Episode 265: The Story of 2023
Hello. Welcome back to Practically Happy. I’m so glad that you’re here tuning in today. This is the last episode of 2023, episode number 265, The Story of Your Year.
The Power of Storytelling
This is an episode that I’m excited to share about. It’ll be a quick one with just some ideas and a little exercise for you as you’re winding up this year and heading into the next.
This week in between Christmas and New Year’s has always felt like a little bit of a no man’s land for me, which is probably part of why we’ve chosen to travel so often in our family life.
We leave around Christmas or just after Christmas and come home after the new year. We absorb this in between week into our travels and experiences and adventures and, time with family.
This year we are home. We’re home for Christmas. We’re home for this week in between. And it’s been an interesting exercise in really relaxing, spending slow time with the kids at home. There’s not much scheduled. There’s not a lot happening out there.
We’re just trying to relax and enjoy spending time together and take it easy a little bit, which is what we mostly need after the year that we’ve had as a family in past year.
I will link some episodes in the show notes so you can jump to them if you’re feeling like any of these exercises will be helpful for you. I’ve created some specific exercises, one that has a set of worksheets that goes with it.
If you’re feeling some motivation and activated energy around the new year and you’d like to practically apply that to an exercise that walks you through, recording some of the things that went well last year, some of the things that you would change, some of the things you’d like to carry on with in the new year just an active reflection on the year.
I will link that in the show notes. You can listen to the episode and download and print those free worksheets. That activity is a fun guided exercise to take you through your year and how things went and how you felt about them and prepare you for the year that’s upcoming. If you’re feeling a little bit less inclined to do a, an, a worksheet about the year and you’re just ready to roll on into the next one.
At the very least, I want to offer today’s episode as a different perspective on how you might tell the story of your year. Of course, expands to telling the story of any experience that you have. And there’s not a right or wrong way to do this. Sometimes it just feels nice to know that there are different options available.
Segment: Pause for a Poem
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks, and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“And you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
When I am Among the Trees by Mary Oliver
Relief heading into 2024
Doesn’t Mary Oliver always feel like a deep sigh of relief to you?
As I was thinking about the end of the year and the turning into the next year, one of the feelings I’ve been experiencing is relief.
Just this has been a big year and I noticed a pattern with the help of my therapist that as I’ve been experiencing, the ups and downs of life as one does. I will go back and begin my story that I’m telling to set up whatever I’m about to explain with “it’s been a really hard year” or “it’s been a really weird year” you know first for six months or more like since halfway through this year.
I’ve told this story repeatedly of that you know using this phrase like “it’s been a really hard year” and that’s the preface to explain whatever else is going on or how I’m feeling about something.
It was interesting to note that and to then ask myself whether that is true and in what ways it’s been true.
The way that we tell our story is powerful. It’s important. In fact, there’s an entire, arm of therapy called narrative therapy that is a storytelling method of creating a story or telling your story and then noticing pieces of it and where you can change the way that you talk about it to have deeper understanding or to experience maybe a different perspective than you did before and.
This is what I thought I might try as, now we’re at the end of the year and I’ve been feeling very much into the, this has been a hard year part of my life. And I thought, I wonder if there’s another way for me to think about this year and not to negate or diminish in any way the real, challenges that I’ve experienced this year, also to open and be curious about all the different spectrum of emotions and experiences that I went through and give equal weight to them.
Negativity Bias
You’ve probably heard of the negativity bias. I talked about it last week in the show about positivity ratio. Our negativity bias comes out strongly when we’re telling a story, when we’re trying to just give an overview. If something difficult or challenging happened, that will probably rise to the surface as the most impactful part of our year.
I like the idea of stepping back and telling our story a couple different ways, giving ourselves the option to think about our own lives from various perspectives.
Two Chairs Exercise
In positive psychology there’s an intervention for building optimism. This is like an activity you can do, and you can do this in lots of different ways in different settings.
It is called the two chairs exercise and it’s simple. It seems almost like simplistic and is powerful. Don’t let the simplicity of it trick you into thinking that it’s not impactful. In this activity, you will get two chairs and it’s helpful if they’re literal chairs. Like you set out two chairs at the front of a room or, in in the setting that you’re in and one chair is the optimism chair, and one chair is the pessimism chair or from one chair.
