Managing energy in 2021

Happy New Year! I left my last blog in 2020 thinking about D&I strategies to focus on for 2021 and I will pick up on these themes in the upcoming weeks, but for this first post of 2021, I wanted to be a bit more reflective if you’ll indulge me. 

The start of the year is naturally a time to set goals and to think what you want to achieve in the next 12 months, but thinking back to the start of last year, we could never have predicted where the year would end up. So rather than thinking ahead to the next few months, it feels to me like ‘present-day’ thinking is a far better use of energy.

Currently we find ourselves (in the UK), in our third national lockdown and I think it’s more of a struggle than previous lockdowns as we’re in the depths of winter. The mantras and self-care practices that many of us adopted in 2020 are coming back to the fore as we continue to need to draw on what we’ve learnt over the past months. I thought I’d share a few of the practices I’ve personally found useful:

• Prioritising daily self-care routines e.g. morning runs or lunchtime/afternoon walks, having a bath and using the Calm app for mediating;
• Getting enough sleep (a simple one but good sleep makes such a difference);
• Having a healthy diet (I try to avoid alcohol during the week – but don’t always manage that!);
• Making gratitude lists (either mentally or writing them out);
• Listening to podcasts/talks with inspiring stories e.g. Oprah’s Super Soul Conversations, Fearne Cotton’s Happy Place or Harry and Meghan’s Archewell Audio.

I would love to hear what you are doing to look after yourselves too.

It will continue to take extra effort at the moment to manage our energy levels as we ride the highs and lows of ‘coronacoaster’ but the ‘shoots’ of spring will start to show soon; so let’s keep our sights focused on that and our ‘present-day’ focus will naturally start to evolve too.