Most people shy away from looking back over the last 12 months of their lives because for so many people, they find there's nothing much to report. In fact, the main thing may not be that there's nothing much to report, but rather that they're somewhat ashamed to admit that they didn't achieve or reach what they intended to at the beginning of the year.

For many, there's a tendency to sweep whatever went on in the last 12 months and hide it all away so the new, fresh, hot of the press NEW YEAR won't be tainted in any way because let's face it, no-one in their right mind would want to start a fresh year with the pain of regret from a year that really didn't live up to much.

However, what I invariably find is that those who ARE successful (in whatever area of life) are those who take the good with the bad and who really aren't afraid of honest appraisal or a truthful review of what really went on.

And I hope you didn't skip that last bit about taking the good with the bad because that little sentence is the simple key that allows a person to move forwards with grace and ease (despite any drawbacks, hiccups or backfires they may have experienced throughout the last year)...

Or... that same sentence blocks a person from fully realizing their true worth and value.

So, the first act of boldness and courage in reviewing the last 12 months is to simply... tell the truth. And there's nothing more powerful and there's nothing more attractive when we stand in the presence of our beautiful truth - no matter how horrible or grotesque it looks.

And when