Happy New Year and welcome to 2009!

As the 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 wasn’t what you hoped it would be, there’s 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’s 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 haven’t done so already, take one or two highlights and one or two “lowlights” from 2008 and ask yourself what lessons you can take away and apply.

Wipe the Slate Clean

As you’re reading this, there’s one word for 2008 – HISTORY!!! The great thing about the New Year is that it’s 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’s 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’ll 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 didn’t 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’ve 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. Whether you like it or not, 2009 is here. Fully engage in it and make the most of it, starting this minute.

I hope you put these strategies to use and I hope you enjoy your experience with us this year. As a company we’ve got some great things planned for 2009 and some of them may impact you and your family directly. We’ll be bringing Memory Training Workshops to 5 new cities in North America this year, so stay tuned to the newsletter to find out where. We’ll also be bringing our programs on Goal Setting, Attitude, Time Usage, and Speed Reading to more markets, so be on the lookout. We’re super excited about getting to know you better in the coming months, so let’s make it a tremendous 2009.

Be Free!

Roger Seip
Instructor