New Year: New You?

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called ‘Opportunity’ and its first chapter is New Year’s Day”

(Edith Lovejoy Pierce)

What a beautiful, empowering concept, that we are getting another ‘opportunity’ to open the pages of our own ‘Life Book’ and to start to visualise and to generate the very next chapter! A brand-new chapter, for a brand-new year! How amazing to have a blank page that you can fill with whatever you want to manifest into your life. Something that so many of us may take for granted, as so many people unfortunately don’t get this ‘opportunity’ to start another year of life.

So many people have sadly lost their lives or their loved ones prior to the start of this new year. This, making the ‘gift’ of another blank page in our Life Books for us to fill with whatever we want to even more precious and valuable.

I love that we can ‘decide’ what we wish to write into each chapter of our own ‘Life Book’. We have the power to make individual choices that can help to give ourselves general direction, support, guidance and motivation towards achieving our own pre-set standards and to living the kind of life that we want to.

I love this quote and finds it always gives great clarity and direction:

“Every new day is another chance to be a better person than you were the day before”

(See Pinterest.com)

Being able to focus our energy on building the new and not fighting the old is something that we often forget as we wade through the high and low tides of life. We each have the option and power to ‘start over, to start afresh in any moment’.

I always keep this focus in my mind, particularly on the harder, tougher days when I may be struggling with an anxious thought, emotion or feeling. I encourage myself that I can learn and experience personal growth and enhancement from all of my experiences, whether pleasant or unpleasant, from how I respond to them and this in turn helps me to continuously grow and develop into the person I ‘want’ to be and to portray the ‘values’ that I find important in life.

A new year can be the perfect time to implement change or enhancement into your life. It can be a time to accept any flaws, mistakes, errors that you feel are a part of you or that you may have made in your life to this point. It can be an ‘opportunity’ to take the ‘learning’ from these experiences and to turn them into something magical and positive for moving forward in your life, instead of carrying the negatives or traumas from them forward with you.

Another quote I love to illustrate this point is:

“Packaged inside of every mistake there lays a great lesson. And while I don’t want to take the mistake into the New Year, I most certainly want to take the lesson that’s packaged inside of it”

(Craig D. Lounsbrough)

So, to think a little deeper about your ‘opportunity’ to design and create the next chapter in your own ‘Life Book’, what are your priorities for the new year ahead? What are your hopes, your dreams, your plans, your expectations? How do you think that you can change, enhance or grow personally in the new year, do you want to? If you could see yourself as being 80 years of age and having the opportunity to look back on the written and lived chapters in your own ‘Life Book’, what would you like to see and read in them? What choices do you think that you could make now, make today, that would help you to feel fulfilled, content and honoured to have lived your life the way you would want to re-read it if you had the ‘opportunity’?

A few beautiful words to leave you with:

“Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets.
So, love the people who treat your right and forget about the ones who don’t.
And believe that everything happens for a reason ….
If you get a chance – take it
If it changes your life – let it
Nobody said that it would be easy ….
They just promised it would be worth it”

(See medium.com)

HOW to write your new ‘opportunity’ chapter in your own ‘Life Book’:

The following is a guide on how to write your new ‘Opportunity’ chapter in your own ‘Life Book’:

1. Firstly, take some time alone to gain clarity, focus and direction of where you would like to make changes in your life and how you would like to enhance yourself or if there is anything that you wish to change at all.

2. Write these points down, as when you see these goals or dreams written in reality, they soon become your vision.

3. Evaluate what the biggest learning experiences from your past / your past year were and which ones you wish to integrate into your new ‘opportunity’ chapter in your own ‘Life Book’ for moving forward.

4. Commit to yourself that you will use only the learnings from these experiences and that you will not be self-critical, self-judging or self-destructing towards yourself with words or by carrying the physical and emotional hurts, pains, confusion and perhaps trauma from these experiences with you into your new year.

5. Each month, take some time out to reflect on your new year dreams, goals and ambitions. Again, non-judgementally, analyse where you feel you are in the writing of your new ‘opportunity’ chapter in your Life Book and if you need to make any adjustments in your current life-style choices to get you to your desired destination.

6. Affirm to yourself that you are creating the path you wish to unfold in your life by carefully planning, reflecting and empowering yourself in your choosing of living more mindfully and in more present moment awareness.

Thank you as always to Brian O’Loughlin and his team at Celtic Media Group (https://www.anglocelt.ie/, https://www.con-telegraph.ie/, https://www.meathchronicle.ie/, https://www.offalyindependent.ie/, https://www.westmeathexaminer.ie/ and https://www.westmeathindependent.ie/ for all their wonderful help!

As published by The Celtic Media Group in The Anglo Celt, Connaught Telegraph, Meath Chronicle, Offaly Independent, Westmeath Examiner and Westmeath Independent newspapers w/c 04/01/2021)