Do less to Be more

I internally debated quite a bit whether to have a special end of the year Blog. It has been such an unprecedented year that it is far too easy to write true but commonplace thoughts about how we can endure hardships and how we can or should adapt to survive in a new normal.

It truly saddens me to hear so many people eager to just leave 2020 behind, forget it as soon as possible and hope to get the old normality back in 2021, and I feel the urge to share a different perspective on it.

I do want to look with positivity and hope to the next year, but not as a raft on which I cling on after a shipwreck, hoping that the currents will take me to a new solid ship, but rather as a new smaller boat that I can guide to new destinations.

Of course, being the boat smaller I can take fewer belongings with me, and have to choose which of my belongings I really need and leave everything else behind, knowing that it is not serving me anymore.
My new year resolutions have usually been about something new to add in my luggage: new projects to design and launch, learning something new, get a new certification, practice better parenting tools and techniques...
As exciting and full of learnings as these resolutions have proved to be, I am now increasingly feeling the need to actually focus more on my BEING instead of on my DOING: be more able to listen to myself and be able to go through my luggage and decide what to leave behind, in order to be lighter and more flexible in my way forward.

I think this personal call can be very well extended to organisations and communities around us. Hasn’t the pandemic somehow forced us all to focus on the essentials?

I would love to see leaders carrying this imperative further, asking themselves and their organisations what behaviours and beliefs they should leave behind, individually and collectively, in order to build a better and more sustainable future.

I believe that now, more than ever, leaders are called to serve their people by facilitating discussions around this topic and gathering inputs from everyone, instead of designing a solo-strategy to be implemented.

My wish to all of us for 2021 is that we can come together to get out of the loop in which we collectively create outcomes that no one individually wants and that we can learn to DO less in order to BE more