Happy New Year to you all! As we welcome a new year, most people choose to spend this time setting goals and plans for 2016 and beyond. This is definitely key for your future success and happiness, but today I wanted to call attention to the importance of reflection. You see, there are things that will remain in your way until you’ve learned from them. So choose to look back for a short while before you charge ahead. This will help you make this year a very different one and kick those goals you’re so keen to set up.
1) History always repeats itself unless you choose to change it. You can’t keep doing the same thing with the same tools and expect things to be different. What we learn from our parents and other adults in our lives will walk in our lives too unless we have awareness and are willing to gather new tools to change the history of tomorrow. What’s going to be different now in your legacy?
2) Things are often simpler than we realise. Without sounding too philosophical it often comes down to basic human fears. We are sometimes afraid to learn from events in our lives because people might judge us. Or even worse, they might not love us if we choose to learn and move on. We often get in our own way with complicated descriptions and meanings around what happened. The core behind almost every event in our life is love and/or fear. When you see the key to the learning for what it really is, not only does it hurt a lot less than you might have feared, it also helps you move on faster without the clutter of the detailed story. Holding on to complexity and a detailed story of how things went wrong will definitely keep you stuck.
3) Hindsight is a powerful teacher. Listen and learn. Put all judgement aside and look at the event/person/things said and see them in today’s light. What did it mean for you then, but more importantly how did it change you? With the wisdom of now, what will future you thank yourself for doing today?
4) Only when we’ve accepted the learning can we create something different. Awareness is key for most change, but to notice is not enough to process and move on. We need to see the learning and fully accept it. If you reject the thing you were meant to learn, it will keep coming back time and time again in your life. So choose to look at those times in your life where challenge, pain and misunderstandings dictated what was happening. I want to be really clear here and stress you don’t need to accept responsibility for everything that happened. The only thing you need to accept is what you were meant to learn. So if 2015 was the year that you ran away, let 2016 be the year where you stop and truly accept what you needed to take away from it.
5) Ask ‘what now?’ instead of ‘why?’. All the things that happen in our lives, whether we’re on the move or staying put, have a positive learning. Sometimes it takes a while to see it, depending on the levels of pain around what happened. But when we’ve fully accepted the positive learning we can move on and start asking better questions. Don’t spend time mulling over ‘why did that happen to me?‘. Choose to ask ‘Now where do I take this?‘.
2016 is looking so fresh and exciting, it’s going to be a truly amazing year! And if you think through the above 5 points before you kick things off, then you’ve lined yourself up for an even more amazing year!
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