1) Make your bed. But get out of it first. Admiral William H. McCraven delivered a famous commencement address to the University of Texas-Austin in 2014, in which he outlines 10 lessons he learned in SEAL training (https://news.utexas.edu/2014/05/16/mcraven-urges-graduates-to-find-courage-to-change-the-world/). The first was “If you want to change the world, start off by making your bed.” Great advice; however, I need to add, “but get out of it first” because that was the harder part of the equation for me this year. I suffer from depression, and there were many days when I simply didn’t want to, nor did I feel the strength to, get out of bed. But here’s what I’ve learned. Probably 80% of the time, if I got up and did one small thing, like take a shower, or go into my office, the depression lifted, even if just a bit. But for the other 20% of the time, there was another lesson.

2) Give yourself grace if you’re in a bad place. I am a high-achieving perfectionist, and I wore that identity as a badge of honor for years. To live up to my own flawless standards, I’ve always pushed myself hard. Really hard. If I struggled, I pushed myself harder. I’ve always believed that if I let up on the pressure, I would just slack off and spend the next year on the couch eating truffles or never get out of bed, ever. I’m learning, albeit slowly, that there’s no honor in believing you need to be perfect, and no honor in baseball-batting yourself when you’re struggling. When you choose grace, find your gentle voice and tell yourself it’s okay to be where you are, your body and mind relax too, and that allows healing. As my yoga teacher said the other day: “We cannot shame ourselves into change, we can only love ourselves into evolution.”  

3) Find what moves you and move. I’m talking about what puts you in flow – that state identified by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in which you are completely absorbed in a task. I’d been feeling a bit stuck this year, and in looking for ways to enhance my leadership skills, I discovered a leadership course offered by Yale. So I signed up, immersed myself, learned so much, and felt a sense of accomplishment I haven’t felt for a long time. I felt in flow. After completing that course, I completed a second one. I’ve always had an intense need to learn, which is one reason I’m an avid reader, and these university-level courses sparked that passion in me again.

4) Trauma can trigger powerful actions. I will do anything to protect my friends, colleagues and family – from people who want to take advantage of them, people who are bullies, situations that are unfair. I’ve always jokingly referred to this as my “Mother Hen” instinct. But it goes way, way deeper than that. I realize I’m so fervent about protecting the people I care about is because no one protected me from school bullies as a child and teenager, and I had no way to protect myself. That realization led to another one: the people I’m so passionate about protecting now are adults and don’t necessarily require the level of protection I needed all those years ago. These insights helped me ease off the control pedal, release some angst and find some peace.

5) Don’t believe everything you think. Perhaps my most powerful insight of all. We have over 60,000 thoughts a day, and 90% of them are repetitive – generally worries, fears, what-ifs, old grievances, and so on. I can get myself in a panicked state within 20 seconds of wakening, thanks to my brain’s creative scare-mongering. But, at least for me, 99% of these thoughts simply aren’t true. So I’ve started calling them out as intruders. If you watched Star Trek at all, you’ll remember the disembodied voice saying “Intruder alert, intruder alert!” anytime some unwelcome alien got on the Enterprise. This does a couple things: It separates us from our thoughts and it helps us recognize the “fake news” our brain tries to pass off as truth.

What are your biggest insights from 2024? And how can you use those learnings to make your life more joyful, peaceful and fulfilling in 2025? Share your thoughts in a comment.