Welcome to another episode of the Transformations with Jayne podcast. I’m your host Jayne Nakata, a life coach, and a podcasting consultant! Yes, that’s right if you are listening on Monday the 14th of December, 2020, my new offer: PodLaunch with Jayne is now live! This year more and more people have been coming to me for help with launching their own podcasts. I’ve been working behind the scenes with Sarah Furuya to help her bring her Legends Series to you in podcast form, and also Jennifer Shinkai who has just launched her new show: Ikigai with Jennifer Shinkai. Subscribe now!
So I’ve finally made it easier for you to work with me. It’s not a big secret requiring an introduction! You can go to my website jaynenakata.com/podcastconsulting to read all about it. I have introductory pricing until February 28th, 2021 for those services so if a podcast is on your “would be nice” list for 2021, please let me know. We start work in January!
Moving on to today’s episode and welcome to the final episode for 2020! What a year! I was thinking this morning that just the number 2020 to me looks so auspicious. It should have been a year that was outright amazing. For a lot of us, it was probably one of the most challenging and confronting years we have ever collectively experienced across the entire world. We went from “normal” to staying home and almost everything going online. Many of us saw that the impossible was now possible. Some of my clients were able to actually achieve some of the biggest pieces of their dream life, which was being able to work for their current job which they love, but from their home or another place. They were suddenly not tied to commuting to an office anymore.
Now that we are in December, I am hearing more and more “Thanks to Covid, this amazing thing happened” stories. Do you have one too? One I heard yesterday that moved me, was someone who had received a handmade gift from her mother. She had asked her mother to make this item when she was 11 years old. But it took until Covid came along and gave her the extra time at home to be able to finish it. She just received it, a gift made with love, in time for Christmas. What a beautiful thing to come out of it.
In my family, a lot of “Thanks to Covid, this frustrating thing happened” things came along. If you have been listening this year you will know that in March we were sent from Sweden to Japan for 2 months temporarily due to Covid. Then from Japan back to Sweden in June. Then in late September, we were told we would probably be sent back to Japan again soon but for good, probably in October. We negotiated for December.
And here we are, about to pack up our life here after just a year. A life we’ve come to love in a very short amount of time. Thanks to Covid, I get to leave Sweden while I am still in love with the place. Once I got past the frustration and anger at having to leave, having things taken away from us again, I came to this realisation and understanding. I’d love to come back to Sweden on my terms when the weather is good! It’s very dark here at the moment! This year, not many people are able to escape to the sunshine and warmth of Spain as they would normally.
So as we approach the end of the year, let’s take a moment and reflect on your year. I’d encourage you to go back to anything you might have written at the start of the year and see where you were then. You could only write those goals from what you knew at the time. From who you were and what your beliefs were at that time. Now we are in a different reality and our challenge in 2021 will be to create our goals for the year and beyond but not let Covid limit us. Sure there are very real limitations but the danger I see is that we will vastly underestimate what we can accomplish in 2021, or use Covid as an excuse not to do things that are in fact, completely possible and safe to do.
Some of the things I wrote in December 2019 included:
Writing a book - actually, I’m glad that didn’t happen because I think I could write a better, more appropriate one now.
Traveling to loads of places - the only traveling that happened was to Japan or around our own region in Sweden - thanks Covid.
I completely forgot my initial word of the year: which was leadership but then got changed to “Self Confidence” and then I added “Ease”.
Did I embody that at all times? No.
Sometimes? Maybe?
But I’m glad I chose self confidence because it made me look more carefully at that and see exactly where I needed to do some work on myself. I think I’m definitely getting there - finally - in December. If you give yourself a year, it will take a year!
The "ease" part, I think I am really nailing at the moment though. We are moving countries, I just launched PodLaunch with Jayne and I am one cool cucumber! Something I have learned through all the back and forward between countries several times now is that something like “moving countries” will happen. Whether you want it to or not, it’s somehow going to get done. However, your thing. Whatever that might be: writing a book, starting a podcast, running 5k for the first time, decluttering, learning Spanish. That is potentially not going to happen. But doing what you need to do to make it a priority will make it happen.
Do you know what I did to get PodLaunch formalised into a website? I got some outer accountability in the form of working with the very talented Laura Marushima from Full Circle Consulting who told me very concisely what I needed to do and by when in order to get this launch happening today. Most of it, I knew I needed to do, some of it was things I hadn’t thought of. But what was also really useful was having someone else doing the thinking for me, and having another pair of eyes on what I was doing. If I’d just done it by myself because I “know” what to do, then it would probably not be done at all. Still just a nice idea in my head, annoying me because I haven't followed through.
And this is what I am doing for my PodLaunch clients like Sarah and Jennifer too. Clever isn’t it!
So coming back to our looking back over 2020, take a moment to look through your calendar, photos on your phone, etc and see what you did actually achieve. It’s definitely more than you thought. And it will give you a different perspective on 2020. Our brains will fixate far more easily on the negative things than the good things. So take some time to actually go through your planner or whatever and make a list of your top 20 things from 2020.
I did this recently in my Sayonara 2020 online event held in Japanese. Everyone commented that making time to do this really helped them to see that the year wasn’t as bad as they thought and that they had overcome a lot of things.
Doing this simple exercise is really key to having a great 2021. I hope you will try it and give yourself the gift of seeing just how good 2020 was when you weren't looking. ;)
Listen to the podcast here.