What 2020 Taught Me

Episode 293 | Author: Emilie Aries

As 2020 comes to an end, I’ve been thinking a lot about what this year taught me - about myself, about business, and about what’s most important. Before we can properly move on and turn the page to a new year, I for one need a little closure! So let’s take a few minutes to take stock of what we learned this year.

I’d love to hear what 2020 taught you in the comments below or on social media! Tag me @emiliearies or @bosseduporg to weigh in and take account of what you’ve learned in this truly unforgettable year.

1. Preparation is great, but agility MATTERS MORE.

I’ve learned so much these past few years about taking charge of my life, my career, and my finances. Back when I started Bossed Up in 2013, I had hardly any savings to speak of and was still working my way out of $6,000 in credit card debt that I lovingly refer to as my “breakup debt.” Pro tip: if you don’t already, start saving for your own “f*ck off fund", because leaving a job or relationship can be expensive.

I know what it feels like to live paycheck to paycheck, which had been my reality since childhood until very recently. And after struggling through some big life transitions in my early 20’s - in part because of my precarious finances - I knew that if I could help it, I never wanted to feel that powerless again.

So over the past 7 years, I was focused on preparation. What could I do to cover my ass, take charge of what I can control, and put myself in the best possible position to be able to weather the next storm?

Now don’t get me wrong: I’m exceedingly grateful for how all that preparation paid off for me this year, but 2020 humbled me and my anxiety-driven preparation mindset. This global pandemic reminded me of how small I am in the grand scheme of things - how small any one of us is. Who the hell do I think I am compared to a global health crisis and resulting economic collapse? Sure, we can budget, save, follow all “the rules,” and try your best to check all the boxes. But at the end of the day, there is so much that we as individuals have little to no control over.

This year taught me to pair my drive for preparation with a healthy dose of radical acceptance. I will never be able to see what’s coming next entirely. So instead of trying to plan and predict, what would it look like to focus on agility instead?

Here’s what I told myself and my team often this year:

it’s not your job to predict it all, it’s your job to stay ready for anything.

It’s your job to keep a level head when shit hits the fan. To be prepared for your predictions to be wrong. To stay on your toes: awake, alert, and ready.

I think back to my days playing volleyball and am reminded of how I used to commit too early. I’d see the other team’s hitter jump up for her set, get ready to spike, and then boom - I’d have misread the signs, shot left in preparation of a cross-court shot, when the hitter sees me moving too early and decides to spike down the line on the other side of the court instead. By clinging too closely to what I thought was going to happen, I missed the chance to respond to what was happening.

Have you ever done the same? You get an idea in your head of how things are going to go, you make a plan, and then you find yourself clinging to that plan against all reason, even when the conditions around you have changed entirely. That’s no way to live - and 2020 reminded me of that.

Agility is what enabled our small but mighty team to come together, throw out everything we had planned for the year, and pivot quickly to roll out our new virtual offerings - HIRED , LEVEL UP, and SPEAK UP. It’s what inspired us to listen to you, our community, through surveys, a series of online forums we hosted at the start of this crisis, and through focus groups in order to respond mindfully and make ourselves as useful to you as possible.

Preparation is a good start - no doubt. But agility is what matters most when the world around you changes. And as the saying goes: the only constant is change.

2. we must learn to breathe while holding our breath.

So much of this year has been defined by waiting. We waited at home in quarantine. We waited to see how bad things would get, economically and otherwise. We waited for the vaccine testing and roll-out. Hell, we’re still waiting. Wondering. Hoping. Wishing for a time when things feel like they’re “back to normal.”

But despite us putting our regular lives on hold, time marches mercilessly on. Even when we feel absolutely overflowing with uncertainty, life has the audacity of continuing.

For so much of this year, I was holding my breath. Tense. Alert. Alarmed. Paralyzed with overwhelm. But you can’t do much when you’re not breathing. You can’t think clearly, move forward, or respond mindfully if you’re in a constant state of panic.

This year - this very continuously intense year - taught me to keep breathing even when I was holding my breath.

I learned to radically accept the uncertainty. To lean into the discomfort of it all, feel the frustration and fear and just do my damn best. I gave myself a newfound permission to re-focus on taking whatever control I could, even when many, many things were definitively out of my control.

As a leader at work, this was especially important for creating space for calm, focused, driven effort. Together, the Bossed Up team and I broke down our challenges into small, incremental steps forward, we moved the goal post a tad closer, and we teamed up. We felt all the feelings: fear, anger, frustration, vulnerability, and we made it ok to acknowledge those harsh realities, take a deep breath, and focus on what we could control. Breathing through the uncertainty, as strange as it sounds, helped remind us that whether or not we freeze, life keeps moving. So, we better get busy living.

3. None of us get where we’re going alone.

This year, I leaned on the Bossed Up community more than ever.

I delegated, and I mean really delegated. I counted on Ellie and Kirby, our incredible full-time staff, to create order out of chaos, bring their a-game, and reinvent Bossed Up alongside me in the face of this pandemic. And they crushed it! Despite never having enough time or resources to do things perfectly, we made progress incrementally and diligently. We were committed to each other and to Bossed Up’s broader mission and community, and that kept us going.

After a few months of fine-tuning HIRED, our job search accelerator, I brought on two (soon to be three!) new Job Search Coaches, Jaclyn and Yanil, to support our job-seekers through our program’s weekly accountability calls and personalized coaching. This combined with bringing more members of the Bossed Up Trainer Team in to support our LEVEL UP leadership accelerator with curriculum development and training delivery, means 2020 has been a banner year for expanding the team of talented bosses our community gets to learn from.

During this summer’s racial reckoning that re-centered our nation’s attention on the movement for Black lives, we began collaborating with more creators of color in our community through podcast and Instagram take-overs, passing the mic to amplify Black voices more intentionally as we developed our broader company-wide Diversity, Inclusion, and Active Anti-Racism initiatives (which I’ll be reflecting on and reporting back on soon).

I’m surrounded by such a diverse, talented community of coaches, trainers, and leaders because we’ve spent the past 7 years connecting and keeping up with each other, watching one another rise, learn, and grind our way to this wild year. And this year, I finally enlisted their support in a robust way. I finally asked for the help I needed to serve our community.

And speaking of our Bossed Up community, I am humbled by how our readers, listeners, and followers showed up for us this year. To every one of you who tuned in for a webinar, listened to a podcast, weighed in to support someone in the Courage Community on Facebook, commented on our Instagram, purchased a LifeTracker Planner, joined a focus group to help guide our pivot, voted on a charity for one of our quarterly donations, or enrolled in our new programs:

THANK YOU!

You are the reason I’m writing this right now. You are the reason our virtual doors are still open. You turned up when we needed you most to help spread the word about what we had to offer, and it’s my honor to work hard to serve you and your goals each and every day. Thank you for making my dream job - of helping bosses like you make your dream job a reality - something I can continue working on. I’ll never take that for granted.

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Got a career conundrum you want Emilie to cover on the podcast? Call and leave us a voicemail NOW at 910-668-BOSS(2677).