New Year, Old Me

I’m not much of a fan of the whole “New Year New Me” thing.

I think when you do this you are giving yourself too much pressure to change your body, mindset and habits all at once. You go to the gym, you diet, you journal and then a few months later you cancel your gym membership, you order takeaways and your journal has gathered dust. The next new year, you do it all again.

It’s not sustainable.

What I do like however, is to reflect on the year. To reflect on how much I have grown and all the patterns of thoughts I have moved through.

So here are the biggest lessons, realisations and areas of growth I have had this year.

1. Becoming comfortable with disappointment

For so long I have hated disappointment. I can’t say I love it now, but I have learned to allow it.

The number one thing I encourage with my clients is to allow your emotions, especially negative ones. Understanding that they are guidance and to be ok with them. Sometimes emotions are a little more nuanced than sadness or happiness and disappointment is a slippery one.

Disappointment is essentially saying that I am not ok with how things are and therefore in resistance to life. I am saying what happened “should” be different and that it’s not “right”.

“Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.”

And when I think about it that way, who am I to dictate the way life should be?

Wow… I actually sound pretty arrogant. Somewhat entitled. Is that really me?

2. Not having to fix a problem

Something I really noticed when it comes to coaching or simply being a friend is how I immediately go into problem solving.

As someone is telling me a problem they have I am immediately searching for solutions for them, which is lovely, but not always necessary. Women are so much better at letting people have space for their feelings and simply empathising without coming up with solutions. As a man my first instinct is to fix the issue.

I noticed with clients that sometimes I just want them to feel better, I want them to have breakthroughs. But really I’m doing that more for me and for my own validation. In fixing their problems as a coach or as a friend I am proving my own worth and demonstrating to them that I am a good friend or a good coach. Instead of just accepting that I am already those things.

I don’t need to hustle.

Sometimes people just need the space to have their problems and feel their feelings without any guidance. This has been challenging for me in so many ways and always comes back to the “not enough” chestnut. We all feel it and I’m not immune either.

My clients and my friends emotional wellbeing is not my responsibility. Which can sound a bit funny when I literally help people feel better for a living, but I can only guide as best as I can.

And I love that I can do that.

3. It’s ok to feel guilt, and when you let it be there it will gradually dissipate

I think we try to stop ourselves feeling guilty a lot. It’s an emotion that we try to push down or change more than sadness.

And so often it’s easily remedied in our eyes. We will feel bad about not doing something for someone so we fix it by doing whatever that is for that person. But when you are constantly pacifying that feeling of guilt, you are completely abandoning yourself.

This has become evident to me a few times this year where I would do something for someone because I felt bad or I didn’t want that person to feel bad. Taking complete responsibility for their feelings and ignoring my own feelings that are telling me, “I don’t want to do that.”

That is self abandonment. That is not self love.

I preach about self love till I’m sick of hearing myself… yet I wasn’t being loving to me.

Yeah I know it’s nice to consider other people, but at the cost of myself?

No thanks.

4. Letting go isn’t giving in

Man I hate losing. I hate losing games, I hate losing in sport, I hate literally losing pens. I lost a blue highlighter somewhere in my house YEARS ago. It still haunts me.

I don’t like being without something that was once mine. Like my sanity when Newcastle lose or throw away a lead for the umpteenth time this season. Don’t get me started.

And one thing I have always struggled with is letting go. Letting go of relationships, letting go of ways I think things should be, letting go of ideas, letting go of ideals, letting go of balloons. Seriously, as a kid that would send me in a spin.

But what I have learned this year is that when I let go of something, I’m not actually losing anything.

When I let go of how much I want Newcastle to win, I feel better.
When I let go of a relationship that no longer serves me, I feel better.

I think I always had this dramatic idea that holding on was in some way romantic. That it made me strong. That it made me loyal. That it made me a warrior.

When really, it has only ever kept me stuck in the same loop.

“Holding on felt romantic. Strong. Loyal. But it only ever kept me stuck in the same loop.”

Holding and gripping. I feel it in my body too. White knuckling and clenching my jaw. That child in me is so worried that if I don’t have control, I won’t get what I want.

But the opposite is true.

When I let go, I allow space for the relationships I want. The people I want. The victories I want.

Loyalty to people and loyalty to the club I support should not surpass the loyalty I have to me and my wellbeing.

Letting go is not the end, it is the beginning of something new.

But I will find you, blue highlighter. I promise.

5. Having high expectations isn’t a bad thing

This ties back into disappointment.

The reason we don’t have high expectations is so that we avoid disappointment. But if you take the feeling of disappointment out of the equation, what is there to fear?

This really occurred to me when someone close to me had a health scare this year. I thought for a moment that maybe I should brace for the worst. So I thought about the worst outcome and I felt just how horrible that would feel.

Then I realised, why on earth would I do that?

Why don’t I just expect it to go the best way possible?

So I tried that and immediately felt so light, so happy, so free. Why would I stop myself from feeling this way, just because it might not go that way?

If the worst outcome were to happen, I would have just made that feeling and experience longer than it needed to be. When really I could have just felt good and positive about it the entire time.

Disappointment doesn’t feel nice. But bracing for it won’t make it feel any better.

6. Being deep means being misunderstood

Thems the breaks.

For most of my life I have felt misunderstood one way or another. Probably because I’m an INFJ and we are almost always misunderstood. Cept for Hitler.

I pride myself on my depth. My depth of feeling, my depth of understanding, my depth of personality. My hairdresser once said I was like a slow peeling onion. And I really liked that. I felt seen.

I’m layered and most people only get or see a couple of those layers. A lot of people don’t have the ability to see all of me. And I love and hate that.

Like I said in my previous blog, I have a fear of being seen, but deep down I crave it so much.

When people only see a small part of the bigger picture that I am, they misread me. They see my honesty as bluntness, my empathy as naivety, my intuition as arrogance.

And that’s ok.

I can’t expect everyone to understand me when I struggle with it myself. I’m a walking contradiction.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way.

7. Grief isn’t going backwards or standing still

Grief comes in waves. I think anyone who has ever experienced any kind of loss knows this.

I’ve noticed that sometimes I think I have already grieved and that I have “completed it”. To go back over those feelings feels counter intuitive to moving on with life.

I don’t really like the notion of moving on. Maybe that ties into what I have been saying about letting go, but I don’t feel like moving on is what you are doing when you grieve.

I think the reason it feels harder is because you feel this need to say goodbye or to carry on and not think about it anymore. I think the reason why grief feels so hard is because we are trying to say goodbye.

What I have found so helpful this year is to not look at it as a goodbye, but to see it as embodying the person and everything you learned from them. That way you never have to say goodbye. They are a part of you now.

In the last couple of years my two cats died. My absolute favourite cats I have ever had. What became so clear to me were the lessons I learned from them about myself.

When you reflect on the life you had with them, those experiences come flooding back. Those memories were always there, but there’s never really a reason to reflect on them. You don’t realise just how profound those experiences are.

This goes for relationships too. What you learned about yourself from that relationship will forever stay with you. So long as you look at it that way.

One thing I have really noticed is that when people end a relationship they tend to try and forget about it instead of grieving it. And when you do that, it will come back around one day. You can’t outrun it.

It isn’t going backwards. You end the loop when you let yourself finally feel it.

I know a lot of people will avoid ever having such deep connections because one day that person or animal won’t be here anymore physically. But the love and all the good times I got to experience will always outweigh the pain I feel to not be able to hold them again.

“The lasting mark they have on your soul is everything.”

The lasting mark they have on your soul is everything.

It is such an honour to feel grief.

Much Love.