Review, complete and celebrate
Corina Roobeck
How about closing out this extraordinary year with the gift of internal peace, energy, and excitement for the holidays and the start of a new year?
A universal focus this year has been our mental health. Thrown into the unknown of a pandemic, doing our best to cope with economic, political, public health challenges, and realisations around racism, our attention has been on the spin cycle for the last 10 months. To gather it up and restore this precious personal resource we need to close out as much as we can and check out of 2020 with a pat on our backs. How do we do this? Completion and celebration, two important distinctions that restore our precious attention, re-energise us for whatever is next on our holiday list. Your family, friends, and work colleagues will thank you for it :)
Review the past, finish up what's hanging in the present, and apply our beautiful attention to our best vision of 2021. Our imagination and creativity will snuggle into the free space created and delight us with insights and inspiration.
Review the past
If you’re familiar with The Zone you already know we’ll invite you to do a yearly reflection, in our words a GUBA, if not, we’ll take you on the journey: Get your favorite pen and paper on and review what's been Good, Ugly, Bad and Awesome.
When we name the ugly and bad we surface the ‘thing’ and give it some air. We can hold it out in front of us, acknowledge the situation, own it, embrace the learning, breathe, and let go. We feel lighter and more energised. Acknowledging the awesome allows us to deliberately put our very busy critical thought processes, sometimes called automatic negative thoughts (ANTs), on hold for a moment and change the channel to relive our positive experiences. When we do this we let our happy neurochemicals flow and it feels great.
What insights and next steps can you draw from what you see?
Complete the present
Have a look at your To Do List. Be honest. What’s been on it for a while? Whatever justification you can quickly come up with - take a different route and see what small step you can take now to move towards completion. Completion is important because incomplete tasks suck up our attention. This is also known as open loops, a phenomenon first discovered by psychologist and psychiatrist Bluma Zeigarnik, and now known as the Zeigarnik Effect: the tendency of our brain to remember and focus on incomplete tasks more than it does on completed tasks.
Too many open loops and our anxiety increases, we forget things, we feel tired, overwhelmed, unmotivated, become snappy, reactive, and sick. The ripple is big. It impacts the people around us, most often those we care about the most. So before we shut up shop for the holidays give yourself the gift of more free attention by closing those open loops.
More calm, energy, and optimism are ready for you on the other side.
Celebrate!
For many of us, the last 10 months have demanded a relentless focus on action and results. Now is a perfect time to pause and celebrate each other, our learnings, efforts, and outcomes. Celebration is a kindness to self and others. It reinforces our humanity and releases those feel-good neurochemicals. We feel complete, energised, and ready for whatever we choose to attend to next.
Get everyone in the team to answer these 2 questions about themselves and each other, or write a message to someone you've been in close collaboration with this year:
One thing I have appreciated the most about you this year is…
One thing I wish for you in 2021 is...
Fill in the blanks, and give them some context. Here are some examples:
What I have appreciated about you the most this year is your positivity. I love how you brought humour to our stressful moments. It relaxed us when we needed it the most. Thank you.
What I wish for you next year is more recovery time to get yourself in the zone. Taking time for you to sleep well, spend time with your family, the things you love to do outside of work.
Remember to engage your whole person. The head may have checked the box, but the heart may still feel incomplete. Or visa versa. Listen and honour your whole self.
If you would like us to facilitate any of the processes above with your teams, reach out at hello@thezone.co.
Wishing you lots of “time in the zone together”.
Corina & The Zone team