Welcome to Unfuck Your Brain, the only podcast that teaches you how to use psychology, feminism

and coaching to rewire your brain and get what you want in life.

And now here's your host, Harvard Law School grad, feminist rock star, and master coach,

Tara Lowenthal. Hello, my chickens. How are we all doing with winter? Those of us who are

in North America, I guess the Northern hemisphere right now, it's very dark. And my body

descended from Lithuanian peasants definitely just wants to sleep literally all the time.

I have never understood why people take time off in the summer. I mean, I guess the idea

is to go enjoy the beautiful weather. But to me in the summer, I feel pretty energized.

My brain has lots of ideas, I actually want to be working. And the time I really want

to take off is in the winter when my brain and body think that we should basically be

in bed 18 hours a day anyway. So I'm trying that this year, trying to kind of mix things

up and work a little bit more with my schedule. But one of the other things that often happens

around the end of one year beginning of another in our professional lives are things like

annual reviews and staff retreats. And so I actually want to talk a little bit today about

how I think about those things and what I have learned in my experience as a coach and

an entrepreneur and sort of what my journey has been with putting together annual review

processes and staff retreats. Now, this may not sound super fascinating, but it actually

is. Whether you are a boss or not, because whoever you are, whenever your professional

situation is, or even if you don't work outside the home, this process of figuring out what

is the best way to create these kind of conversations and experiences actually has very little

to do with work in and of itself. And shockingly, mostly has to do with people's brains and

how they think about the future and themselves and goals. So you're going to want to listen

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