The three key lessons I take away from 2020
By: The Tales Of A Proud Misfit Roxane Régnier
Tags: Female Entrepreneurship, Autocoaching, Self Coaching, Female Entrepreneurs, Coaching

I’ve always been attracted to very different types of interests and for long I thought I had to choose one on top of the others. I thought I needed to choose between developing my artistic and intuitive side (I love DIY projects and weird stuff such as tarot divination and synchronicity theories for example) and my pragmatic, excellence-driven and entrepreneurial side. Yet nothing great came out of that feeling of having to make a decision. One of my big mistake was to think I had to put a label on myself and pick one direction. Well, choosing one part of yourself while forgetting the others is called self-censorship and I decided in 2020 that I would stop this bad habit.

Yes, 2020 will be the year I’m going to learn tarot divination AND talk to investors about startup funding.

After 10+ years of self-censorship, I decided to embrace my singularity and to consider myself as a “proud Misfit”: I don’t belong to some labeled box, I just don’t fit in any of them and that’s OK. I launched Misfit as a company to tackle the ‘female self-censorship syndrom’ in the professional environment and these Medium posts will be the way to address it on a more personal level.

Do you feel you’re self-censoring right now?

Then just keep reading ;)

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I don’t know about you, but 2020 was quite a year for me, both professionally and personally.

In January 2020, I was planning on launching a company with a good friend, moving to the next step with my boyfriend, and having a normal life like everyone else, I guess.

Well, things didn’t go quite as expected as I ended up launching a company on my own in the middle of a crazy lockdown time, and finishing 2020 getting dumped by my boyfriend on the day of my grandfather’s death. Never had I expected that I would finish 2020 that way, nor did I wish any second things to happen this way, and yet I have never felt so alive and aligned with my true self.

As this year was also for me the year I mastered the art of coaching, I now truly understand the importance of self-reflection, self-questioning, and journaling. I will now share with you the three major lessons I learned this year that truly made me grow.

Lesson 1: Self-confidence is about believing that you have the resources to deal with uncertainty

I had never felt very confident in my life even though people around me never saw me as a person with low confidence. It took me years to realize that I would be able to launch a company and months to come to the conclusion I was able to do it on my own. Even though everyone would see an entrepreneur in my personality, I was unable to see it. Even when I was coaching entrepreneurs in building startups and that the participants themselves were telling me “Roxane, you should be the one starting your company”, I didn’t feel capable of doing it.

Well, this year was the year I understood what confidence actually means.

In my world, self-confidence meant feeling competent so I was overpreparing for everything! I used to study and prepare a lot before the exams, job interviews, meetings, public speaking, etc. I was feeling so uncomfortable about the uncertainty that I wanted to plan everything in order to keep it under my control.

That’s where 2020 told me: “My dear, things can’t be planned, so just stop being a control freak once and for all!”

I hadn’t planned that on a winter trip I would have to help one young entrepreneur escape death, that the friend I thought would be my business partner would tell me he didn’t want to start a company with me, and that my boyfriend would dump me the day of on my grandfather’s death a few months ago.

2020: “Do you trust me now when I tell you that things can’t be planned and be kept perfectly under control?” Me: ”I hate to tell you that 2020, but you destroyed one of the most comfortable beliefs I had!”

So I had to let go of the very comfortable feeling of overpreparation that I liked so much. We have to admit that in 2020, the actions of anticipating, planning, and controlling were outdated. So welcome to the actions of adapting and reacting!

When you’re confronted with this kind of unexpected situation, the only thing you can do is looking for internal resources to find the strengths to adapt and react. This is not something you will find in overwork nor preparation. In fact, it has been proven that in very stressful or emotional situations your memory and brain don’t work properly.

So what’s left?

There is intuition, this second mode of your brain that works unconsciously, but also courage, determination, integrity, honesty, openness, charisma, resilience, intelligence, etc.

Well, self-confidence is exactly that feeling of knowing that in case of a failure or an unprecedented catastrophic event, you’ll find these resources in yourself to get you out of the crazy situation if things go the opposite way of what you had planned.

