50. Summer Reflection

Today all I’m going to walk you through a mid-year reflection. So, the spring has sprung and the summer’s coming in and along where, where I am, and I find this a fabulous moment to harness the power of the pause, to integrate your knowing, find your flow, get some perspective and just do sort of a mid-year take, right.

To stop at mid-year and do some powerful, clear, effective reflection. It helps clear the clutter and the noise and focus on what’s important to you now, right? When you’re self-authoring your path you want to do so based on your rich learning from multiple data points, right? To tap into your conscious intentions. And while you want to flow with where you want to go, you want to consciously bring out what you want to continue and what no longer serves.

So either sitting down with pen and paper and getting right into it, or even just flirting with it in the back of your mind as your earbuds are in, and you’re walking in the evening, whatever comes for you and what’s effective for you. Let me walk you through some exercises here. Okay. First up, let’s capture some of your learning over the last six months.

Take, I don’t know, two minutes. And even if you want to pause this, that that’s fine, but take two minutes, set a timer up to five minutes and just capture what has happened for you over the last six months. What has happened for yourself in your own personal endeavors, in the ways that you show up in your team and your family and your community, look at all the different areas in which you show up and literally just writing down what’s happened.

Right. You know, what has happened is I have delivered a significant series of over a week to this client, or, wow, I finally started my veggie garden, which I’ve been intending to do. Or, I voted, I don’t know whatever it is for you. Right?

What has happened for you in the last six months? Just capturing the what. And if you want to, you can press pause here or we can keep going with everything that you capture of what’s happened in in all of the areas that are important to you. What are the implications of what has happened?

How has that impacted you, your priorities. Maybe how has it impacted your work, your family, your goals, your intentions. The question here is, so what that it happened? What are the implications of that? What does that mean for you? Capture some of that, start teasing that out, right?

You’ve got what’s happened. What the implications are, and now landing, again if you want to pause this you can or you can keep going, now, what does that mean for you? So how, how we do this as you step back and you think about what’s happened, what the implications are. Maybe you’ve written it down on a piece of paper and now you’re reflecting on, so now what I do with this, maybe you do a little bit of analysis, right?

Because you see patterns and trends over months, or even years or situations, maybe you stand back and you ask yourself what is the learning here for the way I show up in the world? What is the learning here for how I dance, not balance, but I dance with all my different priorities in the ways I work, love, lead, uh, live out my life, right. What is the dance telling you?

You stand back and you look at what’s happened. What the implications have been. Implications might be the side effects you didn’t see coming, the results that took place, the impact it’s had on other areas, the impact it’s just generally had. And here in this now what is what does all this mean for me?

And now what do I do with it? How do I come in and look at this learning and these implications in a way that shifts my insights about how I want to be showing up, what I want to be prioritizing. Now, what does this tell me about how the rest of 2022 goes, say in starting in September now, what does this mean for me.

When we stand back and we do this type of reflection, it’s allowing us to be able to also come in, here’s part two, it helps us come in to some of the key ways we can look at our leadership and our practice in our leadership through, uh, five or six different lenses. Let me give them to you.

Lens number one, with all I’ve learned about what’s happened, what the implications have been, and now what that is meaning for me, what does that mean for my practice around my number one, boundaries.

Number two, how I give feedback to others. Number three, how I receive feedback from others, solicited or not. Right. Number four, how I am aligning and designing my relationship with my inner team, those voices in my head, those characters on my bus. Number five, what confidence means to me now.

And lastly, what does this mean for my emotional resiliency? Where’s my burnout at, you know, in this vacation I’m about to take is it because I’m completely burnt out, right? What does emotional resiliency and the practice of emotional resiliency look like? Where am I in alignment and out of alignment with that based on what I’ve seen happen in the last six months.

What the implications have been. And now what I am learning. The patterns, the trends, the ahas, what does that mean for how I want to take emotional resiliency forward now? Those learnings that you’ve just created, you can apply those learnings to these areas.

Again, maybe you’re reflecting and walking. Maybe you’re writing this down in your book. Maybe you’re using a digital notebook, but all of this then comes into part three, which is how do you want to adapt now, knowing that adaptation is a continuous cycle. Let’s, and some of you have heard me talk this through or have you seen it another place, draw that sideways figure eight.

Let’s go into the adaptive cycle. Some call it a Panarchy cycle, eco cycle. There’s a bunch of different names for it. And up in the top right quadrant that’s where you’re going to write down based on all I’ve learned, how I’ve applied it to these different areas, this is what I want to keep doing.

This is what I want to commit to continuing doing. Then when you wrap around that right side of the figure eight at the bottom, you’re going to get real curious about this is what I want to let go of. This is what I want to release. Maybe you even have a little bit of a curious conversation with yourself here about, Ooh, is there something you might be avoiding? Something that you’re keeping that isn’t actually serving you?

Right. Like trying to get up and outside and maybe over the summer, you get curious about that. Right. But here at the bottom, we’re talking about what will you let go off, take some notes down there. Coming up and through, across the figure out eight to the left hand quadrant, playing with what you want to dream up.

