2020: My Year in Summary
2020. What a year! This year has potentially (and hopefully) been the hardest year in my lifetime. For 9 months of the year the UK has been in some form of lockdown or under restrictions for social gatherings due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite all this massive negative event there were many positive things that came out of this year and I will be discussing them as well as some other negative things in this post.
💼 Work
At the beginning of the year I found out that I was being nominated by my company for an industry award at the Festival Supplier Awards. I was nominated for the "Unsung Hero" award thanks to my work in the previous years. I really wasn't expecting to be nominated for an award. I knew work were happy with what I was doing but I didn't realise quite how much they appreciated what I did. Around a similar time I was also offered a promotion moving from "Hire Assistant" to "Asset Manager" meaning I got to spend more time working on our database and inventory book as well as finding new ways of doing things within the company that could improve our everyday working. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the lockdowns that came from it I didn't get as much time as I would have wanted to really dig my teeth into the role this year but as I'm writing this (December 2020) I feel like I'm now really moving into the role and finding my role within the company. Work is incredibly important to me and is something that I would say heavily influences my personality so to have these two things go well this year for me was a massive thing.
Unfortunately the good news didn't stay for too long since the lockdown measures brought in by the UK government meant that live events were for all intents and purposes cancelled for the foreseeable future. This meant that our workload went from what should have been a record breaking year for the company to being one of the quietest, if not the quietest, in the company's history. Due to the amount of money lost from events not happening there were some redundancies made within the company but fortunately for me I managed to keep my job. We restarted work in mid-November after being given some money from the culture recovery grant otherwise I think my job may not have been safe even after the first round of redundancies. I'm looking forward to 2021 and really hope that live events come back soon mainly to help me and the company I work for but also for the general morale of the country.
🔄 Hitting Reset
The self isolation/lockdown enforced by the UK Government gave me a really rare chance to stop and evaluate my life and all the things I do. After looking back at the last few years I realised that I hadn't really stopped for a couple of years. A lot of the time my life seems to happen at light speed all around me. I go to work and then most evenings I go home for about an hour before going out again with weekends full of other activities. In the summer when my work gets particularly busy I can very easily spend single digit hours in my house in a week if you remove the hours I am sleeping. I'm not saying this to brag because I now realise quite how unhealthy that is I'm just giving context. During lockdown I wasn't able to do anything; I couldn't go to work and Scouting had moved to Zoom calls so I literally had to log on to my laptop for an hour once a week. I spent a lot of time in my house, mostly in my room either on my Xbox or my laptop.
Having all this free time allowed me to evaluate all the things I spend time doing and the priorities I have in my life. I realised that I had been doing a lot of things for a long time simply because I was in the rhythm of doing it, almost like a habit, and had other things that I wanted to try out to see if I liked it or not. I started doing a lot more exercise than I had in the past; I was going for a run everyday and cooking healthy meals for myself in an effort to feel a bit fitter than I was. This didn't last for more than a month but even now 5 months later I'm still feeling the benefit when I go and play football.
The Chris Mear Brand
The main change that came during the lockdown period was this blog/website and thinking about myself as a "brand". I have thought about starting my own website for a while in fact I had a domain name a couple of years back but never actually did anything with it. After hearing Ali Abdaal talk about his idea that "everyone should start a blog" I looked into it a bit further and found a video from Nat Eliason that explained, in very simple terms, how to get started so I took the plunge. I immediately found myself completely encompassed by the experience and spent much of my waking days thinking about what I wanted to post, what I wanted the site to look like and what I wanted The Chris Mear Brand to look like. I had stolen "The Chris Mear" from Chris Hau, a photographer and video creator from Canada who has the twitter and instagram handle of @TheChrisHau which really appealed to me so I changed all my social media handles to @TheChrisMear and decided that was going to be the name of my "brand". Earlier in the year I had started a photography Instagram account that was public for people to follow me and I already had a private account for following/posting to friends and family. The public account had the @TheChrisMear username so anyone could find me while my personal username remains what it has been for a long time. I changed my Twitter handle to match this and should I open any other social media accounts this is the account name I will try to use (unless anyone goes ahead and steals it from me first).
I spent about two weeks making tweaks to a template website theme on Webflow and adding some information so the site actually had some content before I had any blog posts to publish and then I was called back in to work. During my time off it was a lot of fun to work on my site because I could basically spend all day on the smallest detail and it didn't really matter too much that I wasn't doing anything else. Obviously once I was back working 0900-1730 five days a week my time was cut down by a lot and making changes to my site was less of a priority but I wanted to keep posted so I could have a clear way of saying whether I enjoyed blogging or not. So far I really enjoy it, I have been using Roam Research to write all my articles and book summaries/notes and the bi-directional linking makes it really useful for joining two ideas together and finding new ways of explaining and understanding things.
If you want more information about why I started a blog read this article.
