CwL Ep85: Let’s Take Stock

Welcome to the summer series of the Conversations with Lisa podcast. I am going to be bringing you really simple, actionable things that you can do over this summer break for us in the Southern Hemisphere, for you guys, your winter break to reboot and reactivate yourself after what was 2021. These simple exercises will help you get focused on you, what you want, what matters to you and ways in which we can start moving towards that.

I am not sure about you, but there’s things I want to get done in 2022. And I know that me releasing what was creating some space and getting intentional around what I want is going to make all the difference. So enjoy these episodes, make sure to record everything in your workbook and let’s bring on a new year.

Hi. Here we are for the summer series, and we are going to be rebooting, reactivating, but not to some weird, over-functioning hyper weirdness, because none of us need that after 2021.

So hopefully you listened to the episode last week and you got the vibe that this stuff works when we also allow ourselves to rest. I can’t even tell you how important it’s going to be for your entire life, for every aspect of your physicality, your emotional wellbeing, your mental wellbeing, your spiritual wellbeing, your family’s wellbeing, your work levels of productivity and all those sorts of things, for you to just hold up. Just rest. Give your beautiful, amazing soul and your body, the chance to just drop it down a notch. Just rest when you can. Okay? It’s really, really important. I’m going to keep saying it. You’re going to get sick of me saying it, but I feel like it’s a message that we hear and we’re like, “Yes, I will rest once everything is done.” No, that’s not how it works. Okay?

So in today’s step in terms of just releasing what was 2021, there’s beautiful rituals that you can do. There’s all sorts of things that you might have in your toolkit around a new year. But I think one of the most important things is when it comes to refreshing ourselves and wanting to come into a new year, feeling good, clear, motivated, purposeful, all those things, is to just take some stock. Take some stock, learn the lessons, find the juice in what worked and what didn’t work and what we want to take forward and what we need to drop from the year before.

Because I mean, honestly, it’s so easy for us and this is a lot of what I teach. We’re creatures of habit, and most of our lives is reflecting what we do each and every day. A lot of it is the same, and a new year offers a brilliant opportunity to set some new intentions and to draw a line in the sand. But that’s just words unless you actually understand how your brain is designed to keep you doing the same things all the time. Now, this is work that we do in Ready For Change, and I teach all of that stuff in my programmes.

But today in this step, what I really want to talk to you mostly about is how, when it comes to reflecting, when it comes to releasing and finding the lessons, we are so good at self-deception. We’re so good at seeing only part of the story. We’re so good at saying that was that person’s fault, or this happened; I was feeling like this because of this. And I mean, for sure, for many of us who lived through extended lockdowns in 2021, we are now a product of certain circumstances. You have lived a certain life. You’ve created habits around that.

But the thing is that if we constantly live in the place where we are never to taking personal responsibility, where we’re never taking the blinkers off and looking with radical honesty at our lives, then we miss the juice. We miss the opportunity to shift ourselves internally, to actually have a new year mean something different, right? It’s so, so important to stop fooling yourself.

A question that I ask myself all the time is what do I need to be responsible for here? And also, if this is happening, how might it be happening for me? Because when we ask ourselves these kinds of questions, we get out of that woe-is-me victim mode into a more empowered zone where we can make what’s happening around us meaningful in ways that move us forward, not just keeping us stuck. That was a really clunky way for me to describe that.

But let me tell you what I really want you to go and do in your workbook. Hopefully you’ve downloaded the workbook, but I’m introducing this concept of radical honesty and removing self-deception, because you will get more out of this exercise if you choose to be honest with yourself. And I encourage you, every time you answer the questions that are here, as we take stock, which is just such an important part of my New Year’s rituals… And this is something you can do each and every day, week, whatever. You don’t have to wait for a new year. Time is just a made-up construct, this year concept. But I find it useful because I live in this world and I like to draw a line in the sand, and the New Year’s a really good one.

But this is going to be really, really useful for you if you go beyond the first two or three things that pop into your mind. It’s so easy to find those things. When I ask you with complete honesty what didn’t work this year, if you were like, “Okay, I really need to get honest about that,” okay, it’ll be so easy to come up with maybe even five, but two or three feels easy. I want you to go beyond that, where you think, “Yeah. That’s enough.” Ask yourself the question again. This is how we take ourselves further, when we dig just that little bit deeper.

