I’m not a believer in New Year resolutions.
If you want to change something or set a goal, the time of Year should have no bearing on that.
Whether it’s January, February, August, or November – if you want to make a change or set yourself a goal, start today, this minute. Don’t wait for a New Year before taking action.
However, I do often view December as a great month for reflection.
As meaningless as the end and start of a Year is in terms of setting goals and taking action, it’s still a great time to look back and celebrate all your achievements from the previous 12 months.
Life goes by so quickly (especially when you’re busy running your own business) and often you don’t have much time to reflect during the Year – you’re busy taking action and forging ahead.
But it’s super important that we take time, at least once a year, to look back at our journey and celebrate the good times and the things we’ve achieved (however big or small).
When you are constantly challenging yourself – as an entrepreneur, as a professional, as an athlete, as an adventurer, as a parent, whatever it may be – you will undoubtedly experience failures and times of adversity. Times where it just feels so much easier to throw in the towel than to carry on pursuing your dreams and ambitions.
And if we don’t take time to celebrate the successes and the good times, then it’s often easy to become overrun by adverse situations and failures.
Naturally, we learn more from failure than we do success – we’re forced to if we want to overcome that failure we’ve experienced. We have to learn what caused us to fail, what could have been done differently, how to recover from that failure, and how to get back up and try again with a different approach.
But with success, we’re just pleased it worked out. We might celebrate briefly, then it’s on to the next challenge. You don’t need to spend any more time analysing your success, because you’ve succeeded in what you intended to achieve. In that sense, there’s little more to learn from analysing that situation.
So, even if you experience more successes than you do failures, your mind lends much more thought and energy towards failure – and as a result, your perception of self can become one geared towards failure, rather than success.
To combat this, we must consciously spend more time celebrating our wins. Even the smallest.
And I think December is a great time to spend some thought on your previous wins this year. To revisit them, and to remind yourself of the things you’ve achieved since January, and to re-balance your mindset going into the New Year – with a successful frame of mind.
So, on reflection, here’s my wins of 2016:
- Spending tons of quality time with my beautiful Wife and Daughter (I’m constantly thankful that I’m able to do most of my work from home – so I don’t miss a moment of family life, despite how busy things get!)
- Saving over £1m of healthy food and drink from going to landfill
- Winning funding to purchase our own warehouse and continue to grow the positive impact we’re having on Food Waste with Love Health Hate Waste
- Launching our new website for Love Health Hate Waste and introducing thousands of new lines
- Transforming our high street store from loss-making, into making a small profit – to the point we can explore more sites for stores in the UK
- Starting this blog! And my Udemy course, that’s now helped over 700 people start and grow their own online business since September
- Starting my first niche site project
- Revamping our catalogue for Vitalife Health and developing new revenue streams for this business
I’d love to hear what your wins were this year gone by. Please share them in the comments below.