Well hello Friends! 

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas celebration filled with everything and everyone you love. 

I visited family earlier this month, so this year I stayed in Dallas. And my day was super relaxing. Filled with a little football, a little Netflix-ing and some good food. 

It was a sunny 80-degree day here in Dallas and for a Midwest girl, it’s kinda hard to get used to that at the end of December. Even after 7 years, it just feels…not right. I think next year, I’m gonna have to spend it somewhere wintry. Just so I can have the fireplace going and the snow outside and get to wear all the sweaters and the outerwear. You know?

BTW if you would’ve told me in the winter of 2014 that I would miss snowy weather, I never would’ve believed you. That year in Chicago it snowed 100 inches from November to April. I thought I’d never be warm again. And when I got the job in Dallas, I gave away all my sweaters and coats and got here as fast as I could. 

So…just goes to show what a little distance and perspective will do for you, right? lol 

And that’s what we’re going to talk about today. 

Perspective on your 2021. Because it’s the last week of the year. Can you even believe it? Crazy.

And when we get to this point in the year, most of us naturally spend a little time looking back and reflecting on the year that was. At all the experiences, the achievements, the failures, the losses, the disappointments. 

All of it. 

But the question is, what do we do with that information? 

Are we just reflecting on our experiences in a passive way? 

Or, are we taking everything we learned from those experiences and using that to make 2022 even better?

In my experience, most of us just reflect and move on. 

We kind of summarize the year into a big generalization that captures our experience overall – the combination of all the good, the bad, the challenging – as either being ‘a good year’ or ‘a bad year’ or ‘a challenging year’ or whatever. 

If you doubt this, just go back to 2020. 

Looking back. How do you think about that year?

Most of us would say it was tough. Transitional. Isolating. Worrying. Uncertain. And that was true for most of us around the world. 

But those who look deeper, who took the time to mine their experiences for lessons learned might say it was transformational. Life changing. Clarifying. Because they took the time to look at the experiences – the good and the bad – to identify the lessons. 

Because the truth is, the value of the experiences we have is not just the having of them. It’s what they can teach us if we take the time to look at them.    

The point I want to make is that, as humans, most of us tend to reflect on our year in a more general way or maybe not at all. 

And as part of that, we lump all the experiences of the year together and come away with a generalization, a vibe or mood, that we then label as either good or bad. 

By labeling the year, we give ourselves a way to think about the year that’s now in the rear-view mirror and what it meant in our lives.  

For more, give the episode a listen.

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