And when I say with complete honesty, sometimes we don’t want to look at the things that that didn’t work. Sometimes we make them okay. We normalise what actually isn’t normal. So you’re not going to blow up your world if you go, “Oh, look, I’m just going to have to really admit that this element of my life didn’t feel good.” It doesn’t mean you’re going to go out and quit your job tomorrow by just recognising it and riding it out. Or you’re not going to divorce your partner and go and live on top of a mountain in a hut if you are actually able to be honest with yourself and say, “My relationship feel like it was working.” Don’t be frightened by actually expressing what didn’t work, because when we get honest with ourselves, we can create change. If we live in self-deception, we can’t. We’re never working from an empowered place, and I hope you can see that.

It is something that I absolutely see with women all the time in my programmes is their inability to recognise their own amazingness. And I know, because I mean, I’m in groups of women myself and I lead group groups of women in my programmes, that there’s a lot of times by the end of the year, it’s so easy for us to just sit in the, “I didn’t do this. I didn’t do that. Oh, I sucked at that. I said I wanted to do this and I didn’t, therefore I’m a failure and I never follow through.” It’s so easy to do that. “Oh, I started strong with this. Didn’t finish strong with it. Oh, if there was… I mean, I should have, in that lockdown… Why didn’t I use that time to do blah, blah, blah?”

No. I want you also in this taking-stock exercise to just recognise your amazingness. Can we just give ourselves the opportunity to be like, “Hey, buddy, well done. Well done on that. I know it didn’t necessarily feel easy.” I know that there’s a million different ways you could have did it, but you did it that way and look where we are. We’re okay. We’re here. Can you celebrate yourself a little while you’re taking stock, which is what this first step is all about? Just notice it. And then once again, when you can go, “Oh, well I guess this was pretty good and that was pretty good. That worked well. I felt flowy when I was doing that or that felt like a really big tick in the box,” then ask yourself to find five more things. Okay? That’s the rules. Dig a little deeper.

It’s often where the goal is. And our thoughts are at such a surface level sometimes. Sometimes we just need to have a moment with ourselves, just go that little bit deeper, and then once we’ve done that… These are questions that I ask myself actually all the time, and I was talking to a friend and we were talking about when things were feeling really good between her and her partner. I was like, “Yeah, what was happening for you when that was happening?”

And so often we don’t recognise that just focusing on ourselves in terms of filling our own cups, being responsible for working on things that feel important to us, putting some healthy, beautiful boundaries in place so we can maintain our energy throughout our week and month and year, we can create our own little goals for ourselves around our health and just chip way at things, that has a spinoff effect in every single area of our lives. And I love that we get to have this point of reflection.

I ask myself, when I feel like I’m thriving, when I feel really great, so in 2022, the moments where everything was feeling really good, what did you notice? What did you notice about yourself? What was happening for you? Because of course there’s so much juice in that question. Like, “Ah. Oh, yeah. That was when I put a time limit on my phone and then would put it away. Oh, yeah.” I know that there’s a lot of women who run their own businesses. “Ah, it felt really, really good when I said no to delivering this particular product or service and I said yes to the thing that feels really easy and fun for me. That felt like I was thriving.”

So what lessons do we learn from that? Who were you hanging out with when you were thriving? Who makes you feel really great about yourself? And then on the opposite, when your energy and mood was low, where was that? What was happening there? What caused it? And sometimes things are completely out of our control. There’s things happening outside and around us all the time. Most of us have other people in our lives, and people, they have their highs and lows. And so while that affects us, we can also jump in the mud with people or we can just witness them and love them on the dry land. So what was happening for you? What felt heavy about the year? When was that? And once again, it’ll be easy for you to see, “Oh, this and this and this,” and just go that little bit further. Okay? I want you to think about the most interesting things that you learned about yourself.

And sometimes we really need to sink into that, because I think, and I teach, that one thing can happen and we can create all sorts of meaning around it. Maybe you’ve learned about yourself this year, that something that you’ve said to yourself over and over and over again, you actually realised it wasn’t actually the truth of you. That’s actually hugely interesting. Anyone who did Ready For Change would have had these light-bulb moments of, “Oh my gosh. I realise that I’ve been telling myself for years that I’m lazy, and actually I just went ahead and did blah, blah, blah, blah. That completely disproves that theory. So if I’m not a lazy person, well, who am I? What do I want to create? What’s here for me?”

