The year 2021 has dawned. It’s time to rethink whether turning over a calendar is going to turn over a new leaf in our lives as well. Certainly NOT! Though 2020 will primarily be remembered as a uniquely dented phase perhaps in the century, brutally crumpled by the COVID-19 pandemic across the globe, yet there are many negatives, which can be merged sanely to create positives out of them. It is well known that every night eventually turns into a new day dawning upon new hopes and aspirations so do a new year that brings along many new opportunities needed to be seized or even pounced upon as soon as we perceive them. The dual challenge, which lies ahead with the coming year, will be about coping up with the problems created by the COVID in 2020 and in our standard operating procedures about how to create new opportunities with the New Year 2021 to change our fortunes, neutralize depressing atmosphere besides thriving through our lives. Zeroing in on every day in the New Year as a new day bundled with a new opportunity will certainly prompt us to set new goals with new attitudes and perceptions, gradually empowering us to come up trumps impressively at the end of the year. Here are some of the tips to cross out the clouds of pessimism fanned by the COVID and emerge as a winner in the coming year across all spectrums of life.
• Keep New Year Resolutions Alive
Are you au fait with the fact that only 40% of people succeed in keeping their New Year resolutions after six months pass of their self-swearing ceremony to adopt new habits and abandon bad ones? A right, beginning, cogent and coherent, is half did so ensure that what you think as a new resolution should come into practice straight off and must be sustained through the year come what may.
• Set plausible goals
Setting genuine and achievable goals are as important as prioritizing them with a rational mind. You can’t crest Mount Everest in one leap without going through the needful training.
• One step at a time
Rome can’t be built in a day, therefore there is no need to rush through your actions or jump the gun to achieve your goals in a day. If your goal is big, break it into smaller chunks and approach each part with an individualistic outlook. Only when you are able to cross past the first impediment, move on to the next one.
• Disrupt your embedded routines
To bring about any kind of change, you need to be essential and inextricable part of that change. Outlining your everyday routines especially those that pull you back followed by their replacement with new relevant productive ones will help you disrupt your old habits and channelize your finite energy and willpower in the right direction.
• Open your third eye
The third eye, in this context, is symptomatic of your own inner conscience keeping fast track surveillance on your day to day activities and ringing ominous alarms in the case you take a wrong turn in your journey to change. This sort of introspection would authorize you to set your actions right preventing all your functional flaws from spinning out of control.
• What’s NEW in the NEW YEAR?
Ask this question to yourself in the mirror and recall all those things vicariously in your mind what you always wanted to do but couldn’t do it for some reason or another. It may include anything like moving from a rented to your own home, getting married, planning a baby, buying a new car, injecting new healthy eating and fitness habits or spending time communing with nature by fishing on the lake, watching birds perched on the treetops soaring high into the air, or indulging in the eyeful treat of a flock of cattle grazing on the open meadows in some rustic settings and to name a few.
Most of us pass away our lives in working full hours, finding it extremely excruciating to juggle our personal, professional, social lives with raising children. We are humans, not jugglers who don’t get time to focus on their own self since they are occupied with tossing tangerines up in the air putting their entire focus on aerial balancing. So take a pause, look back upon your gone by year as a lesson for life as to how it could have been made better and carry forward it to the coming one with new enthusiasm planning and completing all sorts of stuff which somehow you couldn’t do in the previous year.
Wishing all readers a very ebullient, flourishing and refulgent New Year.
Dr. Muskan Nagi
Assistant Professor
Gulf University, Bahrain