How To Recap Your Year

Welcome to the Man Talk Show. I'm Connor Beaton and this midweek mini episode, this end of the year episode is brought to you by nature.

So that was a pretty bad dad joke. But I'm basically, I'm sitting outside right now and I wanted to bring this last episode of the year to you out in nature. And so I'm sitting outside so you might hear some birds. I apologize in advance for maybe the lack of audio quality, but you get to hear some calming nature. So we're going to do a couple things today on this episode. One, I'm going to read a poem to you by Rudyard Kipling that I really like and feel like it sort of encapsules what we need right now, what we as men need right now, what we as human beings need right now. And then I'm going to talk a little bit about recapping your year and what you can do or how you can approach.

Finalizing this year. And so if you're looking for a tool and a resource, definitely check out the Shadow Work Guide. It's on my website. You can also go to Man Talks on Instagram and download the free Shadow Work Journal. I created it just for you. It's a lot of people, a few thousand people actually have already picked it up. And so it might be a good tool for you to just find a deeper level of self discovery while you end off this year. So let's get into the poem. The poem is called if by Rudyard Kipling.

If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowances for their doubting too. If you can wait and not be tired by waiting or being lied about, don't deal in lies or being hated, don't give way to hating and yet don't look too good nor talk too wise.

If you can dream and not make dreams your master. If you can think and not make thoughts your aim. If you can meet triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, or watch the things you gave your life to broken and stoop and build them up with worn out tools.

If you can make one heap of all your winnings and risk it on one turn of pitch and toss and lose and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss.

If you force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone. And so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them, hold on.

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue or walk with kings, nor lose the common touch if neither foes nor living friends can hurt you if all men count with you, but none too much if you can fill the unforgiving minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run yours is the earth and everything that's in it. And which is more, you'll be a man, my son.

