What Went Well for you in 2020?
You may be thinking, “This lady has lost her mind!” … “2020 was the WORST year of my life!”
Truth be told, I did lose my mind (a bit) and it sure felt like the worst year of my life; at times.
Like you, I was surrounded by a world of continuous stress and I was living in the “fight or flight” mode…scared, anxious and wondering what next piece of devastating news was going to come at me.
After the loss of my Mother, a dear friend, and my Mother-in-law in 2019, my family felt so weighted down with sadness that we were desperately hoping 2020 would bring more happy moments.
We looked forward to my son’s high school graduation and my 50th birthday!!
We were planning to attend more Pearl Jam concerts and a family trip to Mexico to celebrate and DE-STRESS after the years of worry about my ailing Mom and husband.
BUT NOOOOOOO!! 2020 shook us to the very core!!
Every aspect of our lives became UN-NORMAL, chaotic, and filled with anxiety that we were really “lost” for about 6 months.
And I KNOW that we were not alone in this.
Globally, we were all going through something MAJOR and stressful, so we grabbed our “life preservers”, our Coaches, mentors, family members and friends and we kept our heads above water as the waves of 2020 kept crashing on us ALL.
Slowly, we regained our “sea legs” and jumped back into the metaphorical “boat” together and started creating a NEW NORMAL!!
We put our time and energy on calming our nerves, focusing our minds on what we wanted our new normal to look like and we began feeling more grounded and peaceful enough to “thrive” instead of just “survive”.
We created new daily rituals including a morning and evening “Centering practice.”
We spoke about our goals individually and as a family.
We carved out daily meditation time in the afternoons.
We kept up our sanity-saving exercise routines and revamped our nutrition so it would support our minds and bodies as we faced more uncertainty with my husband’s medical condition.
And you bet we wore our masks!! We did all that we could to protect my husband’s fragile immunity.
At the end of every day, sitting at the family dinner table, we faithfully took turns saying our “What Went Wells”.
My son, husband and I retrained our mental focus to look at the positives, the bright side, all of the lessons that we learned, and the small gains we made for that day.
Day after day we stayed true to this practice and built up our “feel-good” skills so that we became people who were tuned into feeling grateful more often than not
Sure, we get rattled and filled with emotions at times, but now we have a whole new set of habits!
We have a new “sense of normal” and we can quickly get back on track to stay focused on feeling positive and energized as we move into 2021.
I invite you to add in the practice of focusing your mind on “What Went Well” for each day.
Choose a time of day that suits your lifestyle and commit to saying it aloud or writing in your journal.
Celebrate all of the things that went well for you that day.
Those things can be as simple as waking up and seeing the sun, taking a deep breath or feeling your feet hit the floor.
Stick to it for 14 days and I would love to hear how it goes.
Until next time,
Denise xo
