Happy New Year!

Whether you had a great year or just can’t wait for a fresh start in January, hopefulness for the new year is fairly universal. The excitement is often around making next year your best year, but growth and improving on your current situation require more than just hope. They require intention and action. As James Cameron explains, “Hope is not a Strategy.”

Improve for Next Year Better by Inspecting this Year

The first step to making next year better is to understand your starting point. Reflect on the last year. This is a great exercise for yourself but also a good connection and confidence boosting opportunity with your kids.

Identify your wins and celebrate each one, no matter how small. Help your kids see what they accomplished – the challenges they overcame, the lessons they learned and the person they’ve grown into. Then apply the same inspection and emotion as you would with your kids, for yourself. We’re really good at seeing progress in others, but tend to gloss over it in ourselves. Once you identify your wins, find a physical way to celebrate yourself. Give yourself a high 5 in the mirror, hug yourself or jump around and dance. It’s amazing how good this feels and how motivating it is.

Next, identify the things that didn’t go so well and what you learned from those experiences. Don’t beat yourself up but inspect for growth. How will you know if next year is your best year if you don’t take a look at where you are? You can’t improve on anything if you don’t know your opportunities.

Determine if it’s something worth continuing or trying again. Maybe your biggest lesson was that something didn’t fulfill you like you thought it would so you’re saying No to it this year. Identify what can you do differently or what kind of support or coaching would help.

If you want to start by learning more about your emotions and which one you lead with, you can take my free quiz.

2023, Here I Come

Now that you know where you’re starting, you can think about where you’re going. Visualize what your life looks like on December 31, 2023.

Following are some questions to consider in this exercise:

• Where are you living?
• How old are your kids and parents?
• What experiences have you had?
• How is your health?
• What is the state of your most important relationships?
• What does you career look like?
• How are you taking care of yourself, physically and mentally?
• What is your spiritual connection?
• What is your relationship and/or role with your community?
• What is your financial situation?

You can write these down or even write a letter to your future self.

With a vision for what your life looks like at the end of the year, reverse engineer that vision back to today. Identify key milestones and then identify actions to support those.

For example, you want to take your family on a grand vacation in August. Maybe in January, you open a vacation savings account and identify where in your budget you can cut expense so that you can deposit into that account. Or maybe you visualize spending time with your teenager in fun light-hearted conversation instead of the frustration and resentment you currently carry. Perhaps in February you agree on a cadence for regular one on one time together and research coaches to help you optimize your communication with your son. If this last one is you, I might be able to help. Let’s chat!

Visualize Next Year Daily

Your brain believes what you tell it and show it. Visualizing your desired situation and then taking action, will make your future more likely. Psychology Today provides 3 great strategies to get the most out of your visualization, if you want to take a peek. Remember, that visualizing alone isn’t enough. You need to take steps in the direction of your vision, if you want it to come to life.