I’d say it’s a safe bet that pretty much every person on this planet would like 2021 to be a better year than 2020 has turned out to be. (I should also point out that there is ample time left to make 2020 better than it has been so far)
Most of the people who want a better 2021 are hoping that it happens. But some people aren’t hoping…they are planning to make next year better than this year. They know that while hoping passes the time planning makes for an effective use of time.
Hope, as nice as it is, is not a strategy for success. Very few things in life happen on their own. They happen as a result of some type of human intervention. We can debate how that human intervention comes about, maybe it’s divinely inspired as I believe it often is. Maybe someone simply decides “today is the day I’m going to do something.” Whatever the case, nothing happens until somebody makes it happen.
The surest way for you to have a better 2021 is to be somebody who makes it happen. That will mean setting some goals for 2021 and making a plan to achieve them. It is NOT too early to begin that planning process.
This far in advance your thought process should be on the “as is” or your current situation. Start thinking about what was good about 2020 and make no mistake, some things about 2020 were better than okay. You’re doing yourself a huge disservice to think otherwise.
Every plan starts with the “as is” because every journey begins with a starting point. If you don’t know where you’re at then it’s very difficult to know how you’re going to get to where you want to be.
You must be realistic about where you are starting from. Your “as is” should be an honest assessment of your current situation. The actions you took, and the actions you didn’t take, that contributed to you being where you are today. Don’t focus too much on the things that were out of your control in 2020. You’ll deal with them in the next step of the planning process.
With all the unanticipated events of 2020 it’s important to realize that there was still more within your control than there were things outside of your control. It’s just that for many of us, sometimes myself included, we stopped controlling the controllable and stressed about the truly uncontrollable areas of our lives.
We need to make certain our 2021 plan is solid enough that we don’t lose control of another year. We want to make sure that we are so focused on what we can control that we don’t have time to worry about what we can’t control. This series, which will run into early November will help with that.