Making Sense of 2022: Ritual for Integration, Reflection & Vision

2022 was… intense. From the war in Ukraine, to inflation and the crypto-markets collapsing, this year was full of explosive situations that squeezed and stressed us.

How you make sense of an intense experience defines whether you’re traumatized from it or how you learn and grow from it as a person and as a leader.

Unaddressed stress can express in all sorts of undesirable ways down the line, but unpacking challenging experiences can turn intensity into wisdom, foresight, and healing that gives us resilience and insight with which to move forward more effectively than before.

Rituals during threshold moments ( at the end/beginning of the year for example ) can offer just the kind of space needed for this sense making.

Many of our known rituals (resolutions, holiday parties, new year’s, etc.) don’t offer this. Without intentional design, they devolve into spaces for customary niceties or rote traditions that lack meaningful, or meaning-making participation. Let’s face it, if left to our own devices, end of year can become a time for getting wasted at the holiday party and wasting time vegging/numbing out from the intensity of the year by binging Netflix only to be thrown back into the fray to start 2023 with gusto without having cleaned up the dumpster fire of unprocessed emotions from the year.

But when used thoughtfully, ritual space can be nourishing, regenerative and can give you energy. They can make a whole year’s worth of learning worth it through acknowledging the progress in it. They help us find inspiration for what we want to take from the past and where we want to go together in the future.

Here’s why

• Rituals externalize what is on the inside in a ceremonial way.
• They honor each person’s experience and give it a place to live, breath and be related to and negotiated.
• Rituals also give us a place to understand what we want to do with what’s inside of us — whether that’s put it to rest, or turn it into something new — instead of carrying it around in our subconscious.

If you want to succeed in the long-run, you’re going to have to make time

Ritual spaces are honoring, exactly because they make time. They signal (to yourself or your team) that your experience and the space to reflect on and acknowledge it, is worth that time.

So much of our lives are about working harder, faster. The world screams at us “there is no time!!” But slowing down to reflect allows us to make the best use of that time. What did we do? Where did we succeed? What went wrong and why? What did I learn from it? What does it mean for how I want to move forward and what I need to do so?

The space to consider our experience invites depth, and it’s depth that guides informed strategy. Taking in learning, addressing mistakes, adapting accordingly are all best practices for work, design, but also life.

It doesn’t make sense to run faster in the wrong direction. Reflection gives us the space to understand what direction we are headed. Besides, running a business is just like running a body and you can’t run it on stress and cortisol forever. Sustaining a business is a marathon, and it requires depth of thought and being to realize long term success.

Reflection as a path to wisdom and inspiration

Stress can make us do crazy things, and the world is pretty stressful these days. If you don’t create space to learn from those mistakes, you’re not fully leveraging the effort expended and/or wasting it completely. It’s easy to keep running on a hamster wheel because if feels like you’re accomplishing something. It’s much harder to stop and ask/consider “Do I want to be running on this wheel? Or do I want to get off and actually go somewhere?”

As you create space for reflection, you create space for learning and wisdom. From wisdom comes insight: about what’s possible now and where you want to go. It creates direction, clarity, and motivation. So taking time to slow down can actually be the key to moving you forward.

So what rituals will you create?

There are rituals for personal reflection, for communion and connection, for learning, growth and vision. As you consider how you want to close out 2022 and start 2023, what kinds of spaces do you want to create to help your team make sense of the past to move forward into the future you desire?

Get in touch

I’m offering two more coaching spaces for the year ahead and as a gift to anyone who’s interested, I’m holding space for creative visionaries to drop in deeply and reflect on their year. If you’d like a session, please just email me at thisisreichou@gmail.com

I’ve also hosted hundreds of intentional spaces for everyone from NASA to BMW Foundation so if you’ like to talk about how to craft powerful, intentional spaces for leadership and growth, get in touch!