When is the last time you checked in with yourself? I mean, really sat down and evaluated how you are holding up?
Many of us have settled into some type of new routine as we come up to the year mark of this pandemic. Sure we have hand sanitizer and masks now but we also have a year of unprecedented stress, loss and uncertainty.
I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, but taking a minute to reflect on what this year has brought and how you are feeling now can give you some perspective, some comfort, and some direction for what we want to feel and achieve moving forward: a “new-normal new year” as it were.
If we continue to push through without stepping back for a minute and checking in with ourselves, we miss an opportunity:
An opportunity for self compassion for feeling the heaviness of things lost: loved ones, time with family, life events like graduations and weddings, jobs, a sense of security.
An opportunity for pride in the things accomplished: how we grew and changed to learn new ways of doing things, how we adapted to the stressors and life demands.
An opportunity for gratitude for the things we didn’t lose.
An opportunity for awareness of what we want in our lives moving forward.
I challenge you to take a minute and actually write a list with each of these categories as headings.
Stop moving and stressing for 5 minutes and make the list.
Then, armed with this information, how can you support yourself in this upcoming year? What do you actually want in your life, not out of obligation but because you really want it?
This is our opportunity. It’s like redoing your living room and only putting back in the things that you really love, the things that “spark joy” :)
If there are things that you need to put back in out of necessity, let’s take a minute to be grateful that we have something to fulfill that necessity, even if it takes away a little from the ascetic of the room (ie: even a really tough work situation serves the purpose of allowing us to provide for ourselves, so it gets a place in the room… without resentment). Decorate the room around these things to create balance.
This is the ultimate living room redo, the living room of your life.
The challenges certainly aren’t over but if there is one thing that we know for sure after this year, it’s that no matter what life throws us, we can handle it. We have a year of evidence to show us that this is true.
After all, we’ve figured it out so far (even if we’ve gotten a little messy doing it).
Need some support crafting your life moving forward or designing your living room around that tough job? Click here to schedule a "take the first step" consult with me.
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