Now, maybe you learnt that you had more patience or less patience than you actually used to say before. What’s here for you? Why is that interesting? Maybe you learned about what’s actually really important to you as the world went topsy-turvy, continued to be topsy-turvy. What did you learn about yourself that is interesting to you? You’re a fascinating being. Take stock of what you’re most proud of, absolutely. In a time where for me, a lot of the year felt like struggle-town, like, “Oh, was that actually a win? I don’t know.” I don’t know. Was it, I mean, I guess we got through, but sometimes it’s like, “Yeah, no we got through.” I’m proud of that. Own it.

And then I think one of the most important things that I do at the end of a year or the start of a new year is to forgive myself. That was the way it was. That’s what happened. Now, I can go and beat myself up around that, torture myself, or I can just choose to love myself anyway. “Lisa, I forgive you for not being on top of blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. It’s okay. It’s all right. We’re okay.”

And if you are listening to this and you also run your own business, I would say you can go through this as the business owner and in your personal life, or you can combine the two, but I ask myself these questions around my work as well, specifically around my business. So when I go through these questions with complete honesty, what didn’t work in the business this year, if I was to recognise my amazingness, and most of the time, I’m just feeling out of my depth, what worked well? When the business was thriving, what did you notice? When the energy of the business was low, what was going on there? What’s the most interesting thing I learned about my business? What am I most proud of, and what do I need to forgive myself for? All applicable to different areas of our lives, right?

So you could go through this in a granular way. You could do this for your personal life, for your working life, for your family life, whatever you want to do you with it. But ask yourselves the questions and go that bit deeper. If you think you’ve got all the answers, ask yourself again: what else? What else is here for me? If I was to be answering these completely honestly, no more self-deception, no more hiding from myself any more, because that just perpetuates the problem, if I actually want 2022 to feel different, how can I show up and even answer these questions in a new and refreshing way, right? It’s so important, so freaking important, to pat yourself on the back. We hardly ever give ourselves the opportunity to do it. So I really encourage you to get honest in your taking-stock step. Take as long as you need with this step as well.

Often, once I’ve taken stock, and especially around what I need to forgive myself for, I choose to let it go. I choose to let go of the whole thing. You can burn this page. You can burn whatever you want. I love fire. I love that element of fire, and I will quite often just write something down and let it go. It’s literally gone. We choose what we bring into each and every present moment, and most of us don’t realise that we have the choice to just, “Doesn’t have to be mine any more. I’ve got the lessons. I’ve taken stock. So now what? Now what am I going to do with this?” You might decide to light a candle, read it all out, forgive yourself out loud. You might choose to have a little burning ritual. You might choose to share this with a friend or your partner and say, “This was my 2021, and now I’m ready for 2022. This is what I learned about myself. How cool is that?”

I would love to know how you go with this. If you do this, if you’ve got your workbook, make sure you grab that via the link from wherever you are listening to this. Then share with me. I’d love you to be tagging on Instagram or socials so that I can see and I can congratulate you for taking this time for you. And we’re going to be coming in with the next step next week. I hope you’re having an amazing break. I hope 2022 is different in ways that feel good to you. And that’s what I am here for all the time. I don’t want to do things the same way as I did last year. I’m here for evolution, I’m here for growth, and I’m here for the lessons, and taking stock is a huge, huge part of that. Okay. I’ll see you next week.

The summer break is a brilliant time to do some deep diving. I’m not just talking about into the deep end of the pool. I’m talking about into you. So many women that I work with struggle to know what actually makes them feel good. I am on a mission to help more women than ever start to feel good now. You don’t have to wait for everything to change around you and wait for the perfect circumstances or wait for your kids to get to a certain age or your income to get to a certain level in order to actually feel good in the life that you’re living.

I’ve put together a brilliant four-part series called Feel Good Now to help you map out exactly what it is that you need to bring more feel goods into your life right now. If you want to get started, and it is a new year, how about the timing, then click on the link in the show notes and you’ll be taken to my programme, Feel Good Now. I think it’d be the perfect addition to your summer holidays. See you soon.

Hey, if you are enjoying the conversation, then it would mean the world to me if you head over to iTunes and give us a rating and review, it really makes a difference. It’s my intention to get as many of us involved in real conversations that really change the game as possible. Thanks so much for your help. I’ll see you in the next episode.