Episode #55: Who Do You Want to Be in 2021?

There’s nothing that we’re not allowed to want. We are allowed to want what we actually want. There’s no, should, necessary. There’s no, I need to, necessary. So if you’re heading into a new year’s resolution process or you’re setting goals for your team, your company, your family, I really invite you to build a foundation for making a massive change that’s really there in service of your deepest, most authentic self. And I really want to just support you in playing with this idea of “Hmm, from above the line, I don’t need anything. There’s nothing I should do. There’s nothing I have to do. However, I can want. I can have strong preferences. I can stand for things. I can be committed.” And from above the line, that’s where genuine change happens. There’s nothing more human than creating. There’s nothing more human than creating change.

So I want to invite you into a really different process, a conscious process of allowing ourselves to be a vehicle for change to happen.

Welcome to Allowed. I’m your host, Caneel Joyce. Thank you so much for making time to come back again today. And for those of you who are new listeners, welcome to the show. This show is about leadership, leadership for you as a whole person in your whole entire life. And leadership happens when we really take 100% responsibility for creating what we want, including ourselves, creating our own experience, our own way of being. And so I invite you in today to think of this as a private coaching session between you and me.

What I want to talk to you about is 2020. So here we are, beginning of December and last year, this time, things felt pretty different for all of us. I remember starting the new year in January. I had big goals and dreams for the year. I imagine this was a year when I’d spend lots of time working with interesting clients and perhaps continuing to fly around, visiting people and speaking and so forth. I had big dreams for this podcast and for a new coaching program I was launching. And a lot of that stuff did happen, but it didn’t look anything like what I thought it was going to. The pandemic, the wildfires out here on the West coast, the black lives matter, various things that were happening with family. And then of course, just suddenly this shutdown of schools and my life felt, lots of times, like it was really turned upside down.

What was really cool is, if I was able to just focus on how do I want to be through this? How is this experience actually here for me, in service of me? How is this experience actually here in service of all of us? It didn’t make any of the pain go away, necessarily, but it helped frame things in the light of all of this is an opportunity, even if I can’t see it or feel it right now.

By the time we got around to May, I was honestly just on my knees begging for mercy, and really wondering if I could keep going with the things I was still trying to do. I actually did an episode on this podcast then, I remember, and it was a very spur of the moment, suggestion from my head of operations, Heather, who suggested that I talk to you, the listeners of the Allowed podcast about this renegotiation process I was in with myself. I had noticed I was really out of integrity with a lot of my personal agreements with myself. I was not going to be able to get back into integrity without making some pretty big changes. And it felt like there was a lot at stake. For instance, really letting go of the vision I had had for how an episode of this podcast should be, how long and immediate it should be, how researched it should be. And just saying, for now, let’s just focus on getting out one episode a week.

That was such a big letting go for me. And what’s craziest, it was totally, from a metrics perspective at least, it was totally the right move. If there ever is such a thing. The episodes became shorter, they became more personal. And the feedback that we received was that this was what you wanted to hear. This was actually transformative. And it was just such a great reminder that, even though I felt like I was crumbling and I really just out of alignment internally beforehand, once I got into alignment with myself on, here’s what is a yes for me and here’s what is a no, things just started clicking back into place again, but with so much more ease than ever before.

I’m actually floored how much less I can do and still have the same outcomes. So really a lot of learnings for me of how much extra effort I must have been putting into so many things and how little it probably mattered, at the end of the day. So it was a big, big learning for me personally.

As we’re heading now into the end of 2020 and gathering up my notes from the year and looking at what did I learn and what am I grateful for? Where do I want to go next? A big thing I’ve learned is, yet again, I learned, less is more. And that really it’s about my way of being. When I show up whole, I create wholeness. When I show up tense, I create tension. When I overextend, because I think I’m not enough, I am met with scarcity all around. So the goals that I have are not so much, this next year, about what I want to do or achieve, it’s much more about who do I want to be and who do I want to become? And am I willing to even let go of those as hypotheses and hold them really, really lightly and playfully? And instead, have it be more like, “Hmm, maybe this is what I want to be.” But I wonder what life is going to teach me about who I really am and who I really want to be.

Because when tested, we often learn these things. So now as this year is almost over, it’s really time for all of us to realign and re-envision our goals, and hopefully integrating what we’ve learned about life and ourselves over this challenging, challenging year. There’s nothing that we’re not allowed to want. I’ll say that again. There is nothing that we are not allowed to want. We are allowed to want what we actually want. There’s no, should, necessary. There’s no, I need to, necessary. We are allowed to want what we want with our whole bodies. We’re allowed to ask for things and not get them. We don’t need to beat ourselves up about that.

Well, life works in mysterious ways. So if you’re heading into a new year’s resolution process or you’re setting goals for your team, your company, your family, I really invite you to build a foundation for making a massive change that’s really there in service of your deepest, most authentic self. The part of you that, when you remember that, that part’s there, you show up whole.

