Shift

Turn your attention to what works for you

This is not about resolutions, or intentions, or plans for the New Year. Because, please, I’ve seen a million of those.

This is about attention. Are we paying attention to what works for us?

An exercise I’ve used with my executive coaching clients who like end of year wrap ups is to ask what went well. What did you do in the past year that was interesting, engaging, reinvigorating? What brought you energy and enjoyment?

Put aside any lens of judgement. If the dog training class you did with your puppy was the highlight of 2023 for you, that totally counts.

When you’re thinking about this question, don’t just use intellectual inquiry. Too often our intellect is wedded to the judgement lenses – how valuable or important or lucrative was the thing? Which isn’t the point of this exercise. Try listening to your body. We all have different ways of registering pleasure in our bodies; it may be a feeling of expansion and energy, or one of calm and being centered. It may be a connection to others or the natural world, or it may be a relaxed solitude. How do you experience and relate to life giving energy? What makes you feel alive?

Can you do more of the things that bring you those feelings? Can you bring your attention to what, specifically, it was about those activities or engagements that was most enlivening for you?

When I was in school, a long time ago, we had to diagram sentences. Take a sentence and label its constituent parts. I remember teachers writing with white chalk on green blackboards and underlining prepositional phrases, labeling the words “prepositional phrase.”

I hated that exercise when I was in school, but now I see the value of taking a unit and breaking it down and naming the parts. It can help in identifying skills to build and other skills that need some development.

Diagram your best experiences. What was involved? People, family, community? Or was it solitude, focus, flow? Were you using your mind, your spirit, your body, or all three? Were you demonstrating competence or learning new things? Were you in nature? Were you traveling? Were you doing something that has value and meaning for you?

If you can understand the parts, you can build on those even if the entire experience might be challenging to replicate. If one of the highlights of your 2023 was taking a solo backpacking trip for two weeks, that might not be an experience you can do multiple times this year. But you could be alone in nature, or test your physical limits by trying a new sport like rock climbing. For introverts, extended periods alone can be deeply restorative, and as an introvert I make sure that time alone is part of every day, and certainly every week, even if it’s just a short stint.

If you’re reading this and feeling a kind of blankness, and it’s not resonating, here’s an exercise you can try to better identify the positive. Next time you are doing something you’re pretty sure is engaging to you, check in with your body and mind. Take something easy, that you have always liked. Maybe it’s cooking a meal. As you’re cooking, try to observe without judgement what you are experiencing. Are you focused? Does it feel like play to be creative and try new spices? Do you feel calm and confident as you observe your really fabulous knife skills? Or do you feel an uptick of pleasure at contemplating sitting down and serving this meal to your friends or family, planning what wine will pair best with the meal?

Of course, you might be surprised.  You might find that something you used to enjoy isn’t resonating the same way with you. A man who has always enjoyed cooking meals might see that he’s frustrated with it now because his teenaged kids are never home for dinner anymore. A manager who used to enjoy facilitating team meetings might find she’s tired of having to carry a group that is less and less communicative and seems to look to her to do all the intellectual and logistical heavy lifting. It’s all valuable information.

I was driving with my granddaughter and trying to explain the concept of gauges and instruments. We live near the airport, and we drove under a raised bank of lights and she told me, with all the confidence of a four year old, that planes can’t fly without lights. I told her that they helped, certainly, but that pilots could look at instruments to help them fly if their vision was impeded by fog or darkness or bad weather. She told me those weren’t instruments, those were tools. She’s very certain, that one. Can’t imagine where she got that trait.

Attention is a tool we can use to navigate. Checking our energy, what brings us connection and satisfaction, can be as important as checking the instrument panel on any vehicle. How much fuel do we have? Are we headed in the right direction? Our culture often dissuades us from paying attention to our own internal signals, for various reasons. We are told how we are supposed to feel, what we are supposed to want, how we are supposed to spend our time. We aren’t told what tools to use to understand what we, genuinely, in our deepest selves, need to thrive and grow. We may not always be able to go get what we most enjoy, or even to spend much time doing those things. But knowing where and what they are is a great start.