While I’m not a huge new year resolution fan, reflecting on what’s past, I believe releasing what is gone, and setting goals for the future is powerful. Here’s what I’m taking with me into 2021 (and what I’m leaving behind in 2020).

2020 (and the first week of 2021): Fear, grief, loss, anger.
And also: Courage, wholeheartedness, release, clarity.

The main thing I’m hoping to leave behind is, of course, COVID-19. 

As you may know, I’m among the 80+ million people who got hit with COVID, already. It flattened me for two whole months of 2020. 

As a small business owner, being out of commission for 20% of the year hit me hard, and not only to my bottom line. 

Especially during a down economy when 22 million jobs vanished (and fewer than ½ recovered so far), I felt and feel deeply called to serve. But my health and a couple of other things I’ll talk more about in a minute, kept me from supporting as much and as many as I’d like. 

We’ve lost so much to this pandemic. If you’ve been sick or lost loved ones this year, I’m holding you in my heart. I’m hopeful that, at some point in 2021, we’ll be able to look at coronavirus in the rear view, and begin the healing process.

Letting go of the old normal.

Along with illness and loss of life, lost jobs and careers, social distancing changed how we work and relate. Even for an introvert like me, a child of the 70s and 80s who mastered alone time in my youth and continues to crave it, I grieve the old normal. Hugs, in-person interaction, family, caring for our elders, holding our babes, even little things like attending my nieces and nephews small-town sports. 

For me, part of the old normal that I’m deliberately leaving behind includes a whole slew of shoulds I’d been carrying for years. I had a self-pity party on my big 50th birthday that led to a huge realization that, despite my general happiness, I’d carried undercurrents of self-distrust, cruel expectations and judgments, confusion, ideals and conditions that kept me from being fully engaged in my human body, relationships, business, and life. 

In business, that meant a business model that didn’t serve me or my clients as well as I’d like. I pendulated between gorgeous ideas of how to serve and crushing overwhelm about how to attain them. 

So, part of letting go of the old normal, for me, includes letting go of my list of Shoulds and Have-tos. Of the belief that I need to change into someone else’s ideal. Or that I can beat myself into my own. 

Waving goodbye to my own white privilege.

I’ve always cared about civil rights, but this year, especially, woke me to the severity of continued social injustices. I’m deepening my awareness of my own privilege and ignorance, and learning to be an anti-racist. 

I’m a novice student of these topics, so I’ll shine a light on some of the teachers I’m following and studying: Rachel Rodgers, Desiree Lynn Adaway, Ericka Hines, Patti Digh, are just a few of the teachers whose classes I’ve taken. I can’t recommend them highly enough. 

So that brings us to what I’m bringing forward and taking with me into 2021.

The secret of change is to focus all of your energy not on fighting the old but on building the new.

~ Dan Millman.

• A deep sense purpose. This informs my bigger vision and my daily decisions: To heal the way we work and live.
• Big picture vision of what I deeply want, in life and in my work.
• A realistic plan that builds self-trust, momentum, and immediate value to my community. 
• A new business model that is more sustainable for me, more accessible, affordable, and supportive for you. 
• Ultimately, self-trust and the ability to support it in others. I trust myself in a huge, bold new way moving into 2021. That’s largely a result of the turmoil I felt in 2020. I worked with my own coach, and coached my face off with myself and my clients. 
• Self-compassion. It’s better to accept my body and self, just as they are, than to change into someone’s ideal, dontcha think?
• And finally, a deep knowing that I need to continue to learn and live anti-racism. It’s time to grow my voice in speaking truth and justice.