My Take on 2024
Sometime over the past few weeks, the calendar page flipped over and we started getting tax forms delivered in the mail. 2024 just…showed up. There wasn’t a ton of time to wrap up and put a pretty bow on 2023 and I am only now, in the middle of January, just getting my thoughts together about the intentions Elemental Coaching has for 2024.
I won’t lie - it got kind of messy out there. From my perspective, a perspective informed by my experience and my engagement with clients, friends, and followers, I’m looking forward to a year where something’s gotta give. Every last one of us seems to be at a breaking point and something needs to change.
If you aren’t changing, you’re just risking the same outcome over and over again. If we don’t change, we will be sitting on another year dreaming of things we could do while complaining about how we never seem to have enough time, energy, or whatever to go and get the things we really want. This idea - evolve or die - is the foundation of so much of what we do at Elemental Coaching.
It had to come to this. The last four-ish years have been a marathon we tried to sprint through.
In 2020 we were forced to slow down. Overnight, every single variable was flipped around for all of us. So many of us lost so much in that year - family and friends, the connection of community, opportunities to do something or go somewhere. This was a moment of adaptation, and the Elemental team had to shift what we were doing to accommodate how the world was changing. Things felt unusual, and while work got busier, I started to enjoy the slower pace of life in general. Circumstances aside, we don’t often get these kinds of breaks.
But it wasn’t long before we were restless. In 2021 and 2022, as the world reopened and things found their new pace, every one of us was eager to get back at it. Gyms reopened, restaurants started seating people, and travel plans that had been postponed were rescheduled and resumed at the same time (at least, that’s now it felt). The anxiety of the previous years drove us to jump on every opportunity to do something, because you never knew when things might shut down again. We had things to do and more motivation than ever to do them.
2023 - Oh, look, what a surprise - so many of us closed out the year feeling like they had been hit by a bus. Spread too thin, over-scheduled, and rampant burnout. We had tried to make up for lost time, we had tried to ride the wave of the changed world, and the momentum is wearing us thin. This feeling is one of the reasons for the Elemental rebrand - so many of us needed something basic to return to.
In all of this time, over all of these years, did any of us really recover from 2020? Have we given ourselves the time to process and heal what we went through or how it changed us?
Our intention of 2024: Less.
Less commitments and obligations. Less comparison. Fewer things on the calendar. Fewer plans and goals. Why? It’s the only way you give yourself more. More time to rest and recover. More time to care for yourself, more time to focus on what matters to you. Survival mode isn’t sustainable, and the last several years have burned up most of what we’ve had in reserve. You need more for you, and that’s going to mean giving less to others.
What isn’t serving you? What is keeping you from recovering? Let this be a year of healing and recovery. Let this be the year of You.