A Slap In The Face For Christmas: The Gift of Awareness.

I recently read something incredible, something that stopped me in my tracks and gave me goosebumps. It was a simple statement of fact. 

Read that again…. And let it sink in.  

This got me thinking about Christmas and family get-togethers and how it’s often a time of reflection and self-assessment. After all, it’s been drilled into us that Santa knows if we’ve been bad or good and won’t deliver the presents unless we have at least attempted to aspire to some goodness over the past year. 

Which is why giving yourself and others the gift of awareness is such a powerful thing. 

Regardless of what has happened to you over the past year, regardless of the decisions you have made or the words you have said, your best choice (really your only choice) is to embrace these experiences so you can grow as a person and learn to love yourself. And although I know some of you will be saying to me, “But Kat, I don’t really love myself fully and I often have regrets about the things I’ve done” that’s OK too, because now is the perfect time to move forward with a renewed sense purpose. Use every lesson, every experience as a powerful motivator to become a better person. 

As a kid I used to love it when I was given a jigsaw puzzle for Christmas. I’d sit there for hours with my siblings and try to work out how all the pieces fitted together. Now, as an adult and a Master of Disaster I realise that puzzles are the perfect analogy for life. Just as every puzzle piece has its rightful place, so too does every challenge and adversity we experience. Mastering our disasters with radical acceptance and awareness means understanding that even the difficult pieces have a purpose and a place and inevitably help us reveal the bigger picture. 

Think about it: without the disaster of leaving a child home alone, there would never have been one of the most beloved Christmas movies of all time! Sometimes, the chaos of past mistakes creates the most meaningful or even joyful of outcomes farther down the road.

Finally, I want to bring your attention to a little-known fact - that our brains have a built-in negativity bias causing us to focus more on the bad things than the good things (often in order to support our stories of attachment, suffering and victimhood). This directly affects our behaviour and our view of the world.  

In many scientific studies, it’s been shown that we humans tend to:

•  -Remember traumatic experiences better than positive ones.

• - Recall insults better than praise.

• - React more strongly to negative stimuli.

• - Think about negative things more frequently than positive ones.

• - Respond more strongly to negative events than to equally positive ones.

So how do we overcome this? Here’s two quick suggestions.

Take a leaf out of the Stoic’s book, who say that while we can’t control what happens, we can control how we respond—and in that, lies our power.

Or look up the concept of vincible ignorance in Christian theology, which states that in order to overcome ignorance we need to seek the truth and look for clarity in order to rise above our limited stories. 

So this Christmas, I’m gifting you something invaluable: a call to awareness. A reminder that you have the power to choose your story, embrace your disasters, see the positive in the world and trust that every piece of your puzzle has a purpose—even if you can’t see it yet.

In fact, I challenge you to look back over your year—good, bad, ugly, or devastating—and realise and appreciate the huge amount of good that has happened as well. 

Merry Christmas, and here’s to mastering every piece of your puzzle in the coming year!