You’re going to tell the story of things that went right and from the other chair you tell the story of things that went wrong. When you give someone the opportunity to physically sit themselves in the pessimism chair and tell about an experience from this negative perspective of all the things that went wrong and really noticing the trouble and the challenge and the difficulty, it becomes easier to do because you’ve given the permission to say this is where I want you to focus.
And equally when you get up out of that chair and you sit yourself down into the optimism chair and you tell the same story, the same circumstance or situation or challenge from the perspective of what went right, what were the tiny miracles or what were the things that I was really grateful for? What support did I receive? What solutions did I find?
Equally, you have this opportunity to say, okay, I have permission to just go all in on what went right. Now in neither circumstance are we trying to get at the capital T truth. All we’re trying to do is explore the different ways to talk about. the situations and circumstances of our life.
This exercise can be helpful in teams, in team building, and in building optimism like in employees or in a workforce. It can also be helpful in a classroom if you’re trying to build some strategies for problem solving among students or, even adult learners. It gives people the opportunity to practice switching perspectives in a low stake’s way.
I thought I would try to experiment with the two chairs exercise without the chairs just in my mind and journaling about my year. What I noticed that I mentioned earlier is that when I was talking about the year 2023, I kept starting out with the phrase, “this has been a tough year.”
It’s silly because I do feel justified in my description of gosh, it was a tough year because when I list off the things that I that were challenging or unexpected things that happened this year that we’ve been managing, I think a lot of people would agree. Yeah, that was a lot. That was a tough year.
Still, it doesn’t tell the whole picture by any stretch of the imagination. So, I’m doing myself a real disservice focusing on the it was a tough year part without at least giving equal space and equal airtime in my brain, in my body, how I’m feeling about my life.
Recognizing all the incredible and wonderful and beautiful things that I was able to experience this year in tandem. Life is a mixed bag. We are going to experience ups and downs sometimes at the same time. And learning to tell the story. including both will be helpful in our overall ability to have perspective and to tap into the emotions that feel most useful and most beneficial for us.
Now, depending on your personality and just your general set point, whether you tend to be more optimistic or tend to be more pessimistic or, somewhere in the middle, the way that you talk about your story and your life may be on one end or the other of the spectrum.
I think the exercise is helpful to do both ways, either way, because I don’t want you to have the understanding that focusing only on what has gone right and only on the positive and just, sweeping all the challenges under the rug and not acknowledging them and not talking about them and not thinking about them is better.
Tell Your Story Different Ways
We need to have a balanced perspective of the things going on in our lives, and we, if we only are willing to focus on and think about and talk about the things going right, and we ignore the things going wrong, we can sometimes be setting ourselves up for extreme risk taking or, not balancing out the challenges that we may need to be prepared for because we’re simply ignoring them.
I think it’s not inherently better to only focus on the positive or inherently worse to only focus on the negative. Being able to switch and to see both perspectives and then be thoughtful about what serves the narrative that you want to have. That’s where we want to land somewhere in the middle of acknowledging things are challenging and wonderful and Finding that gray area that isn’t living in the total white or the total black.
Trying to switch back and forth in a binary but finding that middle ground and getting a little bit comfortable with it’s hard to explain because it was really tough, and it was really good, and I guess that’s what it means to be human.
By way of example, while also respecting the privacy of my family, I want to share just a few of the things that if you were, hearing me talk about the difficulties that I’ve experienced this year, these are some of the things that I would list.
We’ve had a difficult health diagnosis that we’ve been managing, somewhat successfully, but still not all the way successfully this year. It causes a lot of daily stress to try to find a balance of figuring out this health condition.
I was in graduate school for the first six and a half months of this year and it was so rigorous and so difficult and (again here we go so wonderful) and it took a lot more time than I expected while trying to balance my home life and my parenting and my marriage, my relationship.
We’ve also experienced a job transition this year, which while, positive in some lights can also pose a challenge and be difficult. And for a lot of the year, I was managing an injury. I pulled my Achilles tendon back last November, and it’s taken almost the entire year of physical therapy and being careful at the gym to get it to a place where it’s not hurting.
A few big negatives or difficulties, challenges that are in some cases still unresolved, and I think for me, personally, having an unresolved problem is like the hardest part, because I am a, I’m a figure outer. I like the solutions, I like to fix it, I like to make it happen and just put everything back together the way that it’s supposed to be.
