HAPPY New Year!
How many times have you said this to family, friends and colleagues these past weeks? We are all wishing it to be true for them and ourselves more than ever this year.
Yet, turning the page of the calendar and starting a new year does not automatically turn everything into sudden happiness neither turning everything new.
With intention, it can mark the start of something good, or even great. It is a fantastic time to formulate good resolutions and evaluate those we made just a year ago.
It is also a good time to reflect on those resolutions not accomplished. That is not to be negative. Not accomplishing an objective isn’t necessarily bad. We might have replaced it with something else, something better adapted to new situations. Afterall, if there is one thing we learned last year, it is that flexibility is the key to success. In some cases, if we would have stuck to our initial plans. we would have encountered a ‘full stop’. Whereas by adapting our plans we can move forward, maybe not in the most ideal way, but the important thing was to move ahead at all in the circumstances.
When it comes to Soroptimism we learnt that there is always another way to bring our organisation to the next level. We showed resilience. We continuously had to bounce back. And we developed even better solutions than we ever thought possible in the ‘ideal happy world’ we wished for each other at the former turn of year.
A happy member is a contagious member
I welcome how we all tried to attract new members. That makes us all happy. But even more importantly, we tried hard to make our members themselves happy. We managed to do this in a way we had never imagined possible, due to continuous lockdown issues. A happy member is a contagious member and makes us, as organisation, more attractive to new members.
Let’s help each other
Once again, we are starting a new year in challenging times, and if one resolution could be our common one perhaps it should be ‘to help each other’. Let no one have the impression of being stuck. Believe me, there is always a Soroptimist somewhere who has struggled with the same issues as you are. You can and should reach out to each other to ease the way to a successful outcome.
There is no magic solution, only possible, adaptable and flexible solutions to move on. This is fundamentally what our June Growth Academy will be about. It will be held in my home city of Kortrijk, Belgium where we shall work together on ‘moving on to a more attractive organisation’.
While we will not reach the bright sparkling ultimate goals we had in mind in one single step, we will progress and adapt to the road, and perhaps even change the route. After all, “Creating a better future requires creativity in the present” (Matthew Goldfinger).
Let creativity be our continuous Soroptimist practice!
Yours sincerely,
Carolien DEMEY,
SIE President 2021-2023
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