FIERY LASHES, CHILL PILLS

Hello everybody, 

I hope you're feeling fine? Hello everybody; I hope you're feeling, feeling, feeling, I hope you're feeling fine?

Welcome to today's gist. 

Like play like play, 2023 don dey finish oo! I can still remember how the year started, very vividly sef because I been sick, and now we're counting days till we're done with the year. 

One thing I believe most of us can agree on is that this period after Christmas and before the New Year is one that can typically drive a person to despondence; typically we are advised, an advice that I support by the way, to take time to review the year, to take notes on the mistakes you've made and chart a course for the future. 

But it's also the time where we can fall very quickly into the temptation of comparison. You see this period where you're taking stock of your year, there are a lot of others doing the same thing and there'll definitely be aspects of their year that they would want to celebrate and maybe post on social media, or maybe even gist you about. At that point, the temptation to begin to wonder why your life isn't like theirs or why you're not doing those kind of things thay they're doing becomes really high. Because like you, dem sef get only one head!

But give me one minute, or maybe 5 minutes😉, and let's talk real quick. You really must never forget that youre not them; you did not, and maybe still don't, have access to the opportunities they've had, there may have been other reasons that you were unable to do certain things, reasons that are definitely not as a result of laziness or the lack of a desire to progress.

I'm not saying that you should make unnecessary excuses for yourself, I'm not saying that you should be lackadaisical about your life and future and chalk it up to the absence of similar opportunities. What I am saying is that as you take stock of 2023, be realistic with yourself: what are the things you honestly could have done better but you didn't? Berate yourself for those and resolve to do better. What are the ones you would have done if you had access to the opportunities? Give yourself grace and resolve to do something about getting yourself in the places that'll make these opportunities available to you in the coming year. What are those big wins you had this year? Celebrate them with your full chest! They're a testament of your grit. And the 'little' wins, those ones that you feel are really insignificant and anybody could have done it too, or in fact 'anybody' did do it too, celebrate those wins loudly too. 

The essence of reviewing your year is neither to kill your self esteem nor to enable laziness, it is to learn from your experiences in the 12 months of the year and to take those lessons into the new year so that you do not make the same mistakes. 

In the event that you need tips on how to review your year, I'll just tell you how I do mine. I take time to count all my wins, I write them down and give myself a pat on the back for them. Then I go to my plans for the year and analyze each one, noting whether or not I accomplished them and to what degree the accomplishment was done. I write the reasons I accomplished or failed to accomplish them, really objectively I might add, and then I write down what I could have done better and how I should do it better in the next year. This usually takes me a while to do, but I've found that at the end of this exercise, I'm really pumped about the coming year and feel really equipped to tackle it. 

I hope that as we take stock of the year, we balance between giving ourselves fiery lashes and taking chill pills so that in the end, we come out better persons for the exercise. 

Love,

Achenyo.