Hi folks,
I’ve been out of commission for about 3 1/2 months working on a multi-million project for work. But that is on hold for a few weeks now (and then I guess we will start up again after the first). I apologize for such inactivity but my “day job” has to come first. I trust everyone had a meaningful Christmas. Mine was quiet but pleasant.
Now that Christmas is over, you know what comes next – the “new year”. I am always amazed that people use this time of year as the ONLY time they make resolutions and goals. You really should be reassessing every month or so and changing your goals as appropriate throughout the year.
I thought I would give you some tips for starting the year off right. There is much greater detail in some of our special reports and especially in “The Art of Making Things Happen“. But here’s some starting points for you. I’ll go into more detail every day this week.
The first thing I want you to do is make the most of LAST year! Why focus on the past? Well, you want to have a starting point for making your goals and plans for next year. The best way to do that is to go back and make a list (or write in a journal if you can 
do that) about what happened in the last year. This will be your inventory.
– Divide your list into categories: Health, Wealth, Peace of Mind/Well-being, Happiness, Relationships, Work, Play, etc.
– Where were you last December/January – not geographically but in life.
– What happened throughout the year – make this in a list form (you can put more detail if you have time but the primary goal here is to list what happened in all areas of your life throughout the last 12-13 months).
– What happened that you considered “forward steps”
– What happened that you considered “backward steps”
– What happened (or didn’t happen) that you consider to have kept you stagnant
– What do you want to repeat this coming year?
– What don’t you want to repeat?
– What words and phrases seemed to predominate in your life throughout the year. Examples are “times are tough”, “the economy is bad”, “I worked hard this year”, “times were hard”, “It was quite a year”, “I had a great year”, “I’m glad the year is over”, “I’m ready for 2012”, etc. Write down everything that comes to mind.
Get this done and you’ll have your inventory AND your starting point for your 2012 plans.
Terrie
Hi Terrie
Wow, what a great idea! I’m going to ‘get stuck into’ this exercise. But I just want to share something that happened after I opened this site today;
We have just moved into our apartment in beautiful Perth, Western Australia, and the hot water service has stopped working! My husband had rung earlier with the news that a new system would cost over AU$1100. I was moping about how negatively this would effect the budget for this, and next month, when the words “declare it good” jumped out at me! I immediately tuned into this sentiment and realised that I was unnecessarily attaching negative emotion to a situation that ‘just is’. About 10 minutes later my husband rang back – he’d found another plumber who could do the same work for half the price! How’s that for karma in action. Warmest wishes, Trish.
Trish,
this is such a great story. I hope everyone reads this and realizes the power of their words and thoughts! Thanks so much for posting this. it’s perfect since our Tip of the Month is about “declaring it good”.