Your Best Year Yet!

Make the next 12 months your best ever!

Jinny Ditzler

• Publisher: HarperElement
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780007223220
• eBook ISBN: 9780007385300
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The ebook edition of this best-selling book. Your Best Year Yet is the perfect guide to help you realise goals and overcome last year’s limitations. The proven methods in the book will make this year into the most successful ever.

PART ONE

THREE HOURS TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE

INTRODUCTION

GOAL SETTING

Successful businesses set goals and plan ahead. They know that in order to generate the kind of important change and growth they’re looking for, they must identify their priorities each year and then focus the energies of their people in such a way that these goals are achieved.

The secret of realizing this kind of success for ourselves is the same – setting goals and planning our lives a year at a time. In this way we too can deal with the bigger issues, address the concerns that really matter to us and make the kind of important changes we really want to make.

You know about goals – we all do. We’ve set them and even been successful in achieving many of them. By the age of eight or ten we begin to get an idea of what we want in life. A picture begins to form in our minds of a degree, a job, a car, a house, a family … and as we move through our teenage years our goals become even more clear to us. Soon we’re 25 or 30 or 35 and we’ve achieved many of these early goals and trust we’re on the way to the others. And new goals are already forming in our minds.

However, as life goes on, goal-setting becomes a more casual and far less specific process – wants and desires seem to arrive and plant themselves in our minds almost before we realize it. We don’t often set goals within a one-year time frame, and we rarely make a conscious choice about which of our goals is most important to us. We can also find ourselves in pursuit of goals before we’ve really taken time to think them through, determine their real cost or consider what’s really important to us.

Maybe you’re in the habit of coming home exhausted and turning on the television rather than sitting at the table and sharing a meal with a loved one or listening to your favourite music or reading that book you’ve been longing to get to – or planning the next year of your life.

After the initial spurt of growing up and becoming an adult, most of us don’t stop to think about goals in the same serious way we did when we carefully planned our education, our career, our first place away from our parents. We begin to ‘follow our noses’, reacting to circumstances and meeting our immediate needs and the needs of those around us. All this becomes a full-time job and more.

Time goes by and soon we begin to feel our lives are out of control and there’s nothing we can do about it. Things which matter most to us aren’t getting enough attention and life gets frustrating. We feel we’re no longer in charge of our own lives.

In one of my recent ‘bibles’, Sogyal Rinpoche says,

If we look into our lives, we will see clearly how many unimportant tasks, so called ‘responsibilities’ accumulate to fill them up. One master compares them to ‘housekeeping in a dream’. We tell ourselves we want to spend time on the important things of life, but there never is any time.

There are things which have to be done and we feel we have no choice about it. And by the time we are finished doing everything that has to be done, we’re too tired to think of doing anything else. Gradually we become cynical about things like New Year’s resolutions and Lifetime Goals. Why bother? The thought that we could actually do something about our deepest frustrations just doesn’t occur to us any more. We give up on creating a life that is more meaningful and fulfilling and settle for what we have. We give up on ourselves and our ability to make things happen.

Yet part of us is unwilling to settle – the part that wakes up in the middle of the night worrying but also contemplating the things that matter most to us: What am I doing here? What have I really accomplished? Why can’t I make better use of my time? What can I do to take better care of my family? When is it going to be my turn? Surely there must be more to life than all these worries and frustrations? What’s the point?

Perhaps you’ll be listening to music or watching a play or film – for a time you’re lifted out of your busy life and moved to remember who you really are and what you want for yourself and those you love.

And then the music or the play is over and these important questions fade into the background, covered over by ritual doubts and fears. The day takes over, as it always does, and you don’t take the time to think about what you really want or how to make it happen if you did.

THE STRONGEST MOTIVATION FOR DOING BEST YEAR YET IS TO FIND THE WAY TO LIVE YOUR LIFE SO IT SHOWS WHAT REALLY MATTERS TO YOU – SO YOU ARE TRUE TO YOURSELF.

Probably you, like many, get frustrated and say ‘I’ve had enough!’ You set a goal and start to do something about making it happen, but then your drive fizzles out. Too often our most important goals are not set with the belief that they can really be achieved, so that before long we lose momentum. We’ve forgotten how to keep our attention on what we’ve accomplished rather than on our failures and mistakes. We forget how to live our lives remembering what we do well, and therefore stop building confidence in ourselves and our ability to succeed.

We human beings have an enormous capacity to remember our failures while forgetting our successes. The memory of our failures causes us to lower our sights and lessen our opinion of ourselves. We become frozen in the shadow of our biggest problems and can’t turn around to face them. While in parts of our lives we may be strong and capable, we seem to lose potency in the face of those concerns that cause us the most pain.

Here are examples of the kind of problems I’m talking about – many of them have been shared by clients and many I’ve faced myself:

• My relationship with my teenage son has gone astray: that brilliant, sparkling little man who used to run and jump on my lap and tell me everything seems lost to me. If I’d let myself think about it too long, I would weep.

• The success I’ve struggled towards for so long is here, but I’m working harder than ever and there’s no time to enjoy it. The days go by so quickly and I’m not making the best use of the time I have. The dream for which I sacrificed so much has dissolved.

• The body that used to bound up stairs and give me the energy to work and think for hours and hours seems to have run out of steam but there’s no time to get it back into shape – probably too late anyway.

• I seem to spend most of my time at the office in meetings, handling last-minute emergencies or dealing with other people’s problems. I can never seem to get around to sitting back from my job and thinking about the future and how we’re going to get ourselves out of some of these messes once and for all.

• I want to make my mark, I want my life to matter. How can I find more fulfilment in my job? Should I leave this job and find another one which gives me a better chance to do this? Why don’t I devote at least some of my time to causes I care about?

• I feel as if I’m chasing my tail most of the time. There’s always a deadline to meet and it’s always tomorrow. I know I should plan ahead and stop procrastinating as much as I do, but I don’t have time!

• What’s wrong with me? Why isn’t there one person in the world to love me and share my life? I don’t want to be alone.

• I feel stuck in this job – I’m going nowhere fast. They don’t realize how good I am and probably never will. But I really don’t know how to find something with a better future. I can’t figure out what to do, so I do nothing.

• Why can’t I find some time to ‘stop the music’ at least once a day to meditate and contemplate and let the noise of the TO DO list be silent for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Welcome
• Part One: Three Hours to Change Your Life
• Part Two: The Ten Best Year Yet Questions
• Part Three: The Best Year Yet Workshop
• Further Reading
• Testimonials
• Find Out More About Best Year Yet
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright
• About the Publisher