Every year about this time, I find myself wondering what to say about the avalanche of advice for turning the page on a New Year. Part of me wants to find something super new, exciting and different than anything I’ve said before. Part of me wants to ignore the whole thing.
Notice the dichotomy? On one hand is overreacting and on the other is under reacting. The best answer is likely found somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, and most importantly, focused on why I write The Coaching Digest.
To some extent, The Coaching Digest is my diary to myself about what I’m learning that is making a positive difference in my life. Putting it in the form of a newsletter gives me the pressure I need to keep experimenting and filling in the diary entries.
I’m coming to wonder if the New Year resolution thing isn’t part of the perfectionism game that is so ubiquitous, we don’t even know it’s there. Like why I love starting a new, fresh journal. Or why I want to start over on a painting. Or why I like buying new stuff when my old stuff is perfectly fine.
The insight that came up for me when doing my prior year review this year involved the difference between starting with a blank slate versus getting better at rebalancing, recovery and repair. Since perfect isn’t possible, or if it were, it would mean that there’s nowhere to go from perfect, it seems that rebalancing, recovery and repair are much more dynamic and life affirming.
In 2024, many of my favorite energizers involved discomfort and things not going the way I expected. The joy came in the recovery. Some were small moments, and some were huge. I meditated most mornings, and even though I’ve practiced meditation for years and years, many mornings, I still have to talk myself into sitting down. Daily meditation is a small thing that makes a big difference. One of the huge moments came when I went to Oregon to Stevie Delahunt’s galloping clinic. Galloping on a horse was something I thought I could never do. With her guidance on balance and mindset, it turned out to be something I could do more comfortably than trotting. That awareness paid off immensely a month later when I was riding on the beach in St. Lucia and my horse decided to go full gallop rather than an easy lope. In a situation where I might have previously panicked, I was able to enjoy the ride.
One of my more useful insights of the year was recognizing that Dancing the Tightrope is not just the title of my book. It’s a practice of constantly rebalancing and integrating between the extremes. If I’m stuck in the mindset that I’m supposed to be perfect, every moment of things being off is a reminder of how far I have to go. If I open my mindset to recognize that the moments of discomfort ARE the moments of growth, then I can welcome the process of rebalancing, recovery and repair.
In other words, Dancing the Tightrope is joyful rebalancing.
Last year, I wrote this after my review of 2023:
As for me, what is my intention for 2024? What I realized about 2023 is that I’ve built more internal capacity over the year. The more I’ve interrogated my assumptions and beliefs, the more pressure I’ve discovered I can handle. I like it, because it’s expanded my life. So that’s what I’m going to continue doing.
This year will not be much different. One thing I would like to focus on more is remembering where my power comes from. In a conversation with Christine Dickson’s First Friday’s group last week, I mentioned an insight that came working with a client several years ago.
She, like me, was an approval junkie. Her entire career rested on her ability to please her bosses, do whatever they asked, and show them how knowledgeable she was. For someone seeking approval, it fit like a hand in glove, and she rose to a high level in the organization fueled by her people pleasing behaviors. However, at this stage of her career, she was now charged with setting direction and developing a strategy in times of great uncertainty for her industry and her organization. Now her organization and her fellow executives needed her to think differently. As we were working together, she struggled to develop a strategic plan that was bigger than her need to be perfect. She was aware of the problem; however, she couldn’t see a way to make recommendations that were not yet proven. Instead, she was focused on the minutia, regurgitating the details of the business. In some ways, she had lost touch with her courage to take business risks, and her instincts for tuning into what was coming in her industry had gone flat.
She was letting her prior success and her need for approval define her. When things didn’t go well, she doubled down, trying even harder to be successful and please those around her.
What the organization needed was for her to lead them into a new era fraught with uncertainty, risk and possibility.
The coaching question was how to help her help herself get out of her habitual thinking and patterns.
What came out of our conversation that day was the last thing you would have expected in a serious business conversation. It was about energy. More specifically, it was about where she found her power: Her relationships and endeavors fueled how she felt about herself. It’s a pattern I know well as a recovering approval junkie! She wasn’t grounded, nor was she living in a connected way to her spiritual beliefs.
As we interrogated her patterns, she began to see that the flow was backwards. Once she became consciously aware of how she fueled herself, she had a magical aha moment. With post it notes we outlined the flow she would rather have.
This simple pivot from the horizontal to the vertical perspective helped this client access her courage. From there she had a much better vantage point to make the strategic recommendations her organization needed. Two practices helped her shift that energy flow: meditation and Four on the Floor.
There are lots of forms of meditation. Lately, I’ve been enjoying the practice of HeartMath. There are also many phone apps, like Calm and Headspace. Or you can just sit and practice letting go of thoughts as they arise, while breathing deeply.
One of the simplest ways to get grounded quickly is a practice I call Four on the Floor.
Under extreme stress or when our brains perceive threat, human beings react with one of three responses: fight, flight or freeze. All three are hardwired into our brains, and when one of these three reactions occurs, our nervous system essentially hijacks our brain. Because it is pre-wired, necessary and useful, we cannot stop the physiological response. However, we can mitigate it, or even use it to our advantage.
Four on the Floor is a technique to use the adrenaline rush of fight, flight or freeze in a useful way. When feeling stressed, simply put your heels down on the floor and focus on having 4 points of your feet connected to the ground beneath you. Both balls of your feet and both heels should make solid contact with the ground. Then think of moving the excess energy provided by the adrenaline out your feet into the ground. Just this act should make you feel more grounded. Wait to respond or take action until you feel grounded.
I’ve shared this practice with more clients than I can count. Only one didn’t really like it. He said it was “deeply unsatisfying”. When I asked him why, he said it was because it kept him from going off on people, and he really missed being able to throw tantrums.
It’s these two practices, meditation and grounding, that help create the space to interrogate my beliefs and assumptions. So that’s what am I going to keep doing into 2025!
How are you thinking about your practices and intentions? Where could you benefit from making a pivot instead of doubling down on what isn’t working? Where would you like to be better under pressure?