Your Best Year

Happy New Year to all! During January I plan to offer some ideas to encourage you in the pursuit of your best year ever.

One thing that has helped me approach each new year with enthusiasm and new hope for personal growth and success will sound rather strange - the ability to forget.

I know that learning from our mistakes and using what we learn is critical for growing as a person - in fact, I have learned more from my mistakes than from my successes. So how can forgetting be helpful? I am referring to the emotional and cognitive ability to let go of the past and move forward.

If you want to have your best year ever you cannot carry the weight of past failures or the distraction of past successes into the new year. The ability to forget is the experience of letting go - there is nothing that frees us more.

Paul used this expression in Philippians 3: "forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what is ahead."

Dwayne told me that he and a college friend had not spoken in 25 years because his friend borrowed some money and never paid it back. When I asked him if he ever sought to resolve the conflict he said no. So I said, "you chose to ignore the conflict, lose a friend, and carry this baggage for 25 years." He looked at me as if I had just doused him with a cold bucket of water - it was time to forget and move on and he knew it. What conflict is worth 25 years of your life? Later that day, he called his college friend and planned a time to have lunch and talk.

So as you begin this new year with all the challenges that are before you, employ your "forgetter" - let go of the baggage that can slow you and discourage you as you embrace the opportunities of a new challenge, new hopes, and new dreams for your life.

Check in each week this month for additional ideas to help you experience your best year in 2011.

My sincere hope for you is that this year will be your best year, with the help of our gracious God!

Just thinking, Steve Yates