Bonjour gorgeous,
Paris and Champagne were everything I could have wanted and more!
I am taking a few extra days to savor memories and rest from jet lag. It’s my birthday this week and the 4th of July weekend in the USA, so that feels like a good idea to enjoy a few more days of relaxation before coming back and carving out time for our company’s half-year performance review.
What does a performance review mean to you?
Each year around my birthday, I invest time in conducting a half-year performance review. When I worked in corporate, I was so excited about these reviews, and when I set up my own company, I kept doing them. If you are in corporate, it occurs annually, and if you are an entrepreneur, you can do this for yourself however often you want.
I take myself and my business plan, financial reports, manifesto, and journal out for champagne (this year at the Tampa Edition). When I lived in Sydney, I’d sit at the same table in my fave hotel each year. It’s a ritual.
This critical appointment allows you to conduct a performance review, assess progress toward goals (see how we set our goal areas each year in this article: spiritual, financial, physical, relational, and educational), and reset action plans for the remaining six months.
If you’re preparing for your own performance review with your boss, here are a few items to consider:
- Gather all the positive feedback from clients and colleagues and collate it for your boss.
- Complete the review and rate yourself with comments to compare against your bosses’ impressions.
- Create a list of significant impacts you have made to the business, projects, and team.
- Curate a list of additional development you’d like to undertake including courses, shadowing opportunities, mentoring, online programs and conferences you’d like to attend.
- Make a list of questions to ask your boss that will help further your career.
Our Luxury Manifesto
We also take this half-year review to check, as a team, if we are honoring the contextual word set for the year and our manifesto.
I believe in setting a contextual word for the year—think of it as a decision-filtering system. I have been doing this for 30 years!
If you aren’t sure what a manifesto is, think of it like a set of guidelines, your mantra, your values, your desires, and how you want to show up in the world for those that are important to you—something you could share with your team and those you love.
In many ways, my manifesto answers the question I hear so often: “Why is luxury so important to you?”
It’s a great question. I am from a tiny Australian town; my hardworking single mum taught me that luxury is about experiences, not things. She turned our humble home into a world of wonder, igniting my passion for creating beauty in everyday moments. While we didn’t have a lot by other’s standards, my childhood was happy, and that is a privilege, but I don’t come from privilege.
I believe in luxury because I understand what it’s like to come from nothing (what is perceived to be nothing and feel like nothing) and how you can easily make someone feel like everything through the choices you make and the actions you take.
So, today, I’m on a mission to help everyone experience luxury and elevate their everyday experiences because they are worth it. Luxury is at the heart of everything we do at Neen James Inc., and our philosophy was developed early in my career after being inspired by Matt Church: We do what we love, with people we love, in places we love.
Here are the key elements in our manifesto:
Our Key Message is Luxury is a Mindset.
My Personal Core Values drive my personal and professional decisions.
- Joy
- Health
- Generosity
- Fun
- Beauty
- Energy
- Thoughtfulness
- Abundance
- Creativity
- Luxury
Our Neen James Inc. Company Values include:
- Running lifestyle business that allows every team member to design the life they want.
- Standing in service of our clients to deliver energetic, memorable, valuable experiences.
- Putting family-first. Family means furry babies, extended family, and those important to us.
- Honoring diversity and embrace a diverse mindset.
- Everything we do, say, and share is premium and feels luxe.
We believe:
- Leaders can create luxury experiences for their teams.
- Companies can create luxury experiences for their clients.
- Communities can create luxury experiences for their members.
- You can choose luxury in your everyday life.
- Luxury is you controlling time, not time controlling you.
- Luxury is knowing you can’t manage time; you can manage your attention.
- The gift of your undivided attention is not a luxury; it’s a necessity.
- We can use everyday “luxury” for our mental health.
- Luxury will NEVER go out of style.
We developed a list of statements that help us serve our CEOs and their teams when we do executive strategy work and our audiences when I serve as their keynote speaker:
Luxury is:
- A lifestyle where you appreciate everyone and everything.
- Paying attention.
- Paying attention to the details.
- Creating experiences for others
- Quality over quantity.
- Thoughtfulness and caring.
- Being seen and heard
- Making time
- The pause (reflection).
- Recognition (noticing)
- Connecting (deeper)
Luxury is NOT:
- About expensive things, it’s about experiences.
- What you bought; it’s about how you made me feel.
So now you can see why we think luxury is doing what you love, with people you love, in places you love.
Could you create your own manifesto? If so, I’d love to see it too!
