What 2020 taught me

It’s all about people. And your relationships:

We worked through 2 co-founder conflicts between end 2019 and 2020, those were some of the toughest moments I experienced in my professional and personal life. And both have taught me that I could not ask for better co-founders and it also showed me what a team can achieve if it sticks together through better or worse.

Watching the relationships around me and around me (thank you Anthony & Jenna, Charles & Jessy for being great role models) it becomes so clear that dreams are built on supportive partnerships that lift each other up and our partners are as much part of the journey as we are or our team is. Thank you everyone who supports a dreamer, an entrepreneur, an inventor, an artist or anyone else that is trying to change the world and comes home swearing more often than not. Thank you Gonza for your ongoing support over the years, I seriously don’t know how you do it.

Oh, and 2020 was also the year where I re-discovered Twitter as a powerful community, the amount of wisdom and learnings I got from all of you over the past 12 months is insane — thank you Lenny Rachitsky, @Taylor_Nieman, Steve Schlafman, Amanda Goetz, Janine Sickmeyer, Kristen Anderson, Joe Procopio, Nir Eyal and so many more!

Keeping a cool head when the world is burning:

I’m just finishing “Thinking fast and slow” by Daniel Kahneman. Having learned the ropes with some of the researchers behind the studies Daniel references in the book (Thomas Mussweiler, Fritz Strack) during my psychology studies, it reminded me how complex our decision-making processes are. System I (intuition and emotional decision-making, hot condition) is in the drivers seat most of the time and system II (cold cognition and deliberate, logical thinking) is quite effortful to kick-start and use, however it so key to use system II, esp. when you feel anxious, insecure, or unsure about the future. Making time for reflection and meditating daily in the last 6 months of 2020 helped to have access to system II when I need it, but it’s still a battle to not just jump heads-on into judgement at times.

Thank you Karl Alomar for reminding me of this in the beginning of 2020, when the pandemic hit.

Thank you Alex Weber & Markus Müller for helping me to balance both: emotions and cognition when working through difficult moments this year.

Building bridges, not burning them, even if just by mistake:

One of the highlights this year was the TakeTheLead launch event that we organised to celebrate the launch of the AI leadership coach but also to celebrate and thank you, our community, that have supported us throughout this year. One of our speakers, Shachar Scott, VP Global Marketing at Bumble, has taught us “Build bridges, don’t burn them” and I think no other year made it abundantly clear: relationships is what carries the world forward and they take effort and time to build. So if you have not written to someone that you really wanted to for a really long time, do it. If you have ignored a long-time friend for too long, get in touch and ask them how they are. As someone who spends most of my time building Bunch, I def. struggle to find those moments to get in touch with family and friends and that’s something I want to get a bit better at in 2021. I want to try and savor the little moments and making them count more.

Effectively taking care of yourself is not only a nice-to-have:

Writing my newsletter every Sunday over the course of this last year has given me the opportunity to zoom out and reflect, to give back and find a bit of quiet time in the eye of the storm. Thank you everyone who was and is reading it. The concept of reflecting on my challenges publicly, finding ways of solving them for myself with the help of my team and then sharing what has worked and what didn’t is really powerful — thank you Jack Butcher for rallying for the concept!

I learned this year that if I don’t take a few hours each week to do something not related to Bunch I easily lose my patience with my team and if I do something for myself I come back fresher and more positive, with more ideas that change the game for us, often. To prioritize self-care remains a struggle (because I do believe that hard work pays off), but I came to rely more and more on structure and rituals (daily, weekly and quarterly) to make sure I stay balanced.

Mental health, vulnerability and gratitude:

Working around 80hs each week since years takes a toll, I know why I do it: Making Bunch successful means helping more people at work be satisfied, successful, happy and help more people around the world grow, learn and develop. It’s my life’s mission, it’s not a job. Balancing it with time for myself, my family, my partner is very tricky. The mission always seems bigger. There is always work. I understand how important it is to rest, having done this for more than 10 years now and having had 1 real burn out. But it’s still tough to stick to the routines that keep me afloat and thriving. One new routine that I had tried this year is to make it part o fly daily reflection to thank my partner in 1-sentence gratitude journal entries. At the end of the year I had repurposed it into an Adventscalendar (a daily surprise for the month of December, its a tradition in Germany) for Gonza and it made him smile at everyone of my entries.

Giving gratitude is not something that requires lots of energy, but it’s also not something that pays off immediately in that same moment, it takes a bit of time to see the fruits of pushing yourself every day to see the light in the darkness, but once you’ve managed to do it for a month, you’ll start to see positive moments all around you and that will help to keep going.

Happy New 2021! Let’s rock it! Create, build, gain momentum — the world is worth your hard work and your efforts making it even more beautiful than it already is ❤️🚀💫