End of Year reflections: "love yourself" will get you nowhere, do this instead
Ending a very busy year with thoughts on leadership
This year I sit and reflect about achievements completed (✅), frustrations (🤞🏼) resolved, and opportunities (🌳) to grasp in the new year. I will leave the first two for private conversations. But the last one is a personal opportunity for 2024 to be kind to myself.
I came to this on a flight back from my birth country to London. I have taken so many flights in my life, more than 400 by an estimate. It was the Nth time I heard “You have to first place the oxygen mask on yourself, before you help others to put theirs on.” It’s been a busy busy year, and if you are also in a leadership role and have felt the strain of running at 1000 km / h, while keeping company priorities straight, answering 50 questions / day, while creating culture for your team and whole company, and improving your company’s cash position in the 100s of thousands, while creating new self-sustaining systems, you will know what I mean. You will have to remember to put the oxygen mask on yourself first. To be less dramatic, I called being kind to yourself.
I said this to someone a few weeks back and the reaction was “You mean, you want to love yourself?” No, being kind is not like “loving yourself.” “Loving yourself” - in what I have seen on The Circle, and from my younger colleagues - barely scratches the surface of the human condition and has connotations of being a passenger in your own life - accepting your condition as it is, and letting go of any ambition to improve yourself, your context, and life, by means of introspection and hard work; lest you be accused of “being unhappy” or “not knowing your value.”
This is what I mean by being kind: it is about being present in your context, owning who you are, and applying yourself to the world in a positive way. Let me unpack this:
Be Present - be aware of your situation, your perception, your state, your mindset, your context. Be aware of who you are and how you currently fit in the world. Get to know, for this context, what are your strengths, weaknesses, and unknowns.
Own yourself - grow into your strengths and work with your weaknesses. Don’t spend time on activities that don’t give you energy: don’t try to act extroverted if you are introverted at your 5 day company off-site, don’t go on a multi-day hike if you haven’t walked in months.. you get the drift.
Apply yourself to the world - lean into your strengths while improving or moving away from your weaknesses. Set boundaries - the only way to define expectations. Take control of your situation and put yourself in the context that appreciates most your strengths and nurtures your weaknesses to greatness or renders them pointless. Then, keep working: on yourself, on your team, on your company.. keep building.
You will evolve how you fit into the world. Then it is time to repeat this journey.
If you have been like me, a leader running at 1000 km / h, and for a while you forgot to do it, put your oxygen mask and be kind to yourself. Only then could you help others. Especially if that’s other leaders.
Here is to 2024! 🥂