A quick one from me today — you’ll understand why in a minute.

One of my favorite things about my coaching sessions is that it’s my way of keeping a cool pulse on what phenomena are collective instead of local/specific, because I get to hear deeply about the experiences, energy, emotional state, and so on, of people who are totally unrelated, in different organizations and cities and types of work. Not only do I love when patterns emerge, but it’s always so personally therapeutic for me because there’s medicine for me in naming the collective stuff. 

This week’s finding: everybody is burnt the eff out. People always are around this time of year — there’s a sprint to the deadline of the end of a calendar year / holidays, at the same time as the days get shorter (ugh it gets so dark so early here) — but layer on top of that that people did not realize a) what the impact of the pandemic would be energetically, or b) how long a marathon it would be, and everyone is SO TIRED.

Turns out trauma is exhausting — trauma of unpredictable change and lost sense of control, trauma of mounting death tolls and health risks that make human contact a dangerous endeavor, trauma of financial consequences of recession, trauma of climate change burning our world, trauma of visible race-related violence… it’s no wonder we’re tired!

The medicine I’m finding from this pattern is: (lower-case-z) zoom out a bit, let go of the “according to whom??” expectations, maybe by saying “hey I can’t do what I said I would do and I’m really sorry for any ways that makes your life harder” if you think you’ll disappoint somebody, and then turn your attention to showing up to the things that are still there, that actually matter, which hopefully includes a few things that are restorative to you.

Also consider a reframe: canceling is a gift! Today I started my day booked on Zoom from 8am to 9pm, but by 11am I had had about 2 hours free up from folks shortening or canceling meetings. My reaction was: “the universe loves me!” so maybe you aren’t disappointing people as much as you think — maybe you’re giving them a gift of a relief from expectations.