What will be your word for 2020?
It's hard to believe that there are only three months left of 2020, a year many of us cannot wait to be over and one we’ll never forget.
Many words could be used to describe 2020. And we’ve also learned some new ones - exponential curves, epidemiology, reff numbers, viral load and aerosol transmission, to name a few.
Did you know that every year the Oxford Dictionary chooses a word for the year, a word to describe the year that was?
In 2018, the word of the year was TOXIC.
In 2019, it was CLIMATE EMERGENCY.
What do you think the word for this year might be?
Pandemic? Social Distancing? Unprecedented? Corona-coaster?
What about your own word for 2020? What will your word of the year be?
Reflecting on the words that we’ll use to describe our experience; it becomes apparent that we often focus on external and negative things. And it’s always easy to focus on the negatives.
The problem with this is that the focus of our attention forms a big part of creating our experience. Even if we have the exact same day, if we choose to focus on the negatives that occurred, what we take away and feel about our day will be quite different compared to focusing on the day’s positives.
One of my greatest teachers Rick Hanson PhD says our brains are like Velcro for the bad and Teflon for the good. This tends to amplify our negative experiences and skew how we remember things.
When we overly focus on things that are outside of our control and give words and language to those, it can add to feeling out of control, pushed around by external influences, like a small boat in a storm.
Having said this, it's vital to acknowledge this has been a very difficult year. For many of us and our loved ones, this may have been the most difficult year of our lives. As has wisely been said, we may have all been through the same storm, but we’re all in very different boats.
Many of us have faced redundancy, unemployment or being stood down. We may have felt isolated and alone, disconnected from our loved ones. And this all came on the back of the worst bushfires Australia has seen. If you’re in Melbourne like me, you might be desperately missing all the things in life that are fulfilling, like spending time with friends, going out for a meal, to the theatre, or going out for a walk in nature or being able to travel.
We have all missed important moments. Like when my close friend’s Mum died and I could not be present at the funeral, or when we couldn’t visit hospitalised family members, or meet the new baby in the family, who’s only three suburbs away.
As we finish the last 90 odd days of this year, maybe it's time to take stock and think about what we’ll take away from 2020.
What will your word for 2020 be? What words will you take away from this year to describe the experience?
Do you want to your word of the year to be:
Disaster or determination?
Pandemic or patience?
Catastrophe or compassion?
Loneliness or love?
The first word acknowledges the external circumstance – the storm or boat we may be experiencing, the second word describes the strengths we drew upon to face our challenges.
It is vital to acknowledge the challenging things, to grieve our losses, vent our frustrations. Then it is helpful to then shift mental gears to focus on what we can control and influence.
This helpful skill is one element of self-leadership. It’s about building personal agency and autonomy through actively choosing to focus on the things that we can control and influence, rather than focusing on what we can't.
I hope 2021 is going to be a far easier year for us all.
In the meantime, I hope you can use the last 90 days of 2020 to build your self-leadership, through appreciating the strengths and capacities you’ve drawn on to survive (and even thrive).
I have explored the skills of Self-leadership in my book Leading Above the Line: Applying neuroscience to build psychologically safe and thriving teams. The book will be published in November and has two chapters reflecting on the skills of self-leadership.
These will also be explored further next year, in my Self-Leadership programs and in more depth in my Thriving Professional Women’s program.
Reach out if you would like some more information or a copy of my book.