PhotoCredit: lucyflemingillustrations.com
This year started so well. I had a grand list of new things I was going to make happen in my life and at about 6 weeks into the year I was dialed in. Mid-February I went to New Zealand for work - well most of that trip was Sydney - and expected to be back in New Zealand in less than a month for my usual crammed start to the year. We were talking Covid, trips to some parts of the world seemed unlikely, but not down-under. Certainly not global lockdown.
I came back from that trip and life as I know it unravelled. Life as most of us know it unravelled. And I unravelled with it. Somehow cleaning and baking became more important than working on myself. Somehow cleaning and baking became working on myself. All my rules went out of the window - do the old rules even apply anymore? Life suddenly got a lot less complicated. All that was important was my daily yoga practice, baking (weird) and knowing what percentage of alcohol I should be spraying on everything.
And so I find myself at the start of May wondering what to do with my grand list? Wondering if I care about my list anymore? Wondering what I do care about anymore? Well, other than yoga, biscotti and disinfecting things.
2020 always felt like an important year. So many of the companies I work with had 2020 as a landmark for strategy initiatives. It’s like somehow we intuited that this numerologically beautiful year would be life changing. But not like this? No! When we envision change and evolution we anticipate things going gloriously to plan. Champions rising to peak performance. Award winning marketing campaigns stirring hearts and minds to action.
Real change is messy and awkward and uncomfortable. More puberty, less Cinderella. There are no fairy godmothers here. Well, I live in West Hollywood so to be fair there are a few fairy godmothers around - but they are all struggling with this too.
The World will find its new normal slowly and likely with some mistakes along the way. A few ill-advised outfit choices, a couple of bad grades and a lot of finding our limits. We can’t expect a linear progression of recovery; personally or for our economy. This is not a time to make a grand plan and adhere to it with precision like we know all we need to know. This is a time to experiment.
The biggest resistance to experimenting is usually that we fear failing. Especially failing publicly. No one wants to get it wrong. But do we know what’s right or wrong in this moment? There are plenty of businesses who were somewhat following the rules who are scrambling to survive right now. So if ever the rules didn’t apply it’s now.
When I realized there was some unravelling happening I decided to put a new filter on my life. After a pretty shitty end to 2019 I decided my word for 2020 was “magic”. 2019 taught me that even in the worst of times we can find beauty and alchemy. So I decided that everything I did would be in pursuit of finding magic. Some days I do this better than others. Some tasks better than others. It’s work, but that’s the whole point - I am choosing what I want to actively cultivate in my life.
Which (or should I say witch) is how I am thinking about my list and the next two-thirds of 2020. This is a great moment to choose a word for the rest of the year that will help you transform and evolve. Choose a word, change your word, create a mantra - whatever feels right to guide you and support your actions.
Experimentation is action with intention. By my squiggly logic, if everything you do is grounded in intention the outcome of your actions isn’t important. It’s kind of a way to failure proof yourself. So you’ve really got nothing to lose. See ... MAGIC <wink>.