When the solution is elusive or maybe not doesn’t exist, it’s just something that we’re going to manage over time, that’s, that can be difficult. And I want to acknowledge that. That’s hard and it is okay to feel the hard and to feel the stress and to acknowledge there were some tough things that I experienced this year.
Now if that’s the end of the way I tell my story, what am I left with? Just feeling like low and the truth is that those things were hard and some of them continue to be hard and there’s like this big giant and what about all the things that went well this year that because of some of the overarching difficulties they’ve been erased almost from my memory.
It took some real effort for me to say okay, I’m not going to tell the story this way anymore. What else is true about the year that I’ve had? And I started to look back through positive experiences that I had and recognized this may have been one of the coolest years of my life. I wasn’t even paying attention to that because of how difficult some of the difficulties have been.
So, I’m going to sit in my optimism chair and tell you about how great some of the things that I experienced this year are. I’m going to start with some big ones because travel is so important to me. It’s one of my favorite things to do. It’s a passion. It’s one of my values. And this year I was all over the place.
I spent January in Calgary. I went to Palm Springs, California in March, and then spent the second half of the month in Morocco, which was a life changing trip, an incredible trip that I won’t ever forget. I came home and a couple weeks later went to Philadelphia for school. I spent a weekend hosting creative camp in Southern Utah, which is always so beautiful and wonderful.
I went to Costa Rica with my family for an entire month this summer. Again, this was a bucket list, lifelong dream for Dave and me to take our family abroad for an extended period to Costa Rica. And we surfed every day and we spoke Spanish every day and we ate incredible food, and we basked in the sunlight, and we got to know the locals and we had such a great connective time as a family.
Not only that, but I also came back, got the kids settled in school and went back to Costa Rica to host Novios for the first time. And it was exceptional, exceeded every expectation. We’re so excited to host again in 2024.
And finally, I went to New York city with some of my best friends from school and had such a beautiful couple of days. And a few months later, I took my daughter for her birthday with my sister and her daughter. And again, had an incredible time.
I finished out the year in New Jersey, speaking to a group of amazing women. I was all over the place this year and had some of the most incredible. Beautiful travel experiences with fun groups of people and dynamic relationships.
I love giving space for those experiences to rise to the surface for me to focus on them and think about them and remember them and pay attention to. The goodness that came from these incredible experiences. Travels were fun this year and I also had some other exciting positives happen in my life.
I launched season 6 of the podcast. Welcome to Practically Happy. I have built up my coaching practice and have some new coaching clients, which is fun. And as a sidebar, if you’re looking for coaching, clarity coaching, and values alignment in 2024, I may be your girl. You can sign up for a free coaching exploratory call through the link in my show notes.
This year I hosted two retreats, Creative Camp in the spring and the first annual Novios retreat in the fall. Both were incredible.
I graduated with my Master’s Degree at 40-years-old, huge accomplishment that I think is going to take a couple of years to let settle in because it was a lot of work and so I ended the program feeling pretty burned out and I don’t want to take away from the excitement and the pride that I feel on having done something hard.
I also have been loving getting back into my home projects and have had some fun opportunities since I finished school and came back from Costa Rica to be able to work on my house and I love. DIY home projects. Painting and installing cabinets and trim and decorating. It feels like home to me, and it’s been fun to get back to that.
So those are some big wins this year. And then I wanted to just give a little space to focus on some of the small things, the small, sometimes overlooked ways that our life can feel like it has little bursts of energy and little bursts of joy on a regular basis. It doesn’t take traveling across the world and celebrating a huge accomplishment to feel the positive energy in our lives, sometimes it’s the smallest things that make the biggest impact if they happen regularly.
Some of the things that I, when I put on my optimism lens about 2023, I realize were amazing were my birdwatching. I know it’s silly, but I had such a great bird year, both in my backyard birdwatching. From my yard and around my neighborhood and on hikes nearby. And on some of the trips, I was able to experience some cool bird watching and having that as a new hobby feels really fulfilling.
I also have loved walking to school with my daughter in the morning. It is. Something that I didn’t get to do as much this year as I normally do, and I think it made those days that I did walk to school with her feel special. It’s just a 15-minute walk down the street and we always have great conversation, and it just sets the day off on the right path.
Like that, I have been loving the routine and ritual of a weekly date night with Dave. I’ve talked about these many times over the years on the show. It’s something Dave and I have prioritized for. maybe 14, 13 or 14 years of our marriage.
