A new year often means fresh energy. We celebrate the good from the past year and forge ahead with our hopes and dreams. The buildup to 2020 had all of that. Social media had all of us ready to claim our #2020Vision and make big moves to kickstart a new decade.
We all know how that ended.
Making plans for 2021 may seem futile while we’re still swimming in a sea of anxiety and uncertainty. But I am a firm believer in setting intentions for ourselves, for our lives, our well-being, and how we want to feel. Life will throw us curve balls—and, every once in a lifetime, even a pandemic—but when we catch our breath, grounding in those intentions can bring us back to what we originally set out to create.
Embrace your decisions with curiosity instead of self-judgment and make room for joy in this new year.
2020 was a heavy year, and moms have had to take the brunt of the pandemic’s impact. For many of us, we still need time to process the magnitude of what transpired over the past year before we can even begin to move forward.
The following questions are intended to help you reflect and process some of what took place in 2020, so you can integrate and plan for what’s next. This can be incorporated as part of a soul-care ritual to be done alone, with friends over a Zoom kiki session, or even with your kids where appropriate.
Questions For Processing 2020
- How am I currently feeling?
- When I look back at this last year what emotions are coming up?
- What was the hardest part?
- What am I still grieving?
- What am I proud of or can I celebrate about this year?
- What were my biggest lessons?
- What do I still need to learn?
- What am I grateful for?
- How will I show up for myself this year?
- What boundaries need to be set to facilitate that?
- Who will I lean on when I need extra support?
Don’t worry if you can’t answer a question. Move on and come back to it. Alternatively, if something comes up that you hadn’t expected, give yourself the time to sit with and feel the feelings that are there.
These questions are purposely not focused on singular goals. They allow you room to pivot as necessary with the understanding that ultimately you get to create and define what your process will look like. In the event these questions bring up issues that you may want to dive deeper into, consider getting support from a therapist, a coach, or a close friend/mentor.
During a year-end workshop I facilitated, one attendee found that she was really having a hard time defining what it meant to show up for herself. She dedicated time to improving the relationship with her partner and children, but she didn’t take the time to define what deep soul care looked like for her. So, we used some of these questions to explore how she could develop a deeper understanding of her own needs and what it would look like to honor them.
Give yourself permission to ebb and flow, and come back to this exercise often to see what has changed, what needs to shift or be eliminated. Embrace your decisions with curiosity instead of self-judgment and make room for joy in this new year.
