Every week my good friend and brilliant comedian, Sukh Ojla have a call on a Sunday and coerce our Weekly Wins out of each other. It’s never that comfortable, mildly embarrassing and we spend most of the call chatting in-detail about what we’re eating for dinner. But it’s worth it. It’s worth it to round-off mundane weeks of dullness where not much has happened or we feel no closer to achieving our goals.
Our Weekly Wins, 98% of the time, are not massive career-shaking opportunities, promotions, book deals, commissions, no, they tend to be things like:
I meditated every day
I got out of the house three times this week
I went to a spin class
I set boundaries in my relationship
I found a really cute Sad Goose on TikTok (thanks, Sukh for this stellar find)
The easy option for 2020 is to blanket it as: ‘The Shittest Year Ever’. One that we want to forget sharpish. One that travelled from March to December with alarming speed but not much happened. One where we lost. A lot. But there were good times sprinkled in there, too. We learnt a great deal; I don’t mean how to bake sourdough Irene, no one cares. I mean we learnt to look out for one another, we learnt how much we miss each other, how our friends and family are far more important than our careers and how blindly we all used to trundle from one day to the next.
No doubt once the year is over we’ll share one common mood: tired. And that’s ok, 2020 has been tiring. It’s been tedious. It’s been traumatic. It’s natural that we’ll want to eat, drink and sleep our way into oblivion to see out 2020. But what I’ll be doing just before that is taking the time to review my year and find all the hidden gems that were forgotten in news notifications. I want to remember the laughter and the closeness I shared with people on bloody Zoom calls. I want to relive, just for a second, how my life was enriched this year.
So let’s not write-off 2020 as a total shit-show. Let’s find some light. Let’s be proud of our achievements, no matter how small. Let’s pat ourselves on the back for everything we overcame.
I’ve created this handy spreadsheet: Your Year in Review: 2020. In it you’ll find four columns:
Enriched me
Validated me
Biggest wins
Lessons learnt
One of the most profound things I learnt this year was how much of a work addict I was. If you asked me in January to tell you about myself, everything that would have come out of my mouth would be career-related. I literally did not have a life outside my work. What I hadn’t realised is, that did two detrimental things:
It made rejections personal
When I wasn’t working, I was lost
Empty days in my calendar would ominously loom towards me like the bloody iceberg in Titanic, ready to destroy any confidence I had in myself: ‘Oh God, I’m not working. Everyone else is. Look, she’s filming. I’ll never work again.” Those were perfect days to rest, reset and realign but that’s certainly not how I spent them. Work validated me, without work I wasn’t succeeding.
Now I see a vital column that was missing: Things that Enriched Me. Those aren’t career-related, those are things like: I contacted an old friend, I got to play pirates with my niece and nephew, I had dinner with my sister. These are the life-affirming, heart-warming, soul-swelling events that I now actively look to fill my time with. Work is secondary. Work pays the bills but work doesn’t validate who I am.
So I invite you to fill out your Year in Review and applaud those experiences that enriched you. Of course, we’re human, we still need validation but it’s the enriching experiences that will soar you towards that one universal goal: Happiness.
Happy Christmas and have a wonderful New Year.
Rest, reset, realign.
Peace out,
Maddy x