Celebrate Your Achievements to Change Your Life
I really want to make 2021 different.
I want to highlight it as a moving forward point for the amazing things that I am yet to make happen.
As 2020 drew to a close I did my usual things, decluttered my home, office and digital devices, set goals, made decisions and did a hell of a lot of thinking.
I’ve done a lot of work in the past six months on my thoughts, my potential and the story I have for myself and my life. It’s really helped me to realise just how hard I am on myself. Yes I did that thing, but I’m sure someone else did it faster/easier/better – not enough, need to do more.
Achievement (/əˈtʃiːvm(ə)nt/): a thing done successfully with effort, skill, or courage.
(Isn’t that a perfect definition for 2020?)
It really came to my attention how I never, and I mean NEVER look back and allow myself to appreciate and celebrate my achievements. And I have done some really awesome things.
That’s a $hit tonne of positive emotion that I’ve denied myself over the years.
So I’ve decided that 2021 is going to be different. I’m going to take the time and make the effort to recognise and celebrate my achievements.
To get started, I sat down on the 31st December to write my list of things I achieved during 2020. Three days later I was still adding to it – talk about blowing my own mind!
This simple exercise really has prompted me to look at myself in a whole new light. I did so much and in such a crazy, trying and uncertain year! For most of us just surviving 2020 with our health and sanity intact is cause for celebration.
With this in mind I want to encourage you to write your own list. So you can start 2021 with a real sense of what you were capable of, even during a year like 2020. And blow your own mind with what that could mean for your future.
In the spirit of sharing, here is my list of achievements for 2020:
- Built and moved into my new home office
- Launched our Work Wife Wine Time podcast
- Attained and maintained a 22lbs (10kg) weight loss
- Joined Self Coaching Scholars and completed my first 6 months of committed study
- Spoke at my first networking event on the topic of Techmindfulness (it sold out, they doubled the room size and it sold out again)
- Supported my kids through Grades 7 and 10 (fortunately with just one term of homeschooling)
- Hit my business revenue goal for the calendar year
- Started a new company (watch this space)
- Read 82 books (you can check out my reading list here)
If I hadn’t done this exercise, I wouldn’t have given myself the opportunity to experience the sense of pride, gratitude and appreciation I have for myself right now. My brain would still be caught in my old loop of not enough – need to do more.
Will I sit back and take it easy now in 2021? Hell no! But I’m now approaching this year from a place of abundance, gratitude and appreciation for myself and what I can do – instead of a place of deficiency, scarcity and anxiety about what lies ahead.
Just one final thought. The last thing I want you to do is to compare yourself to me or anyone else. We’re all individual human beings with different circumstances, strengths, hopes and dreams.
COVID was a vastly different experience for me living in southern Tasmania than it was for my friends and family living in Melbourne. It was a vastly different experience for me with my online business than it was for my wife who usually works in a busy city office with a large team and for the past nine months has worked alone at a small desk in a corner of our lounge.
This exercise is all about YOU and what you have achieved under the unique circumstances of YOUR life.
So go on, I encourage you to follow my lead. Create a list of everything you got done during 2020, no matter how big or small and spend some time appreciating what you were able to achieve, during an unprecedented time in our recent history. Then allow yourself to marvel at what you have the potential to achieve in 2021.
