Welcome to 2021

New Year, Who Dis?
 
Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind, hi! It’s us! Your friendly neighbourhood Pickering Group wishing you a very happy New Year.  We hope it’s everything you want it to be, but there’s a ton of pressure on 2021 to deliver us everything we missed out on last year. 2021, please read our guide on how not to choke when presenting under pressure. You got this.
 
Year Nah
 
Resolutions are kind of a joke these days, aren’t they?  Whatever your plans and goals were in 2020 they almost certainly got disrupted by events beyond your control. That part sucked. But what didn’t suck was the way we all found workarounds. We MacGyvered solutions, jerry-rigged alternatives, cautiously accepted Zoom into our lives and online shopped ourselves to exhaustion. With all the strange people delivering exciting packages we didn’t even need Santa this year. Or Tinder.
 
It’s Just a Date
 
But it’s a new dawn.  A new day.  A new hope. No wait, that’s Star Wars and we all know how that’s going. It’s a New Year though and that’s a perfect time for a fresh start. Not moving-to-Bolivia-and-starting-a-llama-farm fresh start, although putting Llama Farmer on your business cards would be adorable. No, we’re all staying put for a little while, so this is more of a spring clean. A zhuzh-up. Yes, that’s how you spell it. We googled it. Let it go.
 
Fresh Up
 
Here’s some ways to chip off the metaphorical congealed yoga pants of 2020 and shimmy into something clean.
 

1. Pantry clear: did you panic-buy cans of spaghetti? Flour? Toilet paper? There’s sure to be a Pataka Kai or community pantry near you. You can find them via your suburb’s Facebook page. Have a clear out, get your cupboard space back for things you’re actually going to eat (hi chips, don’t get too comfy) and pass your hoard on to the many people in your neighbourhood doing it tough. 

2. Tidy up your finances.  If you have invoices to issue or pay, expenses to reconcile, credit cards to balance, or paperwork to file, get it tidy now before the next onslaught.   There’s nothing like the little niggle of messy finances to undermine your holiday serenity.

3. Embrace change. Not loose change, didn’t you read 2? Tidy that up. But if there’s one thing we love at TPG it’s a growth mindset. People who are always looking to improve always improve. Change has been scary this last year, but there are two ways of looking at it: change happens to you, but it also happens for you. You can’t grow without it.  

4. Know Thyself.  Not via online quizzes of which cast member of FRIENDS you’d be (anyone but Ross, omg), but just be open to learning about yourself. Your communication style, your reactions under pressure, why you’re driven to do what you do. We’ve made it easy to discover more about yourself as a speaker and presenter with our Evasion to Inspiration model.  Finding where you sit on that spectrum reveals the steps you can take to improve.  Big ones, away from Ross. Ugh.

 
Let’s Get It Started
 
At The Pickering Group we’re excited about the challenges we’ve conquered already and we know they’ve helped us meet you where you are. We’re still busy training business communicators both in-person and virtually.  We’re helping inspirational storytellers to emerge, and seeing our clients embrace the persuasiveness and credibility of their authentic voices. We’re also still having fun doing it and we resolve to keep that up. We hope 2021 brings you joy and success. Let us know if we can help that happen.