As we approach year-end, don’t be too quick to sign-off on your plans for next year, if you haven’t yet thoroughly reviewed what happened this year.
As my coach and I were planning for my Olympic build-up in 1988, one of our key objectives was to arrive in Seoul, South Korea, and have absolutely no regrets leading up to that moment. We wanted to know that we had done everything possible – everything within my potential – to arrive at that moment, the night before my race, and know we had done all things well. I wanted to race that day with no regrets.It’s vitally important that we do that as well, as advisors and as people. As we get to the end of the year [we want] to be able to look back and reflect upon it and learn from it, especially as we’re receiving a lot of encouragement about planning for the new year and talking about goals and objectives, as I talk about too. But, oftentimes we’re not encouraged to reflect back and look at what we wanted to do and some of the things we wanted to aspire to achieve within our business, within our lives, and realize we didn’t take those steps when we should have taken them.I’m a big fan of Gary Keller’s book, The One Thing, and as I was re-reading this for about the fifteenth time, came back to this page that says this:“When people look back on their lives, it is the things they have notdone that generate the greatest regret . . . . People’s actions may be troublesome initially; it is their inactions that plague them most with long-term feelings of regret. . . . So make sure every day you do what matters most. When you know what matters most, everything makes sense. When you don’t know what matters most, anything makes sense. The best lives aren’t led this way.” [Have] no regrets [when] you move forward.
As I mentioned, that’s exactly what we had for my Olympic swim. And that’s what you need to be having as we roll into 2020 – deciding that when you arrive at December 12, 2020, one year from today, you’ll have no regrets. So what do you need to do to ensure that you arrive there knowing that?
You need reflect back on this year – 2019 – and think about some of the initiatives that you might have considered adding into your business that you knew would really bolster it and make it even more effective. Or, maybe you had a fitness regimen that you wanted to start implementing so you felt better, so you felt healthy, but didn’t quite get to it. I’ve heard all the excuses and reasons. Regardless, think about those key, core items that you wanted to implement into your life this year. Why didn’t they happen? What got in the way? Analyze exactly what went wrong and really had you procrastinating and finally not implementing those tasks, ideas and projects. What are those tasks, ideas and projects that you now have the opportunity to begin 2020 fresh and begin implementing them, so that by December 12, 2020, you can then look back on next year and be standing here with absolutely no regrets.It’s a phenomenal way to live. It puts you out front and has you achieving exactly what you are able to achieve most: your fullest potential where loads of people are impacted postively and you know you’ve put your best foot forward and done the greatest job you could do.
