The biggest lesson I learned in 2021

Hi all, NY is coming, and all of us start doing retro. So do I. I do this in the form of lessons, and you can see those for 2021 and 2020.

This year I wanted to have 11 lessons or so, but then, after the analysis for the whole year I understood that there is only one basic lesson for me.

Photo by Pierpaolo Riondato on Unsplash

I did some cardinal changes to my life — aka finished an amazing career in top Ukrainian companies, god a voluntary vacation break for half a year, traveled to Peru and run a marathon and also let a guy enter my life and met tons of new people. All of this was of course hard, sometimes breathtaking, sometimes interesting, and sometimes heavy to process mentally. This year I was a lot of an observer — I looked after people’s lives, their emotions, and hardships and tried to understand myself. I went through my experiences and also tried to understand who am I. And I understood one thing — the biggest gift you can give yourself and others is to

KNOW YOURSELF. BE SELF-AWARE.

Here are two sides of this process for me:

1. During my life events: travel, work, projects, etc. I started to understand who am I — which risk is ok for me, where are my boundaries, what does great in different spheres of life mean for me what is bad and how I react. What are my cycles and why it is better to sleep for me 8+ hours? Knowing myself allows me to predict myself and build systems and tools which support my activities in the best way. Also, this is a long path to understandable decisions, and logical for me. So I don`t have an internal conflict on what I am doing (still, I am learning, but this year it is far better).
2. As a person in society — when you know your boundaries and principles, where you are going, what is valuable for you — you know how to build and not to build relationships with others. Or at least, you know why you are building those relationships and how they define you. You can set up your boundaries and let others know about them. You act according to your principles, you feel better in this world. I checked this.

Also, one crucial moment — knowing yourself is not a stable result as we all change. This is a long process, and we are the key stakeholders in it.

Happy new 2022 year, all.

Know yourself!

Oksana