Looking Forward to the Square Year

2024 in review and what it means to go with the flow

Tanmay Vora

Updated on December 31, 2024

Did you know?

2025 is a square year (45 x 45) – the only square year most of us will see in our lifetimes. The last was 1936 (44 x 44), the next is 2116 (46 x 46)

Go with the flow

has been my mantra ever since I moved out of corporate corridors in 2021 to be on my own. I wanted to express myself fully through all my skills (and combinations of skills) rather than being confined by a box of responsibilities.

For me, it has meant:

Flexibility Over Rigidity: As a solopreneur, I have reasonable plans but what has been most worthwhile is ability to pivot when circumstances change. Cultivating an openness to detours has led me to unexpected and most rewarding opportunities. Learning how to be adaptive, agile and curious has been the work of a lifetime.

“May what I do flow from me like a river, no forcing and no holding back, the way it is with children.” – Rainer Maria Rilke

Harnessing Energy: The joy of being a solo is to maximize work that taps into my energy and passion. I cultivated courage to say no to work that drags me. Instead of resisting any setbacks or overly trying to make things work, I focus on my circle of control and bring energy in things I do – leadership coaching, facilitation and visual storytelling.

Trusting the Journey: Uncertainty is a feature, especially when you run your own business. When we trust the journey, we can focus on our next best steps (H.T Dave Gray) and let the journey evolve. It is about combining agency to act now with a sense of surrender to what happens as a result of it. A lot of what I offer to customers today started as small experiments that evolved and scaled. As the business grows, my challenge is to keep running small experiments while also working on serving customers.

“Purpose may not always be the starting point of your journey. Sometimes, you start the journey and the purpose reveals itself.” – from my post Move and the way appears

Being Fully Present: Our presence and full attention is a gift for others, especially in a hyper-distracted world. When facilitating conversations, running workshops and creating visuals, my presence and ability to be in the moment makes all the difference. Going with the flow is about focusing on the here and now. That’s when we can synthesize what we consume, make meaning, spot opportunities and make meaningful decisions with our goals.

Finding Joy in the Journey: When I reflect on 3+ years of being an independent professional, I am amazed at how things add up to create a body of work that we can be proud of. I have always believed that the journey is the destination and every step along the way counts – even the missteps. For me, the mindset shift from “have to to the work” to “get to do the work” has been the most significant one.

Looking Back at 2024

More than two decades in leading teams/organizations and over 4 years building QAspire Consulting, I have learned that…

…leadership development and change isn’t about frameworks – it is about creating conducive spaces where people can discover their authentic voice through coaching, facilitation and visual thinking tools.
…large scale and complex change isn’t about top-down push – but about nurturing change carefully, paying full attention to what makes us human. It happens when people/teams converse to uncover their collective intelligence in a facilitated environment.
…shapes, metaphors and visual frameworks as tools to think are becoming indispensable when trying to impact any behavior change in a noisy world.

For me, the intersection of leadership development, change management and visual thinking continued to prove powerful in the past year, as organizations and thought leaders sought more engaging ways to clarify their ideas, build capability, develop leaders and nurture change.

On the work front, the past year saw me:

👉 Facilitating a large scale change for one of the largest IT services company

👉 Running leadership development offsites for customers in IT and pharma space covering seasoned leaders, middle managers and emerging leaders (HiPo’s)

👉 Conducting Quality Mindset workshops for multiple customers

👉 Illustrating two best-selling books in a co-creative spirit

👉 Graphically recording strategy sessions, culture communications and events globally

👉 Conducting visual thinking and sketchnote workshops through monthly sessions, organizational workshops for teams and in academic environments

👉 Curating, creating, sharing, and learning through sketchnotes, newsletter and blogs.

2024 was a good year as far as creating and sharing my work was concerned. LinkedIn tells me that my posts garnered over a million impressions, thousands of reactions/shares and hundreds of comments even when my posting was infrequent at best.

Here are the posts I wrote on my blog:

I am very excited to move my newsletter – Clarity Canvas Weekly – to Substack.com reaching more than 2700 people. I particularly love the community aspect of the platform. I write new posts each week on a Thursday and it goes out to more than 2700 people who have subscribed. There is also a paid subscription (that supports my work) where subscribers get exclusive sketchnotes and other resources through the year.

Gratitude

I am grateful every single day for family, health, friends, online communities and clients – all of which makes my pursuit worthwhile.

On the work front, I am looking forward to 2025 as a year when I expand impact through deeper integration of visual thinking tools in leadership development, change consulting and facilitative interventions – and do it in the spirit of curiosity, playfulness and co-creation.

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