📖 Reading
Throughout lockdown I started to read books (on a kindle). I have never really enjoyed reading and have only really found one series of books that I truly liked and ended up reading all the books from. The series is "The Glory Gardens Cricket Club" books by Bob Cattell. These were fiction books based around a local youth cricket club that I really enjoyed when I was younger. This year I moved to reading non-fiction books which has been a complete game changer for me. I realised that I much preferred 'learning' something new rather than reading a fictional story. I started with The Courage to be Disliked and Getting Things Done and have since read another 5 books with similar themes. If you'd told me a year ago that I would have read more than 2 books in one year I would have laughed in your face so this is a massive accomplishment for me and I feel so much better for reading. I have been making notes on the books I have read and feel like I have more things to add to conversations because of what I have read and the ideas that have come from the notes taken. I recommend for everyone to try out some different books to find what you like because I can guarantee there is a book out there for everyone.
For more information about what I am reading take a look at this page.
✍🏼Journalling/Note Taking
I started using Roam Research this year after becoming intrigued after seeing some threads on Twitter discussing the software and signing up. Initially I didn't really understand the benefits of it over other software like Notion but after using it for a while the connections that are made between your notes can be invaluable, particularly if you are creating content based on your experiences or books/films consumed. I have since started using Roam Research every day for general note taking and journaling and I also use it as a Personal CRM by tracking conversations, meetings and phone calls I have with people so I don't forget things down the line.
The benefits of journalling and taking notes are difficult to succinctly define because they often come gradually and grow with interest each time you journal or take a note. All I know is that now I feel a lot more aware of how I'm feeling and why, which can only be a positive thing. Take notes, on everything, for an extended period of time and come back to me if it doesn't feel good to you.
💷 Money/Finances
Since I was young I have been bad with money. I always spend money when I get it and after every birthday or Christmas there would be a ritualistic "burning a hole in my pockets" which essentially means we went out and spent all the money I got as gifts. When I turned 18 I got a credit card with good intentions of making small purchases and paying it off each month to increase my credit rating for when I wanted to buy a house. Unfortunately it soon became a very easy way to buy things I couldn't afford in the moment but I wanted, a lot of people fall into the same trap. This process happened more than once and I started this year with multiple credit lines for various cards and loans which I wasn't proud of at all. I never missed a payment and knew that eventually I would be able to get myself back to £0 credit but it would take a long time. Since lockdown I have managed to budget my expenses properly and make massive roads into getting rid of my debt, in fact I reached a milestone a couple of weeks ago (less than 4 months after starting the process) that I hadn't anticipated reaching in less than 12 months. This feels incredible to me and makes me feel like I genuinely can change anything in my life if I put my mind to it and make small improvements each day. I've learned from my mistakes with money and as I pay off my credit cards they will be getting closed down and cut up so I don't even have the temptation to use them again. I want to be able to move into/own my own house in the relative foreseeable future and this is a big movement in that direction.
🧠 Mental Health
This year has been tough for so many people. With thousands of jobs being lost, people being furloughed with less income and the loneliness created with social distancing and lockdowns it's easy to understand why since the beginning of the pandemic there has been a 5% increase in reported cases of people experiencing suicidal thoughts in the past two weeks.*
I have struggled with my mental health in the past and been on medication to try and help me but before the pandemic I wasn't taking any medication but didn't feel particularly well in terms of my mentality and the thoughts I was having. This sense of having low mental wellbeing got worse throughout lockdown which I attributed to being on my own at home with a lot of time to just "be with myself". I've said for a long time that I don't like feeling relaxed because I have thoughts in my head 100% of the time that can make me feel tired and have a massive impact on my mood. I reached a stage where I was so unhappy with how my life was going that I got in contact with my local GP and have since restarted taking medication and have now started counselling sessions that have been so helpful for changing my mindset and thought processes around a lot of what I have experienced & continue to experience in my life. I thought a lot about whether I wanted to make this public knowledge due to the stigma around mental health, particularly in young men, but I decided that I wanted to be the person I wish I had seen in the public eye when I was struggling. Fortunately the stigma around talking about mental health has become less of a thing and the situation continues to improve more and more each week and month. For anyone that is struggling with their mental health I highly recommend watching this video and this video which begins to break the barrier around talking with friends and if you feel you have no one else to reach out to feel free to drop me a dm on Twitter.
As I am writing this article I am having a rough week, but that's okay. Without bad weeks you can't appreciate the good weeks and I am now viewing them as part of the process. I am becoming increasingly aware of times where I can think "If this isn't nice, I don't know what is" which I heard from Ali Abdaal which he took from the book Happy by Derren Brown. This has really helped me to appreciate moments where I am happy and enjoying life and helps me to remember them when I am feeling down.
Overall, while this year has had many negatives, but personally this year has been positive for me in so many ways and I am really thankful for the hardships and challenges I have faced because I feel like I have learned so much from them that I am a completely different person today than I was on 1st January 2020. I am now looking forward to 2021 and years to come and will be writing an article about the goals I want to work towards in the future.