At least four things to thank 2021 for

With all that was going around, it's astonishing to think that we did manage to stay positive and evolve our personalities this year. While I was pondering this aspect, I came across the following four things during my discussions with others and from my own personal experience?

Realization: This year has been a revelation in terms of forcing us to dive deep and understand the true purpose and meaning of our existence. This was a challenging year and it challenged our beliefs, notions and sometimes our existence as well. We were constantly looking at who we were and this presented a great opportunity to some of us to redefine ourselves in this year. Though this exploration was fast tracked by an external factor, we got a very important lesson on self reflection and adaption.?

Value: We often came across this from a customer context but what has changed is to understand value of things in our life that we took for granted. We also figured how valuable certain things are compared to others. We were absolutely thrilled to spend time in our native place, with our parents, our children, our pets etc. I will say that we have understood the true meaning of family values and the importance of it. We started to value our family's time, their presence more than ever and this is something that I think has happened unknowingly

Empathy: How often do you see children in your office laptop's camera while attending office calls and be fine with it? Often we treated our office calls like a Mars mission where even 5 seconds of disturbance would lead to a disaster. It became perfectly fine for us when we heard someone say, there is someone in the door, please give me 5 mins, I am going on mute as my pressure cooker is about to whistle, sorry I can't come on video just yet, I am not camera ready and we were also fine when someone called in sick at work, didn't turn up as they had to go for vaccination, took a day off as they got vaccinated, missed few meetings as they had to take care of parents or help children with exams. We gave the time and space for others to get ready for life. Our empathy went one notch above

Care giver: We often don't realize that this got added to our attributes in 2021. This one attitude alone has such a lasting impact on people around us and I am sure we would have slotted this into our lifestyles with much ease in 2021. So much stress yet we saw an opportunity to spread so much joy around us. So many fantastic and encouraging stories of us taking care of our loved ones, neighbors, our collogues, friends during this very challenging times. This year put us straight into a practical scenario and expected us to manage and wow, we came out with flying colors.?

Year 2021 was all about resilience, empathy and gratitude. What's your take?

As we hit festive period, I would like all of us to stay safe, remain cautiously optimistic about the future and stay awesome! Wish you all a very happy Christmas and fantastic New Year!