Time to appreciate your assets
The key to growth and health that most of us overlook
As we approach the end of 2020, a year unlike any other, it may be in more of a crawl than a sprint. We are exhausted, wrung out. Our teams are fraying. Many of us have been in survival mode for months, and we’ll be glad to make it out of this year with our lives and, hopefully, our businesses intact.
Which makes this a perfect time to practice appreciation.
That may not be what you want to hear. But it’s probably what you need. Appreciation is an antidote to survival mode, which—though totally understandable given the circumstances—isn’t doing you, your relationships or your work any favors.
We are wired to focus on the negative, on the threats we perceive around us. While this orientation, our negativity bias, is essential to the survival of our species, it also comes with a serious downside: We overlook the positive and the possible.
You might tell yourself that negativity and pessimism is just more realistic, but that too is a protective narrative. The fact is that there is opportunity and threat in every challenge, and you have a choice where you focus your precious attention.
If you dedicate all your energy to vigilance, to avoiding threats, you might stay protected in some ways.
But that’s not the same thing as being safe, and it’s not reality. Survival is no way to live, let alone lead.
We may think of appreciation as the feel-good fluff to soften the tougher feedback we’re trying to deliver to our team, or to ease the harder lessons we ourselves are learning, but it does more than make us feel good. In fact, appreciation is a critical growth strategy. It helps us recognize the ways we’re growing, and it shows us how to keep going.
Research tells us we grow faster through leveraging our strengths than by fixating on our faults, and we get further by building upon what’s working than obsessing over what’s not. (In an individual context, we often talk about strengths-based development. At the organizational level this approach is known as Appreciative Inquiry.)
So appreciation is a key to great leadership, but in a prolonged crisis, with our nervous systems in continual fight-or-flight mode, it’s also vital to our health and wellbeing.
There are many ways to practice appreciation. We can appreciate ourselves as well as others. We can recognize growth, we can give thanks, or both. Here are some questions to guide you in appreciating your team, your loved ones and yourself.
And 2020 has given us plenty to work with in these regards.
Let’s start now with ourselves. Grab a sheet of paper or open a new note and take a moment to look back over the past 12 months.
Practice: Appreciating Ourselves
Think back to January, back to where you were starting out the year, what you were hoping to achieve. What were your plans? What were you looking forward to? What were you worried about?
Ok, now consider the many challenges and complications that have arisen between then and now. What got in your way? What disrupted your plans?
Breathe.
Recognize how you met these challenges and kept going. Sure it stung at the time, maybe it still does. The disappointment, the grief for what has been lost, is real and valid.
Let yourself feel it. This is part of your story.
And you did keep going. Perhaps in a different direction or at a different pace. This too is to be appreciated: You flexed, you focused, you adjusted. You reset priorities and crafted new strategies, whether for productivity, practicality, progress or self-care.
Now look at what you achieved, under these extraordinary circumstances.
Resist the urge to compare your accomplishments to your own original plans or to what others seem to have attained or produced.
Instead, zoom way in to maintain perspective and context. Look for the tiny wins. What are you proudest of given the reality of your particular situation, with its unique responsibilities, problems and pressures?
Now go beyond what you did, because that’s only part of it. I think it’s more interesting to consider who you were and how you grew this year.
We tend to lead with self-judgment, so please take on these questions with a heavy dose of kindness and compassion for yourself.
Remember the magnitude of the challenges you’ve faced. Forgive yourself the moments when you didn’t show up the way you wanted to. Focus on the times when you did, maybe even surprising yourself in the process.
How did you show up for your team, family or community in new ways? How did you let them know they matter? How did you support them in their struggles?
How does that feel?
Which of your strengths did you lean into? How did you stretch them into new territory? What new strengths did you discover?
Yes.
And finally, what did you learn about yourself this year? What do you now know—about who you are, what you’re capable of—that you didn’t know back in January?
Write it all down. Save it. Come back to it. This is your incredible true story of this historically relentless year.
I, for one, am terribly proud of myself. I hope you are too.
I’m proud of us. We are going to make it out of 2020 alive.
Let’s make sure we’re not merely surviving it.
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