Happy 2020! Welcome to a new year and a new decade! I’m feeling incredibly energized this week. Something has shifted. Clients are checking-in with optimism, specificity, and openness to new ways of engaging. I’ve already led an all-day strategic offsite for a client leadership team, with enthusiastic and highly positive feedback. There are new opportunities galore.
Yet, I am also highly aware of the incredible challenges we face at the dawn of this new decade. Climate change, which is real and affecting all of us, looms with urgency. Economic inequality, political divisiveness and the state of health care in America, just to name a few.
How do we hold this very real and palpable angst, along with positive energy and forward momentum?
I’ve thought a lot about this and what I’ve chosen is to focus on the outcomes I want to create. Rather than a new year’s resolution or simply a goal, I focus on what is the overall “thing” I want to move towards. By aligning my intention and focus with a generative outcome, I step away from looking at everything as a problem that needs me to solve it. This frees me up to allow creativity and intuition to percolate, and removes the stress and heaviness I can feel about responsibility to “fix.”
So here’s my 2020 challenge to you: Shift your focus to outcomes. Ask: “what is it I want to move towards?”
If it’s wellness, rather than focusing on the negative, i.e. “I want to get rid of xyz,” instead shift to “I make choices that allow my body to return to a state of well-being.” If it’s too much stress, instead of “get rid of the stressors in my life;” instead say “I choose to focus on activities that allow me to feel relaxed and peaceful, allowing the stress to pass through me…”
Here’s to shifting your focus from nearsightedness, where the problem is in the future and creates worry and anxiety in the now, or from farsightedness, where the problem is experienced as worry about the now or the recent past to the PRESENT, where everything good happens.