Woohoo! It’s a New Year. Feels like a good one. How’s it starting for you? Is it starting with a bang, fireworks and full speed ahead? Or is it same shit, different year?
I do hope it’s not the latter. Last year (a couple of weeks ago), I talked about celebrating your small wins and taking stock of the year gone by.
One side effect of doing this is realising how much you didn’t do. All the dreams left unrealised. All the ambitions you didn’t achieve. All the resolutions, intentions and goals that were left abandoned at the roadside.
It’s natural. For many of us, it is just not physically possible to do everything we want to do in a year. Life gets in the way. Fear gets in the way. Inertia gets in the way. All sorts of other obstacles get in your way. (I wrote a book about that – check it out here.)
Also, we do have a tendency to overestimate what can be done in a time frame. For years, I wildly underestimated how long it would take to do everything, with the consequence that I was always rushing, always disappointed in myself, always ‘behind’.
Thing is though, this is not a race. There’s really no rush. Your dreams don’t usually have a deadline unless you make one up. And if you do, you’re making it hard for yourself. That’s why I gave up deadlines.
So quit judging yourself so harshly, eh? You did your best last year.
And if it wasn’t the perfect year (is it ever?!), this end of year evaluation can be valuable. You can learn from it. You can see where you could do better this year. You could take what you learned and make a plan for this year.
You could use last year as a springboard for better this year.
So did you learn that you need to carve out regular time for a project? (By not doing so last year?)
So what can you experiment with this year that will give you that time? (Make it easy, please. Start with a small, easily manageable amount of time and work up to hours and hours.)
Did you learn that you hate the gym? (By not using the membership you paid hundreds of pounds for last year?)
So what fun thing can you play with this year to help you feel great in your body? (If you like to dance, Misty Tripoli has a daily dance challenge going…ONE song a day…easy!)
Did you learn that there are not enough hours in the day to do yoga for 90 minutes AND meditate for 2 hours AND journal for an hour AND you know, live your life? (By not fitting in the yoga, meditation or journalling in most of the time last year?)
So what can you do this year to get to do those things that make you feel good? Maybe have a half hour a day in which you do whichever you most need? Or do 10 minutes of each? Or choose one thing a month and focus on that?
Did you learn that you’re taking life too seriously, giving yourself regular stress meltdowns and generally not loving life?
What can you do this year to have more fun, lighten up, focus on joy? (This is one of our primary focuses in the Fall in Love With Life Facebook group. Come join us.)
Maybe you think you learned that you can’t do something. I would challenge that lesson myself, because most of the time you’re just trying to do it in a way that doesn’t work for you.
So what can you do this year that is more likely to work for you? Play to your strengths. Do what works for you. Don’t try to follow someone else’s prescription. Access your own genius.
Take that critical eye you’ve been using to glare at yourself for last year’s failures and turn it into a curious eye that looks at how this year can be even better because of last year.
If you’d like some help with letting go of and learning from last year and setting yourself up with a fabulous vision for this year, check out the “Create and Live Your Vision” package – it’s the process I do every year to give me a guiding vision to live by.
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