Fearlessly jumping into the New Year: A 7-minute Journey of Belonging, Identity, and Conflict

I am always intrigued by the transition from one year to another, witnessing people review, journal, set goals and bullet point lists of resolutions.

For each of us, there is a lot to unpack and doing this once a year doesn’t even do justice to all the transformations, big or small, that we are going through in a year (or over a period of time).

It is a luxury that not everybody can afford: sitting down and uncovering the recent changes, assessing new beliefs, peeling the onions of the assumptions we held as true so far and that no longer serve us (have they ever…)

Yet, as a means of self-care and readiness for change, I believe we can all embark on this challenging journey to uncover and explore some hidden aspects of our identity.

All it takes to get started is a 7-minute discovery.

Grab a friend. Ask them to be your thinking partner for this short moment (you can promise you’ll do the same for them!)

Ask them to tune down any thoughts, ideas, recommendations, or urge to give feedback, as you are thinking about your past 12 months and to just be there for you, without interrupting you.

If you have no one (for now), record yourself.

Start by telling the story of how your identity has been shaped by the environments of the people, places, and spaces that you have interacted with, and the relationships you have built.

Continue with the story of the values and strengths you showed up with. Which ones came up consistently?

Then explore… Where and how did inner and outer conflict arise?

And finally, in which conditions did you most flourish?

If the story starts to fade, and you haven’t reached the end of the 7 minutes yet, tell your friend to ask you this question: "What more do you think, feel or want to say?”

When you complete the 7 minutes, capture what you think was most important for you and what you want to take forward.

This topic of learning and (difficulty with) moving on often popped up in coaching conversations with my clients in the final months of 2022.

Here are some thoughts:

- Some of us feel somehow attached to friends, communities, situations or ideas and experience difficulty to move on. It appears that attachment is not so much about the friends, situations or ideas themselves, but about our self-awareness and sense of belonging.?Internal stories that are anchored, unnoticed, are stopping us from moving on.

- Moving “on” means walking towards a new phase of our identity and every time we step forward, we lose a bit of what we feel made us - before. We refuse to grieve?

- So we ask ourselves, rightfully, “Who am I without this context and where do I belong now, in this case?"

-?That can be scary or puzzling, and heartbreaking in some cases. So the natural tendency might be, hey, I am staying put until I get an answer...

- But stuckness sticks and sucks

- However, what is true is that we’ve all experienced change before, big and small transitions, and they were never risk-free. We know, by experience, that we made it safe, to some extent and/or managed to move on - even in small increments. In some cases, there was even exhilaration in making the decision to change and act upon it!

- We also know that external factors always come into play that will make this new story look slightly different. (History never repeats itself, it might look like it but the combination of conditions, our awareness, our thoughts, our actions, and our surrounding systems, is always new).

- Every change is a new, unique experience. Now one else owns this change, but you.

Therefore, setting goals or a new resolution without looking at this rich range of conditions, relationships, values, strengths, talents, wants, appetite for risk and level of comfort, and other possible scenarios, is a bit pointless. You need to connect the dots.

I am inviting you to build your personal foresight report for 2023, online, on the 6th of January, or in person in London on January 17th at the Conduit. Click here to select your session https://servanemouazan.co.uk/whats-on-in-the-house-of-trust/

In these sessions, you’ll be able to respectfully say goodbye to your old reality and ease yourself into your new identity for 2023.

Always in movement.

Happy New Year 2023

Servane