Many of my articles focus on the present and the future, as I do not advocate getting stuck in the past. There is however great value in learning from the past so you can do things differently and better in the future. We are coming to the close of a New Calendar Year so it is a good opportunity to look back at 2006 and to discover what you have learned, how you have grown and where to go from here.

Here is a 3-stage process I am committing to completing for myself during the Christmas break this year and I invite you to do the same. This process has been inspired from an email newsletter I received recently from www.robinsharma.com

Step 1: Find some quiet time, get out your journal and if you don’t have a journal, why not ask Santa for one this year and start using one. As Tony Robbins said, “If life is worth living, it is worth recording”. Write in your journal everything that happened to you in 2006, thinking about each month and season in turn. What successes did you have, what were your disappointment, what were your top 5 most amazing experiences? This could take you some time but remember anything worthwhile typically requires effort.

Step2: Pull out all the goals that you set for yourself in 2006 and score yourself on how you are getting on. If you decided to earn Eur10,000 more this year and actually managed Eur8000, give yourself 8 out of 10. If you had a goal to go on “a date” with your spouse 10times during the year and managed 10 times, give yourself 10 out of 10. If you are like me and set annual goals sometime other than at the start of a calendar year, this is an opportunity to reflect on the progress you are making. If you set annual goals back in January, now is the time to take stock to see how you got on. Notice which goals were fully completed and which were not. Were there certain areas of your life that you did well in and others where you didn’t achieve as much? For example, did you achieve all your work related goals but neglect your health or fitness goals? What obstacles or challenges got in the way of you achieving your goals? Did you allow these obstacles to stop you or did you find ways around, over, through them? Did you take on challenges in certain areas but falter in other areas of your life?

Step 3: Now that you have reflected on the past year and become more aware of where you were at the start of the year and how far you have come, it is now time to focus on the future. What lessons did you learn through your successes and failures in 2006 that you can use into the future? If the answer is, I didn’t learn anything; ask yourself what could you have learned if you had to learn something? Remember we learn from our mistakes and become complacent in our successes. Make sure to record these lessons in your journal. There is tremendous power in writing things down.

Through this process, you are giving yourself a amazing gift of stopping, taking stock, getting off the treadmill of life to make sure that you are moving in the right direction and you are living your life in line with what is most important to YOU and what YOU believe.

If I may conclude with a quote from Robin Sharma, “The best teacher is a teacher called life. And when you reflect on the past you are capturing the valuable lessons that your life has to offer”.

Let me take this opportunity to thank you as a reader of my articles. I appreciate all the comments and feedback I have received over the past year and I look forward to sharing some more ideas, thoughts and tips in this column with you into 2007. Wishing you and yours a very peaceful, reflective Christmas and energising New Year.

Copyright © 2006 Synergy Coaching Services.