Six steps to a meaningful 2021
Don’t get lost in the big picture, focus on your day, your week, your month… and your dreams will take shape. The experts outline the journey forward, even if you don’t have an ETA
Anne Ditmeyer is a Paris-based designer and coach who launched her popular life map courses on Skillshare seven years ago. ‘In order to figure out where you want to go, start by creating a map of where you’ve been. If you review 2020 in your mind, it’s easy to only focus on the negative stuff. But, when drawing it on paper, people are surprised to see that they learned something new or accomplished something unexpected,’ she explains.
Drawing allows you to be playful and to access your subconscious mind. Ditmeyer stresses that you don’t need to be artistic, and that beauty lies in simplicity. Hers has an arrow running across the centre of the page – a timeline – and a dotted line that runs up and down over it. ‘I started the year low, feeling lonely and with patchy work, then my dotted line went up when I went travelling with my father to Vietnam, then down when coronavirus struck, then up again. Some of the problems we face are created by people thinking that they need to arrive at a certain place. But we are all on our own path and mapping is a good reminder of that.’
Ditmeyer picked ‘explore’. Her map featured a Courtyard of Creativity, a Museum of Collaboration, a Library of Curiosity and a Mountain of Musings. You can put anything on your map. For instance, if you dream of publishing a novel, you could create a map of destination points along the journey to your book going on sale.
‘If you feel overwhelmed about what to include, remember that the best maps are simple. Don’t wait for it to be perfect, just put down the things that are the most important. You can always tweak it!’ Once it’s complete, she recommends hanging it above your desk where it can be a daily visual reminder of where you are headed.
“Magic can come from uncertainty – if we knew everything about how things were going to turn out, life would be less fun