A Ritual for Completing the Year
Photo by Toben Dilworth. The author walking a labyrinth at Land’s End San Francisco.
We’re approaching the end of 2021, the completion of another trip around the sun. I view these year markers as ways to celebrate different aspects of life whether it’s seasons, holidays, birthdays, or personally meaningful events. We can become so stuck both in the mindless monotony of our days and our behavioral patterns. The end of the year presents the opportunity to mark an occasion. It’s also the opportunity to use a ritual of celebration and gratitude to close out the year.
I use a leadership framework that defines your North Star for the next year (for reference, these are my north stars for 2021 and 2020) and an end of year reflection is a nice completion to celebrate how far you’ve come.
This past year, my intention word was white space. From my reflections at the beginning of the year, I shared:
I’ve been able to build a sustainable business in 2020, yet oh-too-often, I’ve been too rigid, too serious, too driven, and too obsessed about hitting financial goals. As I move into year two of the business, I want more magic, more joy, more ease, and a greater sense of flow. White space captures that spirit and intention for me.
North Star Leadership Framework
Setting an intention makes it more likely that you’ll move in that direction for the year. I’m happy to share that while it’s quite imperfect and there are some days that are still packed, both my work life and personal life feel much more spacious. Paradoxically, in giving myself permission to slow down, I’ve been filled with more energy to get more done.
I’ve taught and applied this leadership North Star framework to multiple groups and 1–1 clients for many years, so it’s been well tested as a useful model to think about aspects of our leadership and professional life. Running through the points of the star is the basis of the year-closing ritual.
1. Projects
Think back on all the things you’ve done this year. Think of the projects and processes you’ve put in place professionally and also at home. Which ones are you most proud of? Which ones did you do for yourself, and not simply to please someone else? Which ones gave you the most energy and satisfaction?
Think about both the wins and the misses: the incomplete, lost, discarded pipe dreams that never happened. We always have both. When you look at both, is there anything you want to do differently in the future? Anything you’d like to remember or change up?
For me, the top three projects I’m proudest of are:
Writing, launching, and marketing my first book, Make Space to Lead, which closely follows my stories of creating more white space in life. We teach what we most need to learn.
Creating regular space for surfing in my weeks. Through much of 2020, the first full year of my business, I hustled and packed my calendar with conversations. At the start of this year, I set what seemed like an impossible goal, to surf twice a week. Buoyed by a surf group of designers, my partner Toben, and my trusty 6am alarm, I kept practicing this new habit. I’m proud to say that I now surf 2–3 times a week. It’s been transformative to notice my mood. I am significantly more cranky when I go a week without being in the water.
My favorite project of the year was creating an in-person women’s retreat, The Heroine’s Journey. It was what I most needed for myself, to be able to gather face to face with a group of strong, bad-ass women in the beauty of coastal Mendocino. This project wasn’t even on the radar at the start of the year, but it became something that felt inevitable the more I craved community.
What I’d do Differently:
I ran three public group coaching programs last year. It felt really hard to enroll people, that I was painstakingly pulling in one participant at a time. I would change up the enrollment process to add more ease, more play, and more patience with a longer lead time.
One corporate coaching program really did not give as much value as I had hoped. While I’d spent time interviewing the project sponsor and stakeholders, I would add more rounds to interview the not-so-willing participants to get a better sense of what they believe is the biggest benefit.
Coming up with a book concept, writing it, and launching it within 10 months in retrospect feelts bat-shit crazy. I will give myself more space for my next book. Right now, my current timeline for book #2 is four years. This helps me drop the single-minded focus and drive that got book #1 done.
2. People
Relationships are the cornerstone of our happiness and satisfaction. When we have a fight or negative interaction with someone, we can continue to obsess over the emotions and replay all the different ways we should have responded. In contrast, we often fail to acknowledge all the people who have touched us in some way.
Think of all the people who you’ve encountered this year, both personal and professional. Which relationships grew the most? Where did you build unexpected trust? Who gave you the most support? Which relationships were you most grateful for? When you think of the people, dive deeper into what was most impactful about that relationship this year.
The top three relationship themes that most impacted me this year are:
Co-Leaders. I taught separate programs with two wonderful co-leaders, Jim and Irene. We’ve co-created and improvised our way through multiple iterations of content. Most importantly, it’s been creative, inspired, and fun (well most of the time at any rate).
