The past is a good reference

As we come to the last week of the year, we normally tend to lapse into some nostalgia. While we do dwell on the good times of the past year, we also tend to linger longer on the ills that plagued us, the potential we could not fulfill, we rue the opportunities missed and often why fate was a wee bit cruel in general. The year end is a good time to reflect and dwell and commit to our learning the lessons of the past, but it is also the best time to wipe the slate clean and begin afresh.

So as we step into a New Year, it would help us look back to review the year gone by and make use of the learning from it as under:

Learn from our failures – Our immediate thoughts are often about the regrets we have for either having failed to accomplish what we set out to do or because we never got around to starting what we hoped we would or because we just did not visualize / size the opportunities around us. The good thing about failure is that we it grounds us to reality and reminds us of our mortality. The best thing about failure is that it allows us to steer clear of the mistakes we made and work out a better way to attain our goal.

Improve up on our successes – We do always cherish the sweet successes we tasted. Occasionally we tend to gloat over it and other times we feel smug that we managed what others couldn’t. Our successes should actually spur us to take on newer and bigger challenges, enthuse us to find better ways of attaining success in our predetermined tasks. Ideally we must focus on improving the yield, reducing the time, simplifying the task, automating where possible etc.

Update possibilities – Both success and failures offer us opportunities to discover new possibilities. It could be a technique, an improvement on the existing, leveraging the resources available to the full, discovering alternatives etc. Visualizing, being creative, being enterprising and risk taking are all means to the same end of creating possibilities.

Clean the slate and start anew – Whatever be your evaluation of the year gone by we can neither rest on our laurels nor can we wallow in our failures. The New Year is point in time when we can wipe our slate clean and begin anew. It is a good time to clear the cobwebs in our mind, reinforce positive thoughts for the coming year, get enthused to embark on a new venture or reinforce an existing one and translate thought into action.

Try these:

1. Make a list of 5 pressing items / tasks that you are determined to complete in 2016 no matter what the impediments are.
2. Make another list of 3 things that you will do to

• Make sick and the lonely feel cheerful
• Get involved in your favorite social service project
• Increase your savings by 10 %
• For protecting the environment or for animal welfare
• Improve your health and fitness

This post is courtesy www.actspot.com

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