With the same logic, this year also increased my confidence in humanity. I realized that we’re all way more capable than we think about reacting and adapting and that was a relief to me. Early March we could see that a few billion people were capable of living completely differently from one day to the other if needed. Nobody believed they could enjoy some time not going out, not having drinks, not traveling, and yet we did it.

Lesson 2: Most of our desires are triggered by our fears

Our homo sapiens brain isn’t very complicated: it tries to protect us at all time. When I had always known that our perception of reality is subject to a lot of cognitive biases and other limiting beliefs, I had never realized the impact of fears. We know it’s impossible to have 100% pure lucid thinking but the problem is that fears can mix with your true desires and completely fuck it up.

As our brain wants to put us in the most secure environment possible, it might create desires for what I will call from now on ‘shields’.

What is a ‘shield’?

It’s something you want only or in part because your vicious over-protecting mind decided it would be the perfect thing to protect you from some danger.

It can be:

A diploma: you think it will protect you from getting rejected at job interviews

A partner: you think it will protect you from not dying alone on your sofa

A job: you think it will protect you from being judged by society

Being the popular person in the group: you think it will protect you from not being rejected

3000€ net salary: you think it will protect you from not being sad

Getting married: you think it will protect you from not dying alone (we know that things are way more complicated than that!)

For instance, I always wanted to have a business partner to start a company mostly because I felt it would protect me from failing. This is not the only reason I wanted to have a business partner, but I truly thought that if I had to do it alone I would fail. And that’s definitely not a good reason to look for a business partner!

When we were working together I was proudly telling people “I have a business partner” and it made me feel good and legitimate because at least someone was believing in me to start a company. But I was making a big mistake: I was spending energy on looking for this confidence externally rather than internally.

The problem when you’re looking for ‘shields’ is that you can lose them and you can end up naked in the middle of a battlefield. This is how I ended up devastated when I realized I had to do it on my own.

Then I managed to come to the conclusion that I wouldn’t want a business partner to compensate for my fears. In the end, this event allowed me to make Misfit a 100% women-focused business, feel more legitimate while doing it, and make me realize I’m able to do it on my own like a grown-up. On top of that, this potential partner is now one of my best friends.

To bring the ‘shields’ of your life to consciousness, you can ask yourself these questions:

“Why do I want this so bad?” “What am I trying to protect myself from?” “How will this impact my life?”

We should look for making ourselves out of iron instead of looking for shields that can disappear easily.

Lesson n°3: We should think more about the day of our funeral

I learned this one only a few months ago when I lost my grandfather. He was an amazing person and he had the tribute he deserved. And as I was there the whole day, as I overthink everything way too much, I couldn’t help but think:

“What would my funeral look like?”

I know this is super gloomy, but this is an efficient one. A funeral offers many different components that are worth your attention: who would you like to be there, what will people say about your life and the person you were? Dozens of studies have shown that before their death people say they regret a lot of things, and I don’t know about you, but regrets are something that I specifically don’t want to have.

Let’s have a look at the first one:

Who would you like to be there?

Who will pay a tribute to the amazing person you were?

If you are doubting about the persons you spend most of your time with at the moment, ask yourself: “Is this person the appropriate person to relate all the incredible things I’ve done in my life?” “Is he/she a person who deeply understands me and fully accepts who I am?”

Everyone deserves to be with people who make them shine and who understand their true value.

Now, let’s have a look at the second part: what should they say about you and your life? When I asked myself this question I confirmed that I wanted to spend my life inspiring and empowering people around me. I also want to give life to ambitious projects and make things happen. The good thing is that I consider I’m on the good path, this is for sure one of the reasons I still feel very grateful after this year.

This exercise of thought is so powerful that I often give it to my coachees (actually in the official version you’re not at your funeral but at your 80’s birthday, anyway the result is the same): it helps you take a step back and project yourself in the future in a glimpse.

If you feel like you’re not on the right track, this exercise can help you make decisions to refocus on what is really important for you.

I hope you liked me sharing my 2020 lessons, now I would be very curious to know about yours!

If you feel like to, please share with me by sending me an email at roxane@joinmisfit.com ;)

Bonus to those who read until the end: a good song to start 2021!

A House In The Trees — Summertime

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