The Truth About Loose Ends
There is something so ceremonial and celebratory about the final month of a year! It reaches far beyond the excitement of the holidays and the change of the seasons, and transcends into a mental checklist of what needs to be accomplished by year's end. New Year's resolutions for 2017 are fast approaching just as you are contemplating all that remains on your 2016 to-do list. Do you have a lot of loose ends in your business and in your life that you want to tie up by month's end?
It is important to finish your commitments and projects and adhere to actual end of year due dates. Beyond that though, let's face it...there is a lot of OTHER that appears for most of us as we hurl into December. The mental checklist of what you have started but not yet finished, your 2016 New Year's resolutions and promises yet to be addressed, the exercise classes, lunches, trips that you meant to take. Essentially, it is our mental to-do lists that contain most of those loose and incomplete ends.
The truth about tying up all those loose ends is that some of them are actually supposed to remain loose! As this year ends and another one unfolds, think of this not as one chapter ending and another beginning, but as a circle of events on the timeline of your life. That changes things a bit.
Why Randi?
Having some loose ends in your life is not because you have not done what you are supposed to do, or that you have somehow failed, but rather they represent possibilities, alternate routes, paths yet to try. They are loose as an asset, in order for you to remain flexible in how you approach them and work with them. Flexibility is at the heart of loose ends because flexibility is at the core of balance.
Ah...balance!
How many of you have asked me about having more balance in your lives this year? Loose ends left untied in December allow for a playground of experimentation in January. Experimentation and flexibility allow for change. No flexibility? Hard to have balance without being flexible to altering paths, twists and turns, and assessing what's next in your life in real time as it is happening.
Feeling like you have procrastinated? Do one small thing every week to redirect and connect, rather than tie up, whatever loose pieces remain on your mental to-do list.
Want to free yourself of broken promises? Make sure to access whether that promise is even valid for you now! Rework your goal so that each small piece of it is noted and rewarded. Reward the hills and the mountains will follow.
Looking for the right answers? The solutions that stick over time are often the ones you come up with yourself! What is your life saying to you? Take inventory on what is right in front of you. Chances are if you have not closed out some of your loose ends it is because there is a valuable teaching moment in them. Any common threads between mental to-dos's left undone?
By extension, if you are departing 2016 with a few loose ends, a few things undone...just think about the possibilities to expand upon those loose ends by tweaking and shifting them as you enter 2017! These things are "undone" for a reason. What a gift to figure out why! Ask yourself the following questions as you close out this year's mental to-do.
- Are these "yet to be completed" items on your list still in alignment with your aspirations?
- What does the 2017 version of a particular loose end look like? What's different?
- How can you try something different in order to take forward action on a specific task?
- Does changing course allow for you to redirect what's next and if so, what is it?
Wishing you and those you love the happiest holiday season! There is always a next...may you discover and rediscover yours!
