2020 gave us a chance to get to know ourselves: Here’s why you should keep it up in 2021

One of the only bright spots of this year has been the time the pandemic gave us to reflect on our lives, to get in tune with our mind and our emotions. Niamh Ennis believes this connection is a vital tool to hone in 2021.

Each year, new words move up the ranking dependent on their usage and popularity. I think we can all guess what the contender for 2020 are: unprecedented, pandemic, lockdown, vaccine, and let’s not forget sourdough or banana bread either.

Yet for me, there is really only one winner to emerge from the past 10 months and that’s connection.

Everything that has happened since March 12 has led us either towards or away from, connection. We can never deny that events of this past year have changed us all.

One of the main benefits to an otherwise difficult year has been that we were forced to step off the treadmill of our day-to-day lives. All the things we had to do and the choices we needed to make were removed.

We were asked to do everything we could from our homes, we were asked to slow down. And in slowing down, we began to find a connection in ourselves. We tracked our moods more closely, felt the dips and highs of this rollercoaster year much more astutely.

More accurately, this has been a reconnection with ourselves. As children, we were incredibly connected within ourselves. At that stage of our lives, we weren’t yet exposed to the perils of over-thinking things.

How often do you find yourself over-analysing a scenario, playing out the outcome in your mind, sometimes even before it happens? We think that we’re preparing for the worst-case scenario, whereas what we’re actually doing is setting our expectations and ambitions at the lowest rung.

But when you feel connected with yourself, with your intuition and your heart, you discover that you are also focusing on what’s best for you, what feels best for you.

When you feel better in yourself you are more prone to embracing change, to wanting to live a better life, as you feel more confident that you don’t just deserve it, but you are worthy of it. The links between your self-belief, your confidence and your connection to yourself are extremely strong.

This connection gives you the permission you need to be entirely faithful to yourself, to who you are and to what you believe to be true.

What can you do to connect more to yourself?

2020 gifted us the first step in establishing this connection – demanding us to slow down. But now as we move towards a new year, how do we maintain and improve this relationship?

From a practical perspective, the easiest way you can access that is to introduce a daily practice that will allow for this to happen. Bear in mind that different activities will resonate with you differently but start with one or two from the following list…journaling, meditating, yoga, breathwork, visualisation, intention setting, gratitude lists, being outdoors in silence, affirmations, music or some creative activity.

Even if all you have is 10 minutes each day, beginning to introduce a daily practise will really help slow you down and connect with yourself. I must admit that I struggled with this at the start. As a ‘doer’, I resisted doing this because it felt, dare I say it, a little self-indulgent. But when I did open my mind to the possible benefits, it genuinely changed everything for me.

Introducing my own daily practice marked the time in my life when I decided I needed to change everything (and I do mean everything) and made way for real transformation to occur.

Remember there is no Wi-Fi in the forest amongst the trees or overlooking the ocean, but you may find a better connection there.

Niamh Ennis is Ireland’s leading Change & Transformation Specialist. If you want to reconnect with yourself and uncover your true purpose then Niamh is hosting a deeply nourishing online workshop Release & Receive for €11 on January 11, 2021. This unique event will assist you in letting go of all that didn’t nourish you in 2020 so that you can welcome in all that inspires you in 2021. To secure your space click here. 

Featured image: Vince Fleming on Unsplash

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