How to survive this Christmas without calling in the Feds.
A not-trifling technique to save your seasonal sanity
Quick note before the main post…..I’m launching a little New Year Special… called Breakthrough 2025 - Your Year to Thrive, two empower hour coaching sessions plus a copy of my book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter. All the details are below but it is the perfect gift for yourself or a loved woman in your life, to start the year on track.
You’d better watch out, you’d better not cry (because actually you have to just keep going)
You’d better not pout, I’m telling you why (because no-one cares and you are responsible for everything and everyone)
Santa Claus is coming town (No it’s you. It’s always you. You have to do everything)
The festive frenzy is upon us (why does it always come at the end of a long year, rather than after a warm, rejuvenating holiday?)
I love Christmas. I love the rituals, the excitement, the gatherings and connections. And, like many or most of you, I’m absolutely exhausted. My brain can feel like a shaken-up snow globe, a blizzard of thoughts and To-Do lists swirling around my busy brain.
Added to that, it’s a time full of nostalgia and memories, which make me weepy. I miss my mum. This weekend I’ll be cooking and prepping for the Christmas family feasts and I will be using her recipe book, reaching for the phone to ask her whether I can use white sugar instead of brown before remembering she is gone. I’ll be catching myself every time I walk past one of her multiple Christmas decorations she brought me over the years, being the only person more obsessed with Christmas than me. She’s been missing in action for years now and I am still missing her. For most of us there is at least one ghost of Christmases past haunting our snowy shadows.
For some too, there will be change. I was in a taxi last night coming home from an event, and the driver was telling me he separated this year and will be spending Christmas Day alone once he’s been to see his kids. I tried to encourage him to still make it special, to make it matter, even for himself. At the event I was at there were conversations around divorced Christmases, alone Christmases, complicated Christmases, and messy Christmases.
And that’s as it should be. It’s the life we lead. It is rarely a straight line, and our goal is not to have a happy pitch perfect life all of the time, but be able to experience ups and downs, and curves and straights, and love and loss, and peaks and troughs while staying connected to ourselves.
So, as anyone who has worked with me knows, my favourite advice when the going gets tough, your snow globe of a life has got shaken up, or it’s just a busy, complicated time is to remember: When life feels hard, it’s usually because it is hard, so now ask yourself, what do you need to support yourself through it?
I hope over this year I have given you lots of food for thought and tips and tricks to do just that as you wade through this messy, magnificent, extended and redefined midlife staying connected to yourself.
And here is another little tip to keep you seasonally sane, Christmassy calm and dazzled not frazzled. It’s one of my favourite coaching tools and my own personal life raft.
It’s C.I.A.
No, you’re not calling in the Feds. This is such a simple little technique, I literally use it in my head all the time, all year.
It’s easy to think we have to control everything to make ourselves happy. The opposite is the case. The number of clients who are trying to hold their life together by trying to control everything means all their energy (or a lot of it) is invested in things they simply can’t control. Once they start letting go of that madness, their lives improve dramatically.
I know the less I try to control, the happier I am. People, especially! Best bit of advice I ever got from my family therapist, is to meet someone where they are, not where I need them to be. Game-changer. It was about my kids at the time, but I apply it to my ex-husband, my dad, and certain others. The relief of not being responsible for who they are and how they behave!
So what can you really control? Very little actually. You can’t control other people’s behaviours or thoughts. You can’t control external events. You can’t control the weather. Really all you have that you can truly control are your responses, your behaviour, your actions and where you invest your mental, physical, and emotional energy. You can’t control if your teenager likes Brussel sprouts regardless of how you tried to dress them up in a bacon Christmassy recipe. You can’t control your father’s 30 year old bad mood. You can’t control your partner’s inability to find an imaginative way to surprise you with the perfect gift.
Yet I’m sure, you can often focus a lot of energy on trying to change things and people you can’t.
So CIA
Always ask – what can I Control, what can I Influence, and what do I have to Accept? You don’t have to like what you have to accept, but the faster you accept the reality (not the frustrating land of ‘if only…. ‘) the faster you get back to a place of power.
So rather than encourage you to drop your perfectionist standards (which I’m a firm believer in - being happy and present with family is FAR more important than a perfect dinner) think about CIA and let go.
I am always grateful I went into recovery for the perfectionism that was killing me… that doesn’t mean everything is shit, it means I prioritise what’s important and do good enough - or delegate - with everything else.
I’ll be spending this weekend cooking for the 10 adults I’ll be entertaining and feeding over xmas. I’m happy to make the soups and the Christmas Eve chocolate log and even some boozy chutney. I’ll order my turkey and plan all the trimmings. Because with those things, my standards are met with enthusiasm. But what I can control is choosing not to be held to some fake or external standards that threaten my sanity. So on the busy Christmas Day itself, I don’t need the stress and hassle of making lumpy free gravy. I can be great at so many things, but glupe-free gravy seems to be my nemesis. So I buy the turkey gravy from M&S and get on with enjoying my family and dinner. The relief the first year I did that!!!
What can you influence? You can set boundaries and expectations around help and support, you can set your intention to enjoy rather than stress (remember you have no control over who enjoys the day). You can plan and delegate but that’s all you can do.
Now the biggie. What do you need to accept? That it may not all go according to plan? That there night be family friction? That you might feel sad, happy, frazzled, feisty, loving and hateful all in one morning? That’s ok. You are a human.
Women have a feeling (like jealously, resentment, anger, frustration), and rather than look at that feeling like a child who needs to be nurtured through a tantrum, we add a big juicy slice of judgement to it, thus weighing ourselves down even more (by refusing to accept the perfect Christmas is a Disney movie not a reality, and the moistness of your turkey is not actually an indication of your value).
Yet we have feelings:
Guilt at being a bad mum because we do everything for everyone but no-one greets us with a smile and we feel resentful.
Guilt at not looking fabulously fit and flirty all of the time because that’s what’s expected of us, even though we feel fat and frumpy. And tired.
Guilt at being a failure because we aren’t Duracell bunnies and only have a finite daily energy that seems to go on everything else… the stuff that desperately needs to be done but isn’t deemed important or worthy of thanks.
Guilt that Christmas doesn’t look like it is supposed to.
So let’s shove that shit up the proverbial turkey and CIA ourselves this Christmas.
And remember, there is no perfect Christmas, only your Christmas. So make it work for you.
And until 31st December, you can book my New Year Special (or gift it to a pal or sister) but the sessions can be taken any time before or after the new year. Breakthrough 2025 - Your Year to Thrive, is a package of two empower hour coaching sessions plus a copy of my book Midlife, redefined: Better, Bolder, Brighter for just €250. (Normally one breakthrough Clarity Coaching session is €150). If you’re feeling stuck, need a change or want to get a grip on your life, this will give you the space, guidance and focus to make sure next year is YOUR year. As always, my paid subscribers get a 10% discount.. just email me at alana@alanakirk.com.
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Do you need an Empower Hour?? If you’d like to take a moment to check in on your life to see how you can manage things differently or stop ghosting yourself, you can book a one hour 1:1 Clarity Coaching Session with me where you get to think about you, how to manage this life you are living, and invest some time and thought on you. Radical idea that, is it? To invest some time and thought on you? Details are here.
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