Look Back Before You Look Ahead

Jan 4, 2016

It’s that time of year when family and friends spend a lot of time traveling home for the holidays. Traffic increases and those hometown roads long under construction become a bit backed up. It’s easy to get frustrated. It’s easy to stare ahead with anxiety, begrudging those long lines of cars, wondering just how late we’ll be to our next event.

Traffic is annoying. Yet we’ve all been there – deeply pondering exactly which lane is moving the fastest and finagling ourselves into that one lane. Even if it’s a figment of our imaginations, we all like to take a proactive part in getting where we need to go, as quickly as possible.

lookingbackwardsAs we make these master maneuvers, stopping and yielding and speeding our way into the faster lanes of traffic, we habitually do this one tiny thing that keeps us safe and ensures our speedy lane shifts. We look back. We glance over our shoulder to make sure there are no cars in our blind spots.

We look behind in order to move ahead.

As we approach this New Year, before we look ahead at all the potential that 2016 holds for us, it’s imperative that we glance behind, one last time, lest we miss something important we didn’t originally see.

It’s those little life moments that can make or break our abilities to effectively move ahead – things like, relationships we forgot to follow up with, clients we accidentally neglected, promises we forgot to keep, situations we could have avoided, conversations we should have had.

Glancing back in order to glean all that 2015 offered us can enhance all that 2016 will be for us.

“My father taught me that you can you read a hundred books on wisdom and write a hundred books on wisdom, but unless you apply what you learned then its only words on a page. Life is not lived with intentions, but action.” ― Shannon L. Alder

Let’s embrace the lessons learned from this year – follow up and apologize, grow and forgive where necessary in order to move ahead. Let’s cover our blind spots with intentionality, learn, and take action in this New Year.

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