I really want to also acknowledge that you’re allowed to want nothing. You’re allowed to just be like, “I just don’t want to try to get something new.” And in fact, I invite you to see that there’s a lot of brilliance in a very minimalist strategy here, going into this, yet again, another year of change. But if you could get that really clarified, you might be able to make out that there is a vision there for you. Whether you’re going to try to run a marathon, read 250 books, write a book, make a film, start a company, sell a company, change your whole career, get married, lose weight, whatever the things are for you. All of those goals are wonderful and fully allowed.

Go for it and make them as big as they actually are for you. And see if you can get it into crystal clarity about what’s the actual vision that you have for who you are going to be. Not, what are you going to do? What are you going to achieve? But if all of those things happen, how would you feel? What would it be like to be you in your skin? Because that’s the thing you’re actually aiming for. And then you can ask yourself, is this what I, with my whole body, I am really have a whole body, I really want this. And am I really willing to take responsibility for creating it, and allowing it to happen on its own? Both.

Why is vision important? Why is picturing it and feeling it so important? Vision is a big piece of motivation. Without vision, there is no change. So often we know what we don’t want, but we don’t know what we do want. So coming up with this vision is going to help you start to realize it in your life because… And that word realize is so perfect. It’s not just realize it, make it real. It’s also realize it, see that it’s actually real. See that it’s actually maybe even beginning to happen already. See that it’s actually all around you. All of that material is all around you. And I have a process I really love doing for setting annual goals, setting new year’s resolutions, whatever kind of resolution you want. And I’m going to offer this to you in a workshop format that you can view, it’s on allowedpodcast.com is where you can access this conscious goal setting new year’s resolution workshop.

There are also a few materials there I want to offer you. So I’ve got a resolution recharge worksheet to re-energize your resolutions, to really check them out and see like, “Am I making this resolution from above the line, from a conscious place? Is this one that my whole body says yes to? Is there any leftover resistance there? How do I work with that? Where do I go from there?” So that’s a really useful tool, the resolution recharge worksheet. I’ve also got a conscious goal tracker where you can track your progress along the course of weeks and months and a year, if that appeals to you. And then finally, I’ve got something called a solar system exercise. And this is where you look at all of the sources of support that are all around you, at various levels of your social network, your social life. And then you can see where are there actually also some open spaces where I could invite more support in, and what would I want that support to look like? So that’s just solar system exercise. Thinking of it that you are the sun in your solar system.

I really invite you to go and download those at allowedpodcast.com. And that’s also where this week, you can actually begin to view the online workshop. There’s a video workshop to guide you through this interactive realtime process. I’ll take you through it in full. I’ll completely hold your hand through it. And there you’re going to get to clarify and set, or even reset or revise, a goal that means a lot to you. And you’re going to learn the secrets to getting yourself back on track and unstuck when you find you do get stuck and stalled. You’ll get to make a plan to make something that would help make achieving your goal so much easier. And I hope, through me being there with you, you can catch some of that contagious energy that was there when I initially gave this workshop live. People told me that they got a massive boost of energy, as well as calm and encouragement.

And I really want to just support you in playing with this idea of, from above the line, I don’t need anything. There’s nothing I should do. There’s nothing I have to do. However, I can want. I can have strong preferences. I can stand for things. I can be committed. And from above the line, that’s where genuine change happens. So I’m really, really excited to share this with you and so excited, in fact, I’m going to offer it as a bonus episode of this very podcast. So go in and hit subscribe now, if you have not yet, and you’re going to see that hit your podcast next week. So that will be yet another reminder for you to go ahead and get into this process.

Again, the video is going to be really helpful. You can get that at allowedpodcast.com. So this workshop, it was live at the beginning of the year. I’m bringing it back right now because this is a perfect opportunity to look at it, but looking at through that 20-20 hindsight lens of greater vision than we’ve probably ever had about what really, really matters to us. I can’t think of a better time for us to get re-inspired and to claim that ability that we have, that innate ability that we have as humans to imagine a different life, imagine a different future and imagine a different self. The cool thing is that, that’s what humans do. There’s nothing more human than creating. There’s nothing more human than creating change. We can do that from below the line and you can see how in the way that we’re treating our climate, our mother earth, and the way that we often treat each other. We’re doing a lot of creating and a lot of changing, but a lot of it’s coming from that scarcity place of below the line-ness, should-ing, needing, having to, forcing it.

So I want to invite you in a really different process, a conscious process of allowing ourselves to be a vehicle for change to happen. So please go check that out at allowedpodcast.com. This is the year that we can all do it. We can all do it together. We can take back our power. We can regain control over our dreams. We can distinguish what can I control? What can’t I control? And we can genuinely celebrate both of those things. It’s so liberating, so fun. And, around this time of year, this is one of our favorite ways to play after all the presents are unwrapped and the house is a total disaster, and your recycling is overflowing and hey, let’s reinvigorate our goals together.

I can’t wait to hear what you come up with. Please get back in touch with me and share with me your progress and bonus points for sharing this with friends. I have a group of friends that I gather once a year, and I guess this year we’ll do it on Zoom. And we do this together. It’s made a really big difference of just having that little extra bit of the witness, a little bit of social accountability, never hurt anyone. So get back in touch with me, check it out, allowedpodcast.com. You are allowed to want whatever you actually want, and I’ll see you next week.