I am breaking my normal routine of blogs to bring you a New Year's Message. I hope you find it beneficial!
NEXT PITCH!!
Welcome to the year 2008! I hope 2007 was great for you and your family. Some of you may be thinking it could have been better for you in some way. Maybe you just weren’t the best “you” you could be last year. Maybe you gave up some good habits that were beneficial to you. Maybe you started some bad habits that you know are not in your best interest. Maybe you’ve let a relationship slide into oblivion. Are you where you want to be physically? Are you where you want to be spiritually? Or, maybe you’ve been living on the cutting edge, but you know you need to “step it up” a notch? You may have done well, but you know the only way to coast is downhill, and that’s not what you want.
Whatever your life has been like for the last 365 days, the truth is, the past is the past. It’s like a baseball pitcher who lets a fastball rip. Once it leaves his fingertips, whether it ends up for strike 3, or over the left field fence for a home run, he can’t do anything about it. All he can focus on is the next pitch. No matter what our highs or lows were last year, all we can focus on is the next “pitch” or next step in life. The New Year always brings about a great opportunity to re-focus on that next pitch.
Sometimes though, we get overwhelmed thinking about what we might want to accomplish in the next 12 months. A pitcher could get overwhelmed too if he looked at the entire batting order and thought “I have to get this entire lineup out 3 times to win the game”. He may forget to focus on one pitch at a time. It’s like the old adage, “you can only eat an elephant one bite at a time”. Break your goals down into chunks of short term goals for better results. “I’ll eat one more piece of fruit every day this week than I used to eat” for instance. “I’ll walk 3x a week for 2 weeks, and then try for 4x a week”. Wherever you start doesn’t really matter, just start. Just take that first bite of that elephant, just throw that first pitch, and no matter what happens after you throw it…..focus on the “next pitch”!! 365 days from now, you may just be looking at a “new YOU”!
