Dear 2022

It’s been quite a ride. While the world was struggling to get back to what we once knew to be normal, I was finally getting comfortable with being odd, off and peculiar, with feeling all the feelings. Fed up with being worried about any sort of competition, I slowly started carving my way back to feeling unique. Not in a presumptuous way, more in the way we all are unique once we find our spot and stop overwriting our true nature with some sort of social consensus. For the truest version of ourselves, there really is no competition out there. 

For me, this process involves a lot of writing. My writing has always been dead serious to me. And this year, I finally got serious about my writing. For years I have been wondering how the hell I was supposed to carve out the time to pour my thoughts into ink. How does anyone get anything meaningful done, really, with all the stuff we keep shoving into our days? So you, 2022, have been the year where I – for once – started letting go of what no longer served me, preparing to hand over bits and pieces of what I built at work and at home, allowing others to take over, instead of trying to squeeze myself like a lemon to just be a little more efficient…

You have provided me with countless opportunities to lean into my rage, my inquietness and my fears, instead of sugar-coating them, literally. Admitting that I still am an addict on different levels was painful and liberating, since our greatest pain makes for a great compass.

….

This is how I am hoping to start my annual reflection 11 months from now. Those of you working in product have probably heard of the Press Release technique, introduced and practiced by Amazon: before launching (or even working on) a new feature, the team is asked to provide a fictional press release stating what value this new solution is unlocking for their customers and answering the most important questions about the new product or service. 

I very much believe in the power of the stories we tell – especially to ourselves. If we keep telling them over and over again, they tend to shape our future, the good ones and the bad. Energy follows attention, right? So now that we may or may not have broken the intentions we set for 2022, why don’t you spend a couple of minutes working backwards, thinking about how you want to feel at the end of this year? If you were writing the plot (and I really think you should :-), how will 2022 have shaped you? What will you have accomplished, but more importantly, what did you overcome? What did you make time for? What did you leave behind in order to create space for what truly matters to you? Imagine it’s New Year’s Eve and you are looking back on 2022:  Which stories do you want to tell yourself about this year? 

Just a thought.

Happy weekend!
Tanja

This text was first published in my though-letter Tanja’s Butterflies (February Edition 2022 – Part 1). If you are interested in receiving the next editions in your inbox with additional resources, you can subscribe here.