slow productivity, a number of examples where people have taken time to achieve things They haven’t done it in a week.

They maybe have done it in a year or even two or three years. But it’s something that has been [00:11:00] very fundamental. So how do we know what to focus on? And this is where our vision board comes in. And this is where it links to habit two, begin with the end in mind. It also links to the other concept of what matters most.

Thinking about what matters most will then allow you to prioritize those things. So I would say the best way to construct your vision board is to start with a blank sheet of paper or what I use which is a cork board and then get images of whatever works for you and stick them to it. It could be images from magazines, it could be images from the internet, it could be just drawings that you want to do by hand.

You’re not going to show this to anybody. This is for you and it must resonate with you. The most important thing for this is to think, what does it want? What do I want to be by the end of 2025? How do I want the end of 2025 [00:12:00] to look like? So when I look back, I can be really proud. So this is the whole idea of lifestyle centric career planning for 2025.

You can then if this works for you in 2025, you can then think I want to apply this to to further out. It gives you a plan and planning is so important for being, going in the right direction. But I’ve got to say, please do not over plan. There is problems as well with over planning. If you’re over planning you may not actually get to the point where you actually do something So do not over plan.

I would also encourage Periodic times during the year maybe once every three months to look and review What your vision board looks like and see if it still resonates see if something else is something has changed that you then need to make Changes within your vision board, but [00:13:00] remember it still has to be meaningful for you This is not all rocket science, by the way, there are things here Which I’m probably saying to people which are the blinding obvious.

But having that plan in place, looking at your vision, working back from it, is a much more sensible way than trying to set your goals based on what you’ve seen so far. So that’s my thoughts on planning. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard today, please rate and subscribe to the Effective Statistician podcast and please sign up for this Effective Statistician newsletter.

Thank you very much for listening.

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