What’s possible from all that you’ve learned from, from how you’re teasing it out around your boundaries or feedback or confidence, whatever it might be. What are you dreaming up? What is possible here in your leadership practice and how you want to be showing up? What’s possible. Just, just a few seeds up there.

Right? You might, even as you come back round the figure eight, ask yourself, Ooh, if that’s what I’m dreaming up and I’m trying to nurture those roots, I’m just going to take a couple of notes about where I might get stuck. Cause I’m a little bit fearful here, right? Just a couple of side sticky notes about that.

Cause as you come down and around that left side of the figure eight you want to ask yourself about growth, how will new intentions and the seeds that you’ve sprinkled support your growth and that you want to continue to nurture so they become even a greater commitment in your practice that you conserve andare foundational to how you show up.

They’re not just a habit you’re trying to create. They are how you show up. So this adaptive cycle can really be helpful in, again, this is active reflection, right. And being able to lay down, here’s what I’ve learned from these areas. And from these sight lines now, what does that mean for what I’m landing?

Fourth and final part is while you’ve captured what you’re learning, you’ve applied it to these different areas. And maybe you’ve even played with the adaptive cycle a little bit to get intentional about what you want to commit to, release, dream up, and grow. Now let’s get commitments down, right?

Let’s get into your actions and takeaways. And here it is not a laundry list of a hundred different things of what you’re gonna do now. No. Here, what the exercise is, is designing an alliance with yourself. First we time box it. So we’ll say September to December, I want to create an alliance with myself that allows me to intentionally come into my conscious decisions about what I’m working on, given what I want to commit to, given what I want to let go, given what seeds I want to sprinkle and how I want to grow.

Maybe here in the way you design your alliance, you could do it in, in a way where you have your categories that I shared, like your boundaries or get feedback or entertain that it might come up for you that way. Another way that it might come up and let me walk you through this is asking yourself three questions. So in designing your alliance with yourself is first from September to December, or whatever timeline you choose, but from September to December, based on all I’ve learned and reflected on what is my why now?

What is my why now? What am I yearning for? And why? What is my why? Number two. With that, what’s my one word that I’m going to cast over September and December. That that helps act as this touchstone of an intention that will help mebring me back when I go off course, but that will remind me of this learning and these intentions and my why, that it’s like, that’s my one word.

Maybe it’s flow. Maybe it’s confidence. Maybe it’s power. Maybe it’s hippo. I don’t know, choose a word. Right? Like it’s got to mean something for you. And third is, you know, creating a space where you start writing down how do I need to be with myself in order to embody this one word that drives me towards my why now.

This is your alliance with yourself. Words that might come up here when you ask yourself how do I need to be with myself? Uh, well, words that have come up for me, self-compassion and a self-compassion practice has come up for me. I’m curious. And when I say curious, it’s such an easy word, but literally staying in curiosity, which means showing up in places, knowing that I’m not right.

Knowing that I am not correct. And being honestly curious, and that is not necessarily rewarded in a society that wants you to show up with the answers and always be right. So there’s a depth of that word for me. When I use it in an alliance statement with myself. So you choose word or set of words that allows you to describe your alliance with yourself.

My suggestion then is to either a) write this down somewhere that is purposeful for you and that you can touch it on a regular basis, whatever that means, b) it’s an and/or I would say an and is find an artifact that helps you connect into this alliance to this one word to this why. Find an artifact that sits on your desk.

So there’s three artifacts that I have from different spaces. One is a curled up piece of Birch. A second is a amethyst stone and a third is a moon snail shell. And the stories behind them are for another day. But when I see those, they literally sit on my desk, and when I see those, they are meaningful for me in different ways that connect with the alliance with myself.

And that help me tap into my one word. So you find that for you. So here we are, mid-year reflection that captures the power of the pause in an active way where we ask ourselves questions about what we’ve learned so far and what that means for us. Try to bridge that to some really key areas of our leadership practice, I’ve suggested five or six here.

Take that and apply it to the adaptive cycle, to be able to capture what you want to commit, release, grow, and nurture, and then land that actively in a designed alliance with yourself. And that will help you set up a leadership practice that is conscious when it comes to September or whatever your timeline is.

So this active reflective process allows you to capture all of your intuitive knowing, all of that powerful knowing which nobody else has. Let me be clear. This is not knowing you’re going to find from a book or a podcast or anywhere else. You’re not getting it from your mama. You are getting it from active reflection because you have such great wisdom within you.

Such great wisdom. And to capture that and apply that to your own practices. We need you to do that. We need you to stand up in that way because that’s where you source not just self authoring, your own path, which is powerful in and of itself, but it’s where you source your own power and powerful self, which helps all of us as you stand in that, show up in that. So thank you. Thank you for taking even a moment to flirt with some of these ideas.

For now, I’m recording this in June and we are going to take a break over the summer, over July and August. Somewhere around mid to end September we will connect back in. My hope is that I’ve left you with something super practical so that you can spend your summer months in whatever ways that looks like to be able to play in reflective moments with all that is within you. And we can show up together in further learning and exploration and curiosity in September.

So have a great summer all. I hope you get what you’re dreaming and yearning for over the summer and remember practice your leadership.