So I love this poem for many reasons, because in many ways, it's sort of a father figure almost giving sage advice or wise advice to a son. And as some of you may know, you may have seen, I'm having a child in 2021, Vienna and I are pregnant. And so I had a friend send this to me the other day, and it really hit home. I felt like it was quite poignant, but there's many pieces to it. There's many pieces. It's really. I love this poem because it's. It's really calling us and reminding us about finding a deeper sense of balance in times of chaos, of not being pulled into disaster, of being okay with failure, of not getting so attached to our dreams that. That they become our master. I love that idea because for many of us, when we dream, we sort of become enslaved to them, and we can get lost in just daydreaming and fantasizing about what life will look like when we accomplish whatever or get into the relationship. And I think for many of us, this year, 2020 has brought a tremendous amount of challenge in many fronts. But one of them has been the grief that we have experienced for the dreams that we had of what this year was going to bring, trips that we were going to take, relationships that we were going to start that maybe became rocky, dreams of work and businesses that maybe have been put on hold. And so for many of us, this year has brought a tremendous amount of challenge. But this poem is just a potent reminder to allow us to move back into the existence and the space of being present with both sides. And this is what I wanted to talk about as you wrap up this year. My main question for you that I would like for you to journal on is twofold. One, how did I hold Paradox this year? How did I hold? How did I experience? What was my relationship to Paradox? Because for some of us. For many of us, this year maybe brought new expansive spiritual experiences, emotional experiences, relational experiences. Maybe our businesses grew, but it came in the face of dealing with grief, dealing with loss, dealing with having things taken away from us. And so in many ways, we are facing paradox. So explore what your relationship to paradox was this year, because in many ways, that is what is going to be required of you in the coming months. So outside of that question, what I also would like for you to explore is wrapping up a little bit about your year. What did 2020 bring you so you can just do some writing around? What challenges did I face this year that I'm proud of? What victories did I achieve that I would like to celebrate? And what experiences did I have that I would like to remember that I would like to learn more deeply from? So exploring those three pieces and then at the. At the. The last piece, I want to just share. I want to just share a little reminder for everybody that's out there that is wrapping up this year to not only investigate and look at your relationship to paradox, to not only look at your wins and your challenges and your victories, but to look more deeply at how you as an individual grew, how you as an individual expanded. How did you meet the chaos that 2020 brought? Did you meet that chaos with fear? Did you allow yourself to get sucked into countless conversations or battles online? Or did you meet that chaos with a sense of stability and grounding? Did you do what you needed to do in order to tend to your own sense of inner calm, your sense of. Own inner peace in the face of what arguably has been the single most chaotic year that we, as the human race has experienced since maybe the World War, since World War II ended. So how did you face that? How did you face the chaos of this year? I think that is worth writing down because it's in that space that we will discover how we face change. How we normally deal with chaos. Right. This year amplified a few things. Number one, it amplified our relationship to chaos. So our individual relationship to chaos. So for some of us, that chaos comes up externally, we see it online, we see it in the news, and it produces an immense amount of panic or anxiety within us. For others, we're fine. We're able to maintain our habits and our rituals that keep. Keep us grounded, that keep us centered, that maintain our direction and our course in life. And for others, we need a little bit more support. So explore your relationship to chaos this year. And lastly, what did you discover about your relationship to fear? 2020 doused our consciousness with a inordinate amount of fear and panic and terror. And for many people, this was the really big challenge. So this year was, in some ways, a sort of amplification of how we all deal with fear. Do we allow ourselves to crumble? Do we allow ourselves to fear monger and perpetuate that and perpetuate that fear through our social media channels and perpetuate that, that fear in our conversations with our family and in our thoughts before we go to bed? Or are we able to navigate and sit in the seat of awareness and presence and peace in the face of all of that fear? So my final question for you, that I would like for you to explore either through some journaling or in a meditation or maybe even in just a voice memo, is to explore what was my relationship with fear in 2020? What was my relationship with fear this year? And then some follow up questions are what fear taught me this year are. And maybe you can just answer along with this, what fear taught me this year is sorry, should probably get that grammatically correct. So what fear taught me this year is in 2021, how I will action that lesson is. And if I could allow myself to be more grounded in the face of fear, I would need to. If I could allow myself to be more grounded in the face of fear, I would need to. So this is just a reminder for you to look at how to prioritize the things that are going to set you up for success. Many people are going to try and preach, you know, new New Year's resolutions, which, I mean, don't work for the majority of people. A lot of people are going to, you know, really try and start new habits in the beginning of January. But what I would really invite you to do is to cultivate a deeper sense of awareness of how you, as an individual, as a man or as a woman, face fear and chaos. Because it is this relationship. Knowing this relationship is in some ways a deeper key to liberation and is a deeper access point to our inner sense of salvation and peace and grounding and love and self leadership and self regulation. Because for most of us, we have walked through life not truly knowing what our relationship to fear and chaos are, because when they arise, we are swept away by them. And 2020 was the year of fear and chaos. And for some of us, we may have spent months getting swept away by the current of chaos and fear and anxiety. And so to better understand our relationship with those things and to come back to the practices, the rituals, the routines, the disciplines, the habits that we actually know bring us back into a seat of presence, of grounding, of awareness, of peace, of joy, of connection, of intimacy. This is the direction that we want to shift our consciousness. This is the direction that we want to aim our mind's eye, that we want to sort of fix our inner compass towards. Because life will always be chaotic and it will always have a certain quality of fear in it if we let it. And so to develop a deeper awareness of our relationship to fear and chaos and to understand how we maybe be. We might be attached or meshed with it in some areas of our life and the people that are in our life that maybe we get caught up with and we, we get stuck in that fear trap. I'm sure that we all experienced that this year. We were having conversations with people and all of a sudden, you know, you're, you're down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and fear mongering and you can feel your body just tensing up and, you know, the, the inner desire to go and have a drink or smoke a joint or, you know, tune out and watch Netflix or have a cheeseburger, smash popcorn in your face suddenly gets exponentially higher. And so these coping mechanisms and the people that surround us that sort of spew this fear, we need to be aware of and we need to make sure that we are cultivating the rituals and the routines to develop a better connection with our sense of inner strength and inner leadership and inner resolve. And last but not least, our sense of self regulation. This is one of the most potent tools that we have in our arsenal, is the tool of regulation. And so for 2021, I hope that you join me in embarking on the journey of developing a deeper connection to self regulation and self leadership, because that is my mission for 2021. So thank you so much for being a part of this podcast. Thank you so much for tuning in to my show, being a part of my platform. Please share this message, send it to somebody that you think will benefit from diving into these questions and hearing this content. If you want to share, please do tag me man talks on Instagram and I will see all of you. I will hear from all of you, hopefully in 2021. So be well. Finish off your year strong. Maintain your routines, your habits, continue your disciplines, and continue to come back to a sense of deep self regulation, self trust and self connection. Be well.