As another year comes to a close everyone is gearing up for 2020. New Year’s resolutions are in full effect. The plans are the same as every year. You know the usual goals: lift weights, eat better, watch less tv, travel more, make more money, and have better relationships. You start the year absolutely crushing it you’re in the gym every day destroying every muscle group. You are eating plain chicken, rice and broccoli. You stock up on every self-improvement book you can get your hands on. Your energy is through the roof at this point thinking about how much better life is going to be after you demolish all these goals. 

You are now one month in and you are starting to feel the New Year jet lag. Your motivation has started to dwindle. The gym doesn’t sound as appealing since you’ve been sore this whole month. That plain chicken starts to taste like sawdust since that’s all you’ve had and the only thing you can think about now is that all you can eat Chinese buffet. But you keep moving because you have to keep your goals.

Now it’s February, and you have ghosted the gym and diet. You are back into the comfort of the whole binging of Netflix and ice cream. So, where did you go wrong? Why does this seem to happen every year? You had all the motivation, in the beginning, where did it go?

It all went wrong when you decided to change everything in your world at one time. You shocked the system with a complete overhaul. It also doesn’t help that you told everyone about your goals and in turn you got that sweet, sweet, dopamine hit from everyone congratulating you on having all that New Year ambition.

Why not, make this year different?  Instead of making new year’s resolutions, let’s think about everything that you did this last year. Go ahead and write down everything that sticks out in your mind. All of the good things. You got a raise at work, write it down. You read a really great book, write it down.  Now, don’t forget to write down all of the bad stuff. You made a mistake at work that cost the company money, write it down. You should have around twenty to thirty things that really stuck out this year. 

Relive every moment that you wrote down. How did you feel in those moments? Why do these moments stick out in you?

Okay, you’ve got your separate lists. With the good events think about how this year you are going to build upon these events? How can you make it happen more often, or even keep building upon these moments? This year, we are going to maximize the good events. Now what should you do with the bad events? Well, not every bad event can be changed because bad things always happen, but you can change how you mentally handle an event. If you were to go back into that moment how would you handle it better? There are times you could have dove a little deeper in a problem and the answer would have come to you instead of making a snap decision.

This list is going to be a solid foundation on how your next year is going to be even better because you analyzed every important event from a whole year and you’ll have an even better foundation to build upon this year.

Let’s take this year head on and not fall back into our comfortable routine of falling further into mediocrity. It’s time to be great, it’s time to be Barbaric.

Carl                                 
Twitter @HeavyMetalCJ 
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