Shaping the Year

Most people start their end-of-the-year wrap-up with a year in review and go down memory lane of all the things that have already transpired. But Flaunt Your Fire is all about doing things a little bit differently.

Erica Courdae joins India to dig into some of the things that happened in 2021, but more importantly, to envision how those things are shaping their decisions, opinions and who they are going forward into 2022.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

• How easing back into work after a break benefits you, your brand, and your clients

• Erica and India reflect on how they showed up in 2021 and what changes they’re making for 2022

• How unlearning urgency around opportunities allows you to say yes to what matters

Easing Back Into Work

On the Flaunt Your Fire podcast, Erica Courdae says that while it’s easy to get focused on resolutions and goals for the new year and “coming in hot” on January 1, giving herself more time off over the holidays and allowing herself to slowly segue back into work has made a big difference in her energy beginning a new year.

India says she has also had to learn to ease herself back into working after her holiday break, especially for things like client calls and interviews.

“It’s always a little more challenging,” she says to feel like her full time and attention can be focused on those kinds of interactions when she is still adjusting to being back at work.

Erica adds that she is in the process of unpacking the ideals of urgency and productivity that she was instilled with and “deprogramming that from a sense of not only am I not going to do this, but I won’t do it because that’s not setting myself up for success, because that’s not the type of energy I want to come into a brand new year with.”

India agrees that she doesn’t want to bring the culture around urgency that she learned in prior work environments into “the world that I’m consciously creating myself.”

She poses the question to people in leadership roles at their businesses, “are you creating a culture where you’re hitting people over the head as soon as they come back in with…the reasons why they felt like they needed a vacation in the first place?”

Easing back into work can also benefit your branding and visibility efforts, because you’re more likely to be able to pull on your core messages effectively when you’ve had some more time to acclimate and bring work to top of mind.

Showing Up in 2022

Reflecting on 2021, Erica says that the last year was an extension of the urgency from 2020. “A lot of that visibility was still supporting people in where they were with that, with how they saw me, how they processed me.”

Over the course of the year, she says, some people made it clear that Ddiversity, Eequity and Iinclusion weren’t important to them unless there was an urgent reason for it to be, but others did stay the course.

For those that recognize that DEI is in how you do all things, the conversation is shifting to “not just addressing what is the urgent thing at this moment that some people have decided they need to address, but how can we be more prepared before there’s a fire raging?”

She continues, “I want to be able to talk about what allyship is and who really needs it, who benefits from it and what it is to be an imperfect ally and…how imperfect allyship is important and necessary beyond the good white women that needed to feel as though they were able to do it during a Black Lives Matter movement and moment.”

India says she’s noticed some shifts in how Erica is showing up visually, and that her images are lighter and less serious.

Erica responds that she feels like “there’s a little more space for me to be able to bring my personality forward because there’s not the weight and the pressure that June of 2020 and those six to twelve months afterwards where…there wasn’t the same type of permission for levity and being able to be a little more here…I don’t want to show up as somebody else.”

India adds that her own visibility and online presence has changed over the course of the last two years, where prior to 2021 she had a more rigid structure around it, but in 2022 she’s giving herself “even more grace to continue to experiment with that visibility.”

She says she’s looking forward to working with photography and photographers again and “easing back into letting some that come back in a more experimental and more fun and very lighthearted and kind of playful way that shows more of who I am.”

She also wants to continue more of what visibility has evolved into through the course of the pandemic, by spending more time in smaller groups and with speaking engagements where she can “go much deeper with people in a way thatn you can’t in just a social post with a caption.”

Saying No So You Can Say Yes

In 2021, India says she learned to listen more to her intuition and her gut responses and that has fundamentally contributed to everything she accomplished this year.

“I don’t know if the same level of accomplishments that I’ve had in this year would have been possible if I didn’t check in with myself and say, is this going in the direction that I want to be remembered for? Is this going in the direction of the impact that I want to have in the world?”

She also says she learned not to allow fear or worry that the opportunities might not be there tomorrow to stop her from saying no to things, so that she could say yes to things that truly matter to her.

“One of the things that really showed up for me last year, that I am carrying forward, period, not just into 2022, is recognizing that pacing myself with things like that and saying, I'm going to say yes to maybe even a little bit less, but it's so that I can be fully present and I can give it my all and I can be proud of what was created when I do say yes has been where it's at instead of just doing the quantity thing.”

For Erica, 2021 was a year of shifting and evolving what the concept of an accomplishment is.

“I know that last year part of it was acknowledging like, hey, I'm not saying yes to everything. Hey, I'm not going to allow urgency to dictate what I do and don't do, and not be able to in any way, shape or form control how that then impacts me mentally, physically, emotionally, spiritually.”

Her intention in 2022 and beyond is to allow the question of what accomplishments are possible to remain open. “I want to allow that to always be something that can exceed any current expectations or thoughts that I have about it…I don’t ever want to think that the influence that I could have or what I can achieve is only limited to what I am aware of in this present moment.”

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