Basically since we had children, we decided that, every night wasn’t a date night anymore and we need to set some time aside for each other and those date nights are like the heartbeat of our relationship and give us a place to come back to week after week and check in with each other and check in with ourselves and relate to each other and I’m really grateful for those.
I also have the best book club. In February, it will have been two years that we’ve been meeting together for monthly meetings. My book club is made up of some of the most incredible women who I’m so happy to know and be friends with. And something about having that on the calendar, that regular check in, that regular meeting, it may be the only like true social event that I do during a month.
It feels really nourishing. If you yearn for a book club, I have two different episodes on starting a book club. It’s something that I have started in every city that I’ve lived in, and it becomes the backbone of my social life and I really appreciate it. I will link those episodes in the show notes if you’re interested. (How to start a book club Episode)
And finally, despite my injury, I am heading into now what will be my third year of exercising at CrossFit with Dave. And this year I got a lot stronger. I feel like I finally learned how to do some of the movements, and I got more comfortable with the vocabulary and moving around in the gym in a new way.
And this year, even with being gone so often in the spring and having an injury that prevented some of the movements that I would like to do, 2023 was a year where I really built some strength and some flexibility and some balance. And I feel so good in my body. And that is meaningful to me, especially as I’m getting older.
Having found a way to move my body and to take care of my body that feels good to me is so wonderful and not something that I want to gloss over. It feels like a big deal to be getting stronger even as I’m getting older.
Upon closer inspection, it appears that my description of the year as just “hard” is insufficient.
The very least, it’s overly simplifying what was a dynamic and interesting and challenging and inspiring and progress promoting. I like that story better.
I’m so glad that I took the time to sit in a different chair and give some equal airtime in my memories and in my reflection to everything that I really appreciate about the way that this year went and about the things that I was able to experience.
Goods in with some of the hard and bad not only gives me a clearer picture and helps me feel a little bit better you know. If I’ve been only focusing on the bad, bringing up some of this lightness and that the beautiful, wonderful things that I experienced feels better. Of course!
It also gives me a clearer perspective that when I’m stretching outside of good/bad or hard/easy, and I find that myself somewhere in the middle and I find that it can be both and it probably always is in some ways both.
In some ways it builds perspective and helps me feel a little bit more grounded in what is. Finding some acceptance in the good and the bad. It also reminds me of the power of perspective and the power of narrative, that the way we tell our story will influence how we make decisions moving forward and how we think about things.
Being careful about that, being intentional about it, acknowledging space for things that go wrong and things that go right, things that are tough and things that are beautiful invites us into some of the fullness of what life has to offer and it helps train us to be open to both, open to it all.
I want to invite you to think about your year, just think back on your year and what immediately jumps to mind is like the headline of the story you would tell. And then maybe dig in with a little bit more detail, pull out a, take a piece of paper and a pen and write down the story of your year, a high-level overview from the perspective of the things that were hard and tough and went wrong and allow space to feel those things.
And then flip the sheet over and write down the things that went well and were amazing and great and give equal space for those things to fill you up. And then you may choose to pull out a third. and incorporate the two stories together, where you find yourself somewhere in the middle of the challenging and the good, the difficult and the beautiful.
Storytelling is powerful, and it’s one of the ways that we can make sense of our world and make meaning in our lives and developing the skill or learning the practice of Adjusting the perspective of your story to learn more and have more fullness and more truth in it can be helpful.
I hope that you have found this episode to be insightful in some way. And I hope that you’ll take a minute to, if not write it, then at least think about the way that you’ve been thinking about your year. And then adjusting that lens a little bit to see if you can see it from a few different perspectives.
To give yourself a fuller picture of. The experiences that you have had in 2023, as we head into 2024, I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you about the women’s trip that I’m hosting in July to Turkey.
Talk about a highlight of the year and something that you’ll look back on and think, what an incredible experience! I’m so glad that I made space and time to go have that adventure. Registration is available now.
The trip is about a quarter full for July 18th to 26th in Istanbul and Cappadocia. I love traveling in groups, I love traveling with women, and if you feel a little tug, a little yearning for an adventure with a group of incredible like-minded explorers, join us.
I will put the link to sign up for the trip in the show notes.
If you have any questions, shoot me an email and I’m happy to answer it. Otherwise, I hope that I’ll see some of you there. And Happy New Year! I’ll talk to you next time.
