To be completely honest, 2024 was the biggest year I've ever had in business, personally and professionally.

I peaked.

And just like a lot of people at this time of the year, I'm looking back over the year to see what worked, what didn't, what surprised me and what landed exactly as I expected it would.

I won't bore you with an annual retrospective of how many likes I got on LinkedIn (not as many as you'd think) or how many self-nominated awards I won (none.)

But I will admit openly here that I am not anywhere near where I thought I would be by the end of 2024.

I'm considerably ahead.

But not in any of the things I assumed I would be ahead in.

The wind blew very differently this year than I expected it would. And it's blown me in a very different, wonderful and rewarding direction.

People change, and so do customers.

This year I was asked to do workshops and conference presentations in things that I am way less qualified to speak on than the things I spoke on in 2023.

I am one of Australia's most qualified people to speak about business on Meta's platforms and even work for Meta Australia and New Zealand to deliver their own training - but the only people that wanted me to deliver Meta training this year were Meta themselves.

Instead, all year, all anyone wanted to hear about in social media was LinkedIn.

Seeing this change early in the year, I designed a range of materials for various groups including government, corporate, university students and small business owners.

I'm glad I did.

I have done more LinkedIn workshops both online and in-person than anything else and they have been some of the most well-attended workshops I've done.

But there was one other kind of training I did that was pretty close behind LinkedIn.

Public Speaking.

And this was an interesting one, because I started offering public speaking coaching and workshops in 2022, but it just didn't take off at all.

Yet I really did think there was something in it, so I persisted. I had a few clients in 2023, but nothing spectacular,

This year, I had just as many public speaking coaching clients as I had social media coaching clients. And if I remove LinkedIn from the equation, I had more attendees at public speaking workshops than social media ones.

Which reflects a change that I am seeing in general within the broader entrepreneurship community.

Business owners are seeking skills, not just ideas.

If there was a word of the year for me, it's "skills."

That word has come up more and more often.

It's been part of my conversations about universities and how they are producing so few graduates who have any useable skills.

It's been part of my coaching sessions where the business owners I am meeting are less interested in mindset tricks and more interested in useful skills.

And it's been a priority in the training materials I've been producing.

In fact, I have changed the focus of my workshop presentation slides from being full of ideas and theory to being more around live demonstrations of how to do things and how systems work from the inside.

And it's these live demonstration webinars and workshops that have been the most well-reviewed and rated by attendees.

Perhaps we've started to see through the online guru mindset word-games and fancy frameworks and boss-bro/boss-babe manipulation and seek out things that make them money.

They've been seeking things that move the needle - not just move their emotions. And this has been an interesting shift that I've even noticed in myself.

The books I've read (or listened to) and the podcasts I've heard as well as the conferences and webinars I've attended have been almost all about the "how to" rather than the "inspired by."

The keynote speakers I'd seen weren't disappointing, but I found myself bored by them within minutes. But those who showed me how to do something new - not just the research on why I should do something new - had me engaged from start to end.

And I learned far more this year from YouTubers, podcasters and LinkedIn Live videos than I did from any conference or organised keynote speaker events.

The world took a sharp turn as well.

And this is where I will take a small detour to politics. Don't worry - I won't go too deep into it.

What we're seeing in business events is a little bit reflected in what were seeing in the broader world.

Not all of us predicted such a dramatic swing back toward political conservatism in 2024.

Wins for conservative parties in the Northern Territory and Queensland after long stretches of Labor party control were followed by a conservative "wave" in the US as Trump returns to power with both Houses of Congress aligned with him.

2025 will see a nasty federal election season in Australia and a potential surprise in the Western Australian election.

The left-leaning government of France is flailing about, the Labour party in the UK is struggling to find its feet and in New Zealand all the progressiveness of the Jacinda Ardern days are long forgotten as we bathe in the juices of a post-COVID world of high costs of living and a long hard look at all the "extras" we've been taking on in business and our cultures.

In Central Queensland, a group of traditional owners has banned "Welcome to Country" ceremonies due to the commercialisation and cheapening of them becoming an embarrassment to them. They won't be the last to do this.

When people are struggling to pay rent, groceries and bills, asking them to sit through a political speech before their one glorious escape from the world into football, cricket or even a theatre production - in which they are welcomed to the place they live in... well, it's a little hard to take. Especially when you know the person performing is being paid more for five minutes of reading a script, than you are getting paid for a week of work.

I'm not arguing for or against these cultural ceremonies. They personally don't impact my life or business. And I have friends who perform these duties out of a sense of great pride and purpose. And they don't always get paid for it.

But I do know that the more times you force someone to hear a message that they didn't ask to hear, the more that they will start to resent that message and what it stands for.

They'll also start to resent you.

Street preachers are a rare sight these days for this very reason. Preaching to people only serves to make usually reasonable people hate you and everything you stand for.

And so we now are left with a world of hatred for "wokeness" and any kind of progress and science.

And a lot of that has to do with how the woke, scientific and progressive have treated people.

When you look down at, preach at and constantly tell a group of people that they are bad, dumb, racist, stupid and bigoted, they're eventually going to react in a way that you might not like.

And they'll do it in greater numbers than you expect.

And that's the world we find ourselves in now.

So where to from here?

This all ties back into the movement I've noticed this year towards real skills, real change and real results in business - rather than playing around with word games, awareness days and mindset manipulations.

For myself, 2025 looks like a year where there is little tolerance for "fluff."

The people I work with have told me directly that they want:

1. Skills that will start and grow a successful business

2. Skills that will get them the job they want

3. Skills that will help them not be useless at speaking publicly

4. Skills that will help them use technology without being reliant on others

They want to be profitable, independent, strong, resilient and successful.

They are tired of having to walk around on eggshells when it comes to wanting to work hard, be successful and take up their space in the world.

They are tired of the same rubbish advice around manifesting and positive thinking and magical words, phrases and mantras that achieve nothing.

They want movement, change and action.

And before you think of these as the words of a privileged middle-aged white "cis-male" - my clients are 80% women. Half of them are not white.

If my clients are ready for change, maybe yours may be too.

Or perhaps you might be ready to start being more honest with yourself about where you are, what you're thinking and what you want to do about it.