Most of us, if not everyone, wait. We wait for the right time, the right place, the right situation. Sometimes we end up waiting our whole life. But then January 1st rolls around and we think we can muster the motivation, the inspiration, the energy, the discipline, and the action necessary to make the changes we want to in our lives with the consistency and effort needed to make our dreams come true.
We set our intentions, make announcements of our big plans for our life and the year ahead, we get backed by others who are also jumping into the next year’s hype that all begins on January 1st. Then the tires hit the ground and we realize how much friction we’ve built into our lives and hadn’t realized what it actually takes to actually make change last. January 2nd rolls around, then the 3rd, and then the 4th and everything we thought we had, the energy, the inspiration, the discipline, the action, etc. starts to plummet and we can’t find what we need to make things last.
We put January 1st on this great big pedestal like it is this specific time that is going to change the course of our lives. Then the year passes us by and December rolls around and we wonder where time’s gone and reminisce about all of the big dreams and plans we had and how everything we’d hoped for just slipped by and we moved nowhere toward our high hopes and dreams we had the 364 days before December 31st.
Forget about January 1st. It’s significance is completely meaningless. It’s not a specific date that inspires. It’s not a specific date that creates an opportunity to change. Let’s consider this analogy. Let’s compare the month of December and the month of January to the evening and the next day, respectively. So if we consider December as our ‘night before’ and our January as the ‘next day’. If we wait until the day of to create change we won’t be as prepared as we could be if we had prepared the night before.
What I mean is that if we want the best possible outcome for ourselves in the year ahead we need to be starting the ‘night before’, AKA we need to start reviewing, reflecting, and planning in December. December is a time where we can give some thought to where we are, what we want to change, what our goals are, and what we need to take action on. Starting the ‘day of’, AKA January 1st, we’re already starting behind as we’re not as prepared as we would have been if we had started preparing/planning the night before.
So with all the big dreams we have for our life, start planning today and begin taking small steps TODAY. This will help in setting ourselves up to actually achieve that which we want and set out to accomplish.