Celebrate What Is Right With Your World

Welcome to 2021! What a year 2020 has been.

Last year I wrote about ‘New Starts and New Beginnings’ and this year I would still encourage you to do that exercise again, however, I felt this year I would also invite you to celebrate …

Celebrate what is right with your world!

I have taken the phrase from a wonderful National Geographic photographer, Dewitt Jones (www.dewittjones.com), who has an amazing Ted talk and I would encourage you, as you start to think about next year and the years ahead, to watch the Ted Talk .The essence for me of his talk, is not to take things at face value or how they look at first glance, more to look further, look deeper and you will find something to celebrate.

When times are hard, we can often only look at what’s gone wrong and how hard things are. At those times, it is still important to look ahead at possibility. As Mary Poppins said, “everything is possible…even the impossible’. In the same way, when things are hard, it is still possible to find what we can celebrate.

Within the updated ICF Core Competencies (CC8 Facilitates Client Growth), we are invited to ‘partner with the client to transform learning and insight into action’ and within that to ‘celebrate progress and success’. How often do you encourage that in your clients? When they have worked hard over a period of time and developed, changed and grown, how often do you take time with them to review what’s happened that is good and encourage them to acknowledge and celebrate that change, development growth? When you come to the end of your time working with a client, how often do you encourage them to celebrate their success? Often times, in this fast-paced world, we can find ourselves just moving on, looking forward and miss the acknowledgement and celebration.

This year has been a challenging one for everyone. For some there was too much work, for others too little. For some the challenge of loneliness or not having physical connection; for others it was life on Zoom. We all had many challenges to overcome, whether physical, mental or practical.

So, using the updated competencies as a frame – what can you celebrate as you look back at 2020?

• What do you know about yourself now that you were not aware of before?
• What did you learn in 2020 that was useful and that you can take with you?
• How did you grow?
• What did you enjoy doing, seeing or being with?
• What successes did you have- no matter how big or how small?

There may be other such positive questions you can ask yourself and then I would encourage you to answer this final question before looking at 2021 and beyond.

What and how will you celebrate, what is right in your world?

As Dewitt Jones says: Change your lens … change your life!