Happy New Year!
For a year full of blessings and prosperity. I trust that everything good and wonderful will appear in your life in the coming months.
If you had a successful year last year, achieving most, if not all, of your goals… Congratulations!
You have a lot to celebrate.
However, congratulations are still in order, even if things didn’t turn out the way you hoped.
Why?
Because the year is over and it’s over! You’ll never have to deal with that again, and the New Year presents you with another chance to use the lessons learned from last year to make this one even better.
Some of you may see the New Year as an opportunity to create the ‘New You’. This is especially true if the New Years didn’t go as well as you would have liked. But I don’t see it that way. To me, the notion of a New You suggests that you are emerging for the first time, you never existed before. Of course, this is neither possible nor, frankly, desirable. It’s not possible because you’ve obviously been around for a while. He has had many decades of experience and knowledge under his belt. You’ve had enough time creating your own story. So, to paraphrase Bob Marley, all these decades of personal history cannot be erased that easily!
It is exactly because of the history that you have experienced and created that it would not be desirable for you to create a New You at the beginning of the year. Do you think you could just throw away decades of memories and life experiences? Who exactly would you be if you could start your year completely separate and unaffected by your past experiences?
As arbitrary as the date of New Year’s Day is, it still represents a time when most of us reflect on our lives and consider the things we’d like to improve about it. We always want the next twelve months to be better than the previous ones, and therefore I think it’s counterproductive for you to set out to create a new you at the beginning of the new year. I think it makes more sense to work on creating an improved version of Old You. An update!
Regardless of how the Old Year ended for you, the New Year presents a perfect opportunity for you to create a Refined You. In this case, you are not starting from scratch, but you are going back to take the lessons you have gained from the experiences of the Old Year and use them to refine your life philosophy, refine or even redefine your goals, and refine your strategies to achieve them.
Any effort to create that New You is an effort to short-cut the process. It is exactly when things don’t quite work that we need to dig deeper and look for ways to improve for better results.
There is no glory without adversity. Any attempt to start the New Year as a new you is to deny yourself any real sense of victory, as there would have been no difficulties or setbacks on the way to your climax. In fact, under those circumstances, I don’t even know if you could see your achievements as highlights.
Remember that your life is a masterpiece, and you are the painter, creating, refining this masterpiece with each new stroke of the brush, each experience, each interaction, and each memory. You can’t create a masterpiece with a quick brush stroke and it would definitely be next to impossible to create one if you had to continually start over. Creating the masterpiece that is your life requires focus, dedication, discipline, and persistence.
While it may be tempting, even appealing, to start your life from scratch after a year, let me encourage you to embrace the idea of refining your life.
Here are four ways you can refine yourself in the new year:
1. Practice self-assessment
This is the time of year when most of us tend to take stock of our current situation, so it shouldn’t be too exaggerated. It is an important habit to practice constantly but especially at the beginning of the year. As you reflect on your life, here are some questions you can start with:
Where are you in relation to where you intended to be at this time of year?
What new goals do you need to pursue?
What old goals do you need to redefine our simply discard?
What new people do you need to bring into your life?
What oldies do you need to stay away from?
Your honest answers to these questions will give you good insights into what your next steps should be.
2. Be kind to yourself
Whenever you talk to yourself; you have a captive audience of one.
Learn to talk to yourself in kinder and more compassionate ways. In other words, learn to entertain thoughts about yourself that don’t constantly bring you down, but lift you up.
Psychologists say that we have between 50,000 and 6,000 thoughts every day and most of the thoughts we have today are the ones we had yesterday and the ones we will have tomorrow.
Get in the habit of monitoring and taking inventory of your thoughts so that you can not only notice times when you are not being kind, but you can also begin to make a conscious shift toward greater compassion.
3. Reserve judgment for yourself
Often even the harshest criticism from a complete stranger can’t be as stinging as the ones we give ourselves. The truth is that most of the time we are our worst enemy and critic. I am not suggesting that we handle ourselves with kid’s gloves. We definitely need to put in effort, but it has to be done with compassion and love.
In many cases, the source of our own judgment comes from comparing ourselves to others. We will look at the tremendous achievements that others seem to have achieved and immediately become critical of ourselves, not realizing that perhaps you overcame much more difficult obstacles than they did, and therefore, by all objective metrics, despite appearances , is actually more successful. Discipline yourself to think positively about yourself
4. Take one step at a time
Once you have completed your own assessment and determined the next steps you need to take; take into account the fact that you will not be able to do it in one go. Everything in life is about a process. Unless something catastrophic happens that forces you to make massive changes, real, lasting changes come in small increments.
As author Dr. Michael Puett reminds us, “Change doesn’t happen until people change their behavior, and they don’t change their behavior unless they start small.”
The New Year is certainly an exciting time. It gives us the feeling that we can have a fresh start, but I think the best way to do that is to renew our efforts to grow and improve so that we can create the results that we want. Part of that process is recognizing that from time to time you will fall short, but that does not mean that the entire year has been a failure. In fact, if you think about it long enough, you’ll find that your most rewarding experiences stem from the challenges you’ve had to overcome. These situations do not seek to transform you from scratch, but serve to forge and refine you into a better and stronger version of yourself.
As you move into the New Year, do so with boldness and courage. As an artist, you have creative discretion. Keep editing and perfecting your masterpiece as you go.
I also challenge you to show every day of the year the same level of hope, enthusiasm and optimism that you had on the first day of the year.
Keep pushing!
