A New Year, A Time of Reflection

Happy 2016!!!

Every year when the calendar changes to a new year it feels like a natural time to reflect on the year that has passed and get ready for the fresh start a new chapter if you will. As I look back on my 2015, there is no doubt it was been a rough year, and it would be easy for me to lament about all the things that didn’t go according to plan or the heartbreak of the last year. Goals were set at the beginning of the year, some of them attained, some of them I came up short on. A friendship that was very important to me ended. . .badly. I mean for heaven sake I had a house fire in the spring. That’s enough to make anyone a little crazy.

Like I said it would be easy, and trust there have been days, to sit back and discount 2015 as a crappy year that I can’t wait to be done with and hope that 2016 is better. But if I take time to pause and really think about things, there have been some WONDERFUL things about 2015 as well. I’ve met lots of new people and started new friendships, some of them in real life and some of them via the internet. These new additions to my life have certainly made my life better and I have enjoyed getting to know each and every one of them. Business has been solid this year and continuing to grow. And I’ve spent a lot of time changing and growing and healing wounds from the past, not always a fun process but definitely a positive.

We all have highs and lows

 As I looked at both sides of the coin that is 2015, I came to a realization. Had the crappy things not happened this year many of the good things wouldn’t have happened either. Had the fire not happened I would have still had a beautiful new bathroom but the insurance money allowed me to do some additional updates to the house that I had been wanting to do for years. Struggling with the disappointment of not being able to compete in half marathon lead to weekend of intense anxiety which in turn lead to me finding a community of people online that have been a wonderful addition to my life. That weekend also lead to me finding one of the best books ever about anxiety that has helped me AND tons of my clients. I could definitely go on but you get the idea.

Almost everything in life has a good and a bad side too it. Sometimes it’s hard to see and we don’t always see it right away. But most of the time something good comes out of the struggle. Now please hear me out, I’m not saying that when life smacks you in the face you should be happy it happened and start looking for the silver lining. It’s okay to struggle and suffer and cry and scream and throw a fit like a 2 year old, sometimes life sucks and it’s okay to feel it. But once you get through the hard days and the hard parts and have come out the other side look for those positives;

What did you learn about yourself?

How have you changed for the better?

What opportunities came from this experience?

What would have never happened had it not been for this?

I hope that regardless of how your 2015 went you are able to look back and see that you are a stronger better version of yourself then at the start of 2015. And I hope that your 2016 is everything that you hope and dream it will be.

 We are 4 days into the New Year, and I’ve started that process again, making goals and setting hopes and dreams for 2016. I don’t know what this year will bring or what will happen. I’m sure there will be more ups and downs just like every year. But what I can say for sure is this. Despite lows of 2015, now that I’ve come out the other side, I wouldn’t change a thing. Without the lows I would have missed some REALLY good highs and at the end of the day I wouldn’t trade the highs for anything.

Life's like a Tree, Sometimes Ya Gotta Prune It.

The idea of pruning has been on my mind a great deal in the past few weeks. Merriam Webster defines pruning (verb) as "to reduce especially by eliminating superfluous matter or to cut off or cut back parts of for better shape or more fruitful growth." Every spring and fall I spend a couple of weekends pruning the landscaping at my house. Partly because I want it too look nice and neat but also because the trees and hedge will grow better if all the dead and dying parts are removed. You can help shape how a tree or plant will grow through pruning, cutting low branches will keep things growing up for example. It’s funny to think that removing parts of living thing in such a traumatic way as cutting them off could actually help something become more fruitful in the future. But it’s true, every time I prune back the hedges they seem to grow taller and faster.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to spend this whole post talking about my landscaping adventures. Although there have been some dozies, but that is a different post. I bring up my adventures in landscaping because much like my hedges, we often find that we have to prune parts of our lives back or out so that we can become more fruitful and grow in the ways that we need and want to. Pruning in our lives can mean many different things, sometimes its cutting back on behavior that is holding us back. Maybe it means letting go of an activity to make room for something else that brings more joy or purpose to your life. And still other times it means that the relationships in our lives need to change or end. However, one thing is for certain, it is hard and it can be painful to prune the places in our lives that need to be pruned.

The last 6 months, for me, have been filled with pruning. Some of you may know a little of what has been going on from my previous post about letting go. If you haven’t seen it you can check that out here. But the quick rundown is that in May I had a minor house fire in the midst of a remodeling project and then in July, through circumstances out of my control, I decided to give up the goal of completing my first half marathon. Both of those events were the catalyst for some very deep reflection and ultimately pruning in my life.

Some of that pruning has come in the form of me needing to change my behaviors and choices, mainly in terms of MAKING time to take care of myself. I love my job, but it should come as no surprise that my job can be very stressful. When I was in grad school the continually beat us over the head with idea that we needed to take care of yourself, and we were all like yeah yeah we know, and we came up with these great ideas and plans (it really was good to start thinking about it then). But ya know what happened. Life happened, I forgot to calculate that I still had a life outside of my profession which includes friends, animals, house work, and caring for myself as an adult (you know eating, showering, laundry etc). All of the sudden all the time I planned or self-care got sucked up with other things.

The events of this summer FORCED me to re-evaluate how I was spending my time in the evenings. Ultimately I had to convince myself that it was okay if the dishes didn’t get done EVERY night so that I could have time to journal or color or whatever other rejuvenating things I wanted to do. I tend to be a bit of a perfectionist (ssshh don’t tell anyone) so letting go of getting things done to sit and color was a challenge, but I felt SO MUCH better when I would, that ultimately that wasn’t a HUGELY painful transition or pruning in the end but it was/is still challenging a times.

My "self-care" corner of the couch :)

This summer has also caused a re-evaluation of the relationships in my life. You can learn a great deal about a person and the nature of your relationship when you are going through a crisis or a particularly challenging time. I have a fantastic support system and wonderful friends that were there for me. However there have been a couple of people in my life that have made things more difficult or have done or said hurtful things through this whole course of events. At the time I was hoping that they were just crappy in a crisis, because let’s be honest some people don’t handle crisis well and that’s okay.

However after several conversations it became apparent that there was more amiss in our relationship than just a poor response to a crappy situation. The crappy situation had just highlighted the trouble that was already there. So now I am faced with what I find to be the most challenging and painful part of pruning and that is consciously and deliberately putting space and new boundaries in place in these relationships. That’s the painful part.

I’ve been in this place before, and while everyone is different and you never know how someone is going to react I know that once the pruning is done I will be free to grow and flourish. About 5 years ago I was in a similar place with another friend. I kept putting off talking to her because I didn’t want to lose the friendship, I thought we had been through too much to not get things worked out. And I knew that what I was going to tell her was going to hurt her. It was a difficult conversation, but once it was done I felt like a weight was lifted. I didn’t realize how much that relationship was weighing me down until I did some pruning and felt the change, the growth, start to take place. I still miss that friendship from time to time (we had been friends for close to 10 years and truly had been through a lot together) but I know that I would not be the person I am today had I continued to carry that dying branch.

So as we continue to move through Fall, and the leaves change and those of us with landscaping are working to prune the trees and bushes, I pose the question, are there areas of your life that need to be pruned? And if so, what do you think is holding you back from doing that pruning? Like I said, pruning can be painful and seem like an odd way to spur growth. But I will tell you this for sure, the last 6 months have been hard for me and there have been a lot of tears, and there will probably be some more before the pruning is done but I have also grown more as a person in the last 6 months than I have in the last 3 years. And I know, things are just going to get better.