Happy New Year and Welcome to 2015!

As the co-founder of Freedom Personal Development, I want to personally help you usher in the New Year with a bang, so here a few tips for shaking out the holiday cobwebs and getting back on track professionally and personally after a break.

Either Celebrate or Mourn, but either way……

…learn the lessons that were there. If you finished last year on a high note, great! Make sure and celebrate that victory in whatever fashion you feel appropriate. If last year was not what you hoped it would be, there is value there too. Whatever the results were, the truth is it was most likely less than 2% of your Life.

The real value is what you learned and how you grew. There is a world of difference between 10 years of experience and 1 year of experience 10 times. One will bring you inexorably toward a Life of meaning and greatness, where the other will only frustrate you. If you have not done so already, take one or two highlights and one or two “lowlights” from 2014 and ask yourself what lessons you can take away and apply.

Wipe the Slate Clean

The great thing about the New Year is that it is new! You, along with everyone else, get to start over again at zero and build whatever you want with these 365 days. You know that saying that “today is the first day of the rest of your life”? Well it has never more appropriate than at the beginning of a new year.

So what does this mean for you? Do you need to forgive yourself? Do you need to quit resting on your laurels? Or do you simply need to dive back into non-holiday living and get back to basics? Whatever your answer- DO THAT immediately! You will literally feel a weight lifting off of you.

Create it Twice – Consciously

Stephen Covey talks about how everything is created twice, once in our minds and once in our external reality. Our external results are largely a symptom of how consciously we created our vision mentally. So if you did not do it at the end of last year, make sure to take time ASAP to set some goals, dream some dreams and make some plans for the coming year. Give yourself an anchor to come back to in spring, summer and fall. It will be the most valuable investment of time this whole year, I promise.

Now Go!

A mentor of mine once said that there are two ways to get into a cold swimming pool. One way is that you can “test the water” with your toe and ease in slowly. If you have ever done this, you know that this is infinitely more painful and agonizing than the second way which is to take a deep breath, brace yourself and DIVE IN. Fully engage in it and make the most of it, starting this minute.