Family. I spent 3 weeks in Thailand, 14-days under quarantine with my two daughters and my sister and her family. It was both boring, mundane, and wonderfully beautiful to spend the 14 days together. The end result was that we were allowed to see my mom in Bangkok. That family time, was a huge cornerstone of the year. An entirely restful break with the space to be bored.
Romantic Partner. My partner and I are both divorced with two kids each. We’ve navigated this second year of the pandemic with more intentional dialog about where we want this relationship to go and how we want to combine our complicated lives. I’m proud of the difficult conversations, the tears, the heartache, and the joys that we’ve shared together as we deepened our understanding of each other.
What I’d do Differently:
To be more intentional of which 1–1 clients I choose to work with. To let go of some clients who I can’t serve as powerfully.
To better parent my 13 year old daughter. Through their younger years, I’d been proud of my parental instincts around boundaries, rules, and where to push them. Now, my direct style, propensity for planning, and continual desire to problem-solve means that I need to relearn how to parent a teen. She needs to create her own life choices and make her own mistakes in a safe environment. I can do a lot better in biting my tongue and dealing with my emotional fallout to her teenness.
3. Community
Community refers to the system we live in. For many people working in corporate, the community may be the company you work for. It could be company-wide, or it could be for your organization or team within the company. Community could also be an organization you volunteer for. Community may also be a group of people that you want to serve, be it the neighbors on your block, your extended family, for a book club that you run.
What communities have supported you or that you’ve valued in 2021?
My biggest emotional peaks around community have been two highlight memories and three communities of support:
It was the first night of the Heroine’s Journey Retreat, set in a glamping location for COVID safety. A group of strangers had vulnerbally shared some of their history with each other. They were tired, they’d just arrived that day, but we all felt the magic. Each woman had gone back to her space in a neighborhood of tent cabins. It was a cold starry night and as I strolled, I saw the warm glow from each tent. I felt an inexplicable sizzle of bubbling job, excitement, and pride that I had brought together the people and lit up all these tents. It felt like the perfect community.
I was stressed out from all the pre-launch activities for Make Space to Lead, and decided to spend the last weekend before launch in a hot spring retreat with no cellular service. As we drove back to civilization and my cell service returned, I started seeing and reading all the feedback that early reviewers had left for the book on Amazon. It was the first time that the book felt real. That it had readers who enjoyed the book, and learned from it. I felt like I had done something good for the world, bringing this a valuable message out to the greater community.
Most of the time, I work alone. I spent my days writing, creating programs, and coaching people 1–1 over zoom. There have been three communities that have fed my soul through this year: the Positive Intelligence team that I’ve consulted and coached with, a group of witchy women working through relationship and life learnings, and finally, a small group of four coaches that have met almost every Friday this year. I’m so grateful for all three communities.
What I’d do Differently:
I tried to build an online community on Facebook at the start of the year. Somehow it didn’t work out. It felt too forced, too rigid and I abandoned it. I may start another online community in the future.
4. Me
In the North Star framework, leadership starts with Me in the middle. To be a better person, leader, or human being, the most impact we can make is by changing ourselves.
Consider how you’ve most changed this year? What behaviors have you let go of and which new ones have you adopted? What patterns have you successfully broken? What are you proudest of learning? What new identities have you adopted?
The top three changes for me are:
I’ve run many different programs and shared teachings via weekly live videos. The way that I show up has completely changed. I used to have to plan out the agenda and lesson plans down to the minute and stick to it like chewing gum to a wall. This year, I’m more of a jazz musician, learning to improvise and play different notes. I adapt when I teach with different people. And I’m more at ease when I teach solo.
I’ve embraced my identity as a writer. I wrote my first book! I’ve had a two years of a weekly writing practice with my blog. And I’m now paid to write as a published contributor to Business Insider and Entrepreneur. It feels fantastic to return to an identity that I shed in college.
I’m more familiar with my self-critics and saboteurs. I now recognize them and their voices. I am a little bit less hard on myself. When I’m in the grips of these saboteurs, I can often see what’s happening. Being able to change behaviors, emotions, and thoughts more rapidly is a future goal. I’m taking one small step at a time.
Bottom-Line
Create your own year end ritual by taking the time to introspect and reflect. Elevate the ritual by sharing your process or these thoughts with someone else. You could also write it down on paper and do a ceremonial ripping and burning of the paper. Both the acts of sharing or the physicality of ripping and the changing state of the burn are small rituals that mark something important.
Reflection IS ritual. Celebrate your 2021 using this leadership framework that looks at the year through the lens of Projects, People, Community and Me.