The start of a new year is always a wonderful opportunity to stop, do a stock-take of your personal and professional life and begin to plan what that transformation for the new year might look like for you. You may even draw on the ideas in last month’s article by David Ivers entitled “Personal and Professional Transformation. The notion here, of course, is how do you plan to be the best iteration of yourself at home and at work, each and every day of the new year? However, the year is now 2020 and the second decade of the 2000’s has been and gone and a new decade has just begun.

As the last month of the calendar year finally arrives and we collectively celebrate the end of one year and the start of a new year, Raymond Carver’s question is so pertinent. As you look over the year that has been, ask yourself: “Was it the year that should have been?” In other words, when you go back to your wish list of dreams on 1 January of this year, “did you get what you wanted from this life, even so?” It is a wonderful question and turns our focus to purposeful self-reflection and to personal and professional transformation.