As we move into the New Year, many of us reflect on the past, while looking toward the future. We relish in our successes, learn from failures and yearn for the actions we will undertake in the coming year.
We want to offer you a simple guide for this transitional time of the year. Something to empower your work, spur your creativity and leave you in a position of power and purpose as the first day of 2024 draws nearer.
Firstly, as with all things, I express gratitude toward myself and the world around me. The resources, challenges and actions of those around me allowed me to make the decisions I chose to make, allowed me to follow the actions I chose to follow and allowed me to become the person that I became in 2023. You should certainly feel gratitude for all the good things that have happened for you, but don’t dwell unduly on positivity. Remember that much of our labor is directed at solving problems in our societies and without those problems, we wouldn’t have worked to fix them. Some of the most painful parts of our reality spur us on toward a brighter tomorrow, challenge us to remediate them and draw our deepest powers out of us.
Thanks and Praises to the world that helped make me, and allowed me to be.
Second, it’s important to congratulate yourself on the work you did. It could be hard to pinpoint, but it’s important that you do it.
Congratulate yourself for efforts you performed, even if the result was imperfect. Your successes prove your power. Your failures will be examined to provide you with additional efficacy.
Thirdly, projects successfully completed or failed during the last year warrant our attention, our love and our effort. Considering how our successes occur so that we can replicate them, or attempting to discern the exact cause of any failure so that it can be avoided for upcoming efforts.
- Those who ignore their failures risk arrogance, leading to complacency and inevitably into downfall.
- Those who dwell only on the challenges they have faced in their work risk falling into hopelessness, inactivity and inevitably into downfall.
Carefully review the actions you invested into your work. Which actions yielded more return than expected? Which actions caused turbulence or confusion? Which actions were certainly detrimental? Were these effects situational or universal? Denoting these differences can assist you in future understanding of your work, and empower you to choose actions that have high yield effects.
Which actions certainly helped me? Which actions certainly undermined me? Which actions had unclear effects?
Fourth, did you become the person you wanted to be in 2023?
Was your heart and personality in the place you wanted?
Did you begin or finish small projects? (small stuff: “I made a drawing”)
Did you begin large projects? (“We planned and created a small fashion release”)
Did you begin grand projects? (“I launched my brand this year, and we’re just getting started!”)
Maybe you had huge ongoing projects that will continue (“My daughter is going into seventh grade.”)
This portion is kind of like taking inventory. Some work that we do is so front-and-center that we constantly remember the effort we are putting into it (my exercise at the gym is like that for me) and it tends to consume much daily thought. Some work is more illusory, and can become disassociated from “projects” in your mind. Marriage is a good example: there is never a time when you will finish this project, it will always consume energy and will always require creative inputs. Some items on this inventory may look unwelcome, but recall that all of our tasks arise from a need that we experienced.
Take some time to consider all the places you direct effort into, and why each project was started in the first place.
Finally we will aim to become the person we want to be in 2024. I have to admit, this is the easy part.
Our inventory shows us where we put our effort in 2023, and how effective our efforts were. If we were honest in our appraisals, then our list will make it quite easy to decide which actions to pursue, which to modify, which projects go on the backburner to await the “right time,” and which efforts should be abandoned altogether.
Make a basic (or not) plan for goals you wish to reach and the actions you will perform to achieve them in 2024!
Go kick ass!
