What does New Year mean to you?

Over the last week, many of us will have wished those we know and love a happy new year and best wishes for 2018. But do we do this out of habit or is it a genuine, heartfelt wish? If so, do we wish the same for ourselves with the same passion and meaning?

What does a new year mean to you? Does it mean the chance to make something wonderful happen? To improve the quality of your life in big or even small ways? To do things you’ve never done before?

Is it a time to make new year’s resolutions that will fizzle out and be forgotten by the time February rolls round? Or have you simply given up on all of that and just hope to make the best of what you have?

I, personally gave up on making new years resolutions a few years back when I finally accepted that they did not work for me – or anyone else I knew!

Why is that? We are so full of determination when we make them and we might get off to a flying start and feel great about ourselves and new found hobby or fitness or energy levels…for a few weeks… I can only speak for myself and hazard a guess that the same may be true for some others, as well. For me, resolutions were made on the hop, when people asked me what they were going to be. They were something I decided to try because I felt I should; like eating less chocolate, losing weight and getting fitter.

Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to and trying to make these kinds of changes – quite the contrary – but the execution was all wrong; I was doing it out of a sense of feeling that I should, heaped huge amounts of pressure on myself, tried to make the changes too quickly, failed and then felt terrible about it. Cue the consumption of more chocolate and, once again, taking position in my overly familiar old cycle.

My ability to improve myself, my health and my life in general, year on year, only began when I stopped making resolutions at the end of the year and started thinking about, and visualising, how I wanted my life to look and how I wanted to feel.

I started to write down things I wanted to achieve, in the awareness that these things might change with time and that that was okay. I started to look at my past and what I hadn’t liked or enjoyed about it and used that to set my bar higher for the future; I decided what I didn’t want which helped me to know what I did want instead. This then became my new focus, rather than focusing on the past.

I truly believe, that in life, we must focus on where we want to go, rather than where we have been. The past is behind us and it is only useful for us to look back the way in order to learn from it and move on.

But how do we learn from it? Well, by now, we have all most likely had massive servings of things we did not want in life and we know how they have affected us and how we have (or have not) dealt with them. So, we have a blueprint. It might not give us all the answers about what will work in future, but what it surely does give us are a list of things that haven’t worked.

So what is it you really want to change about your life? If you have been trying to change something for a while but haven’t yet been successful, what are the things that haven’t worked? Are you still trying them? Do you feel you should maybe try something different but are unsure what to try next?

We all need balance and variety in our lives and I believe this to be true in problem-solving and self-improvement as well. Life is about trial and error in order to find what works for us in any endeavour we undertake. But the great thing is that we have a starting point: we can learn from ourselves and we can also learn from others. We know from our past some of things that don’t work for us and some things that do. And when we are stuck, we can look to others: we can ask ourselves “who else has already done what I want to achieve and how did they do it?”. If the answer resonates with you, then it is a sign that you perhaps might want to give it a go.

So what does a new year mean to me? It simply means it is a good time to reflect on what has and hasn’t worked for me in achieving my goals, so far. It is a time to finally let go of techniques, thinking patterns, routines and habits etc. that have never been effective or beneficial for me and, so, to give something new a try.

This always fills me with excitement and positive expectation as I think about what now may be possible. I hope it does the same for you.