They say hindsight is 2020 and never has that expression mattered more than it does now.  I’ve been reflecting on what 2020 has taught me.  Here are my biggest takeaways from a year that I won’t miss.  

Set intentions not goals.

I coached leaders in enough businesses in 2020 to watch them pivot, iterate, set new goals and scrap OKRs altogether.  There was too much uncertainty, unpredictability, and ever shifting sand to find firm footing.  The companies that I watched succeed, however, stayed true to their intentions.  They didn’t let goal setting anxieties or missing targets hold them back.  I’m following the same advice for myself.

I’ve never been much of a goal setter and, in fact, psychometric instruments (also known as personality tests) back me up on that.  Reflect on that for a moment.  I have three advanced degrees and bucket loads of “achievements” — jobs at the best law firms in the world, an Oxford degree and associate fellowship there, been featured on top radio shows and in prime media publications, and now I’m launching my own business.  And I am not a goal setter.

When I set goals, anxiety sets in.  I can’t sleep and I spend my life measuring things.  When we first launched our online coaching program, I thought I should set goals.  How many instagram followers, email subscribers, and facebook friends do we have?  Suddenly, I couldn’t sleep without checking in on how I was doing against my goals.  When I realized that was happening, I stopped.  

I went back to my intention — to help get as many women into leadership positions as possible.  Suddenly everything shifted.  I stopped counting followers and subscribers.  I refocused all of my attention on what the women I’m coaching need.  What can I do today to support, challenge and promote the women I reach through my work.  That is the only measure of success.  

Goal setting produces anxiety and wastes time.  Intention setting means I am living my core values every day.  And it doesn’t get in the way of achievement. 

Safety is an inside job.

Holy sh*t — did the world feel unsafe this year or what? Once the stay-at-home orders hit California, the panic set it.  I had just finished a meeting in LA and stopped at Whole Foods on the way home.  I had no idea what was happening.  I met a distraught young woman sitting on the floor in the middle of a nearly empty aisle looking for a can of anything.  I sat down next to her.  This was before we knew about masks and social distancing.

“Are you okay?”

She said, “Everyone seems to be panicking so it makes me feel like I should be panicking too.”  

“No,” I said.  “You shouldn’t be.”

That was a profound moment for me.   We talked for awhile about how having an abundance of dried rice and beans and toilet paper wasn’t going to make either of us feel any safer.  I bought beer and left. 

What 2020 made clear was that, yes, we need to pay attention, care for and believe in ourselves and each other, practice safe social distancing and have compassion.  But safety is an inside job. There was nothing we could be certain of in 2020 and that is not going to change in 2021.  I returned to more contemplative practices in 2020.  Meditation to stay present, the poetry of Mary Oliver and the warm fur of my soft animals to keep me warm.

Feeling safe to me means being present and awake in my body.  I feel safe because I am living a life with purpose and intention and believing in myself because I’m living consistently with my values. I recognize that I am privileged to not live with food scarcity and to have a warm place to sleep every night. That is abundance.

Fix your own oxygen mask first.

We can be of no service to others when we are not okay ourselves.  This was the year that I took self care to new levels and never once considered self care to be a selfish act.  I tried out every tool in the resilience tool chest.  

I sent thank you notes to people who helped me along the way which made me feel better for a while. 

I kept a silver linings notebook.  

I meditated for 5 minutes a day, then 10, then twice a day for 20.  I practiced several different kinds of meditation over the last year.

I did yoga, then I hired a trainer, then I tried fast walking, then I did a few deadlifts with my corgi.

I binge watched Netflix, took a break from TV altogether, listened to audiobooks and podcasts, returned to hardcover and took entire media breaks.

I took hot baths and cold showers.

When asked by my coaching clients what to do to feel better, I said “whatever works.”  

The most important lesson I learned was that when we are stuck in our homes for nearly a year, we may have to try different things at different times and we have to take care of ourselves first.  My entire job is to support others and if I’m in bad shape, I’m in no shape to help anyone.  

Never lose your sense of humor.

This familiar adage is one my father used to preach but I don’t think I really appreciated how important it was until this year.  He died a few years ago and mostly I remember him telling me this as a teenager.  Through tears I implored him to understand that there was nothing funny about what I was going through.

Boy was he wise.  Humor is the antidote.  In 2020, so many horrible things were made so clear that we could not look away.  Injustices, murders, inequality, brutality, hate, fear and so much death.  My pod has been very small in 2020.  Limited only to my brother and my daughter.  Thankfully, they are both pretty funny.  

Humor makes us resilient.  Humor weakens negative emotions.  Humor strengthens our immune systems.  Humor makes us feel like we belong.  Humor gives us energy.  Humor revitalizes us.  Humor makes the unbearable bearable. 

In the words of Viktor Frankl, the Austrian Holocaust survivor who wrote about what Auschwitz taught him in Man’s Search for Meaning, “I never would have made it if I could not have laughed. It lifted me momentarily out of this horrible situation, just enough to make it livable.”

Sometimes the women I coach ask, “are you saying fake it till I make it?”  Absolutely not!  For one, I never coach people to lie.  That just creates anxiety.  And two, it doesn’t actually change the way we feel about ourselves.  In fact, it keeps us stuck in the false belief system that we can’t say we can do something until we’ve actually done it.  Instead, we must learn to look for and acknowledge every bit of confirming evidence that we have the skills necessary to do the jobs we are seeking.

For many men, confidence gives them the edge to put themselves out there and seek promotions far earlier than women.  In their book The Confidence Code, Katty Kay & Claire Shipman talk about a Hewlett Packard study which showed that women apply for promotions only after they believe they meet 100% of the job qualifications, whereas men apply when they only meet 60%.  Tell the truth, have you ever applied for a job for which you are only 60% qualified? 

Talk about your abilities.  

Advancing in our careers requires speaking confidently about our abilities because, as Ohio State University professor Richard Petty has said, “Confidence is the stuff that turns thought into action.”  We may hesitate to suggest a course of action that we are not positive will succeed, and we certainly may hesitate to ask to be promoted to a job that requires skills we’ve not yet honed.  Putting ourselves out there before we’re sure we’re ready takes courage.  But once we do, we have the opportunity to grow, develop and improve.  Yes, failure is a possibility; but as one of my colleagues says, FAIL stands for first attempt in learning.  

The first goal in coaching for promotion is to understand that we women must build our confidence in order to get ahead.  And we do that by acting with the belief that we can learn to do things and further develop our talents. Carol Dwek, author of the book Mindset and a Stanford psychologist, explains that the most successful and fulfilled people in life believe most in their ability to learn and improve.  And, indeed, it is true.  The major factor in whether people achieve expertise is purposeful engagement not innate talent. 

Sure, we can try to figure out where this all began and why.  There are lots of well researched reasons why women doubt their abilities, suffer from imposter syndrome, fall into the perfection trap and struggle to stop ruminating over what went wrong.  There is research that shows boys and girls are still reprimanded and rewarded differently as they grow, therefore reinforcing certain behaviors that do not serve women.  

And we can go to therapy.  Incidentally, one of the ways I describe the difference between coaching and therapy (and believe me, I’ve had my share of both!) is that coaching is about looking forward and therapy is about looking back.  My therapists and I have looked at all kinds of choices I made during my childhood and adolescence (okay, who am I kidding, and well into my twenties and thirties) that may have served me once upon a time, but no longer do.  Understanding why they seemed like, and maybe were, intelligent choices at the time is kind of useful.  But more useful is really knowing that what got me here won’t be get me there.  And in coaching, I help my clients develop confidence.  Because that is what we need to get ahead.

Build your self-efficacy.

Self-efficacy is our belief in our ability to execute the behaviors necessary to achieve success in a given situation.  I like to talk about self-efficacy because it doesn’t mean a belief that what we do will be perfect.  It’s about a belief in our ability to execute. 

To build self-efficacy, I help my coaching clients retrain their brains.  Our brains are not hard-wired like computers, but are more like playdough. It’s what we call neuroplasticity.  This means the ingrained or automatic thinking “I can’t do that” can be retrained.  So that when faced with an opportunity, our automatic response is, “I haven’t done that yet, but I certainly have the skills to do it!” 

Here’s a simple coaching exercise I do:

Go through all of the positive feedback that you’ve received. Notice that while you may not be an expert in the exact thing you are asking to be promoted to do, the feedback makes clear that you have some serious strengths. Look for data about your raw skills and talents: a core intelligence, an analytical mind, a clear communicator, a tactical problem solver, an ability to read the room, to name a few.  If you don’t have good written feedback, then ask those you trust “when am I at my best?” 

Using this data, craft four or five really strong sentences that you believe are true about you and that emphasize your strengths. Make them clear and concise. When you’re done, put them on a clean sheet of paper and commit them to memory. Repeat them. Seven times a day for seven weeks.

I did this with my coach when I first started facilitating retreats.  I used to plan for days in advance. I would read, write, outline, interview and once I had a plan I would call my mentors for advice. The retreat would come and not much would proceed to plan because when people do deep work, you never know what might happen. While the pre-work that I did served me in learning (I read more, listened more, and connected more), even I had to admit that there came a point where all of this preparation was of diminishing returns. I realized I was trying to be perfect and expertly predict everything that might happen.  But that was impossible.  I was at the sixteenth decimal point when I shouldn’t even have been doing math.

My own coach helped me construct six simple statements that, while hard for me to believe at first (I found them embarrassing, self-promoting and it actually even made me cry to say them aloud), I knew they were true.  They were based on feedback from others.  And I also knew that my believing them would make me a more confident facilitator, which in turn would serve the people l was working with.   When you say something seven times a day for seven weeks, you retrain your brain.

Move courageously towards confidence.

This exercise changed my life and it has changed the nature of what people say about me as a facilitator. My self-efficacy led to greater confidence.  My confidence led to action.  My action led to stronger skills development.  And this all continues to lead to much more work.