A new year, a refined you

Happy New Year!

For a year full of blessings and prosperity. I am confident that all the good and wonderful will manifest in your life in the months to come.

If you had a successful year last year, achieving most, if not all, of your goals … Congratulations!

You have a lot to celebrate.

However, the congratulations are still in order, even if things didn’t turn out the way you intended.

Why?

Because the year is over and over! You will never have to deal with it again and the New Year presents you with another opportunity 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 old year did not 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 being born for the first time, you never existed before. Of course, this is neither possible nor, frankly, desirable. It is not possible because you have obviously been around for a while. He has had many decades of experience and knowledge under his belt. It took you a long time to create your own story. So, to paraphrase Bob Marley, all these decades of personal history cannot be erased so easily!

It is precisely 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 discard decades of memories and life experiences? Who exactly would you be if you could start your year completely detached and unaffected by your past experiences?

As arbitrary as the date of New Years Day may be, it still represents a time when most of us reflect on our lives and consider the things we would like to improve about it. We always want the next twelve months to be better than the previous ones and therefore I think it is counterproductive for you to set out to create a New Me 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 presents a perfect opportunity for you to create a Refined You. In this case, you are not starting from scratch, but are stepping back to take the lessons you have learned from the Old Year’s experiences and use them to refine your philosophy of life, refine or even redefine your goals, and refine your strategies to achieve them.

Any effort to create that New You is an effort to shorten the process. It’s exactly when things don’t quite work out that we should dig deep and look for ways to improve ourselves for better results.

There is no glory without adversity. Any attempt to start the New Year as a new self is to deny yourself any real sense of victory, as there would have been no difficulties or setbacks on the way to its climax. In fact, under those circumstances, I don’t even know if you could consider your achievements to be 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 stroke of the brush 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 concentration, dedication, discipline, and perseverance.

While it may be tempting, even attractive, to start your life from scratch after one substitute per year, let me encourage you to embrace the idea of ​​refining your life instead.

Here are four ways you can perfect 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 consistently, 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 simple discard?

What new people do you need to bring into your life?

Which old men do you need to stay away from?

Your honest answers to these questions will give you a good idea of ​​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 a kinder and more compassionate way. In other words, learn to harbor thoughts about yourself that don’t constantly hit you, but rather elevate you.

Psychologists say that we have 50,000 to 6,000 thoughts every day and most of the thoughts we have today are those we had yesterday and those we will have tomorrow.

Get in the habit of monitoring and taking inventory of your thoughts so that you can not only become aware of times when you are not speaking kindly to yourself, but you can also begin to make a conscious shift toward greater compassion.

3. Reserve judgment on yourself

Often times, even the harshest criticisms of a complete stranger cannot be as sharp as the ones we impose on ourselves. The truth is that most of the time we are our own worst enemy and critic. I am not suggesting that we operate with children’s gloves. We must definitely push ourselves, but we must do so with compassion and love.

In many cases, the source of our own judgment comes from comparing ourselves to others. We will observe the tremendous gains that others seem to have achieved and immediately become critical of ourselves, not realizing that perhaps you overcame obstacles much tougher than they did and therefore, by all objective metrics, despite appearances, in fact it is more successful. Discipline yourself to think positively of yourself

4. Take one step at a time

Once you have completed your assessment and determined the next steps to take; be aware of the fact that you won’t be able to do it all at once. Everything in life is about a process. Unless something catastrophic happens and forces you to make bulk changes, real, lasting changes are made in small increments.

As author Dr. Michael Puett reminds us, “change doesn’t happen until people alter their behavior, and they don’t change their behavior unless they start small.”

The New Year is certainly an exciting time. We feel like we can have a fresh start, but I think the best way to do that is to renew our efforts to grow and improve ourselves so that we can create the results we want. Part of that process is recognizing that from time to time you will fall short, but that doesn’t mean the whole year has been a failure. In fact, if you think about it deeply enough, you will find that your most rewarding experiences stem from the challenges you have had to overcome. These situations do not seek to remake him from scratch, but rather serve to forge and refine him into a better and stronger version of himself.

As you move into the New Year, do so with boldness and courage. As an artist, you have creative discretion. Keep editing and refining your masterpiece as you go.

I also challenge you to show the same level of hope, enthusiasm, and optimism every day of the year that you had on the first day of the year.

Keep pushing!