I've spent most of the last week hibernating. It wasn't what I'd intended to do, but it was what I seemed to need, so I let myself run with it. During my hibernation, I wrote two long lists, one of everything I was happy about in the past year, and one that I was unhappy about. I am definitely doing this, or something like it, every year from now on.
The list of things that I was happy with, proud of doing, successes, things I'd learnt, went on for four A4 pages, whilst the negative list covered only one. And yet, predictably, I've probably spent more time dwelling on those. Just by writing this out I shifted my perspective, from 'argh I can't believe the failure' to 'Ok, there's been some fail, but there's been way more good stuff, and you've actually learnt stuff from the fail, so surely that's not entirely a fail then?' Which has been pretty sweet.
These are my most important lessons of 2009. Seeing as they're more 'woah, cosmos' type lessons, I'm going to be trying to live them in 2010.
Trust my intuition. Trust the feeling inside that tells me what is and isn't possible, the feeling that says 'this looks interesting' or 'get me out of here'. Learning to ask myself questions and not censor the answers.
Permission. Permission to trust myself and my intuition. Permission to invest in myself. Permission to feel things like anxiety and fear without beating myself up about feeling them. Permission to dream, and then to work out how to make these dreams real, and to risk doing it. Permission to risk failing.
Control. Believing that I control my own life. Not allowing other people to control how I feel about myself, by measuring myself as a success or failure against someone's else's yardstick, and then accepting that judgement.
Now, I'm off to hibernate some more....
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Real patriots!
3 days ago
This sounds like a fabulous idea, the two lists. I think I'll try that too and see how things turn out! I'm glad you had more positives than negatives. Have a happy new year!
ReplyDeleteComing up with 4 positive pages to 1 negative is AWESOME! Just wait until school starts and turns your world topsy turvy again. Don't let the insecurities get you down, just look at your list of accomplishments to remind yourself you know how to succeed.
ReplyDeleteYou are something else, J! How on earth did you get so wise? I love your lists. I've started a bucket list just for the hell of it!
ReplyDeletebittersweetwords - I recommend it. I guess it's natural (well, perhaps to semi neurotics like me) to think about the mistakes made, because we (hopefully) want to avoid repeating them, but realising how many positives there were was quite liberating, and made me realise that I do more stuff 'right' than 'wrong'.
ReplyDeletemm - I'm starting a new job and a new course at the same time, so should be fairly, uhm, interesting!
Kathleen - Are you going to put it on your blog? I need to update mine. Probably by managing to make every mistake there is! (Yeah, I know it's totally hubrisitic to say that, but...)