What Happened to the 'Clear Seeing' We Hoped for in 2020?
THE TOLL this year took on you, on your family, on your co-workers, on everyone, has been enormous. I hadn’t realized how heavy it has all been until I stopped, and put it down.
Earlier this year, just weeks into launching my company full-time, I watched (in abject horror) as small businesses failed all over as Covid-19 upended the lives of every single human on the planet. For the first time in my life, I was terrified that I could lose everything: my business, my home, a safe place to raise my children.
Nearly overnight, the economic, business, healthcare, and environmental impacts were evident. Our lives were changing forever, and we didn’t know if or when we’d get them back as they had been.
What scares us is SACRED
Then, companies reached out, wanting to fortify their staff with a resilience toolkit via keynotes, workshops, and coaching their executives. Bit by bit, I understood that I was embarking on the scariest and most sacred personal and professional journey of my life: being of service and dusting off my own resilience alongside my work in real-time.
Soon, 2020 will be hindsight, and hindsight will be 2020. Meaning that we now get to crystalize all of those grueling, uncomfortable, frightening, and let’s-get-comfortable-being-uncomfortable moments from this past year.
Finding purpose in the pause
Have you taken a moment to reflect on your purpose in the pause amidst this pandemic? Have you asked yourself, “Why is this happening for me?” instead of “Why is this happening to me?” If not, I suggest you ask yourself this question and then get quiet and wait for your inner voice to answer you.
What did you learn? How did you grow? What have you changed? How have you flexed? My greatest resilience flex? Believing in myself.
To date, I realized I hadn’t believed in myself. I thought my achievements could be chalked up to:
luck or
knowing the right person or
being in the right place at the right time or
being seen as attractive or
working really hard.
I attributed success to things outside of myself and never felt worthy; I didn’t feel I fully believed I had what it takes.
Releasing Collective Expectations
Now, after watching people recalibrate, the intrinsic beliefs we had about control have crumbled. Businesses have shifted and pivoted, and we released our collective expectations of a predictable future. After being placed on the proverbial leveled pandemic playing field, looking back at how myself and my company has grown, and what we’ve achieved individually and collectively, I believe in myself for the first time. Not only that, I wholeheartedly know that this work, the practice of resilience, is both necessary and a privilege.
Resilience is now a requirement, not an elective. It’s truly an honor to be of service at this time.
HINDSIGHT IS 2020
This time last year, 2020, was thought to be the year of “clear seeing.” I believe we’ve received greater clarity than many of us have ever had. I don’t believe this year has been the worst year of our lives. While fully appreciating the loss of health, finances, and vitality, I humbly suggest, this has been the best year of our lives.
A year when we finally stopped. When we finally began to listen. When we finally appreciated our gifts and started living our lives in accordance with what is important – health, family, goodness, human connection, love. We didn’t get the year we wanted, but we got the one we needed. We got clear seeing.
In the spirit of resilience, I hope we are never the same again. Meaning, I believe we all can be enhanced by these challenges, not diminished by them, even if we wouldn’t have chosen them.
We’re not going back to normal. We’re going forward. We will bounce forward into 2021.
- Dr. Taryn Marie
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr. Taryn Marie Stejskal is one of the leading authorities on Resilience Leadership. Her work is resonating throughout the Fortune 500. As she describes it, "We are a world in which our human experience is defined by facing challenge, change, and complexity on an order of magnitude to which prior generations have not been exposed. The concept of resilience is built on the very ideology that we have the capacity to face hard things: trauma, loss, misfortune, and the like, and come out on the other side; not diminished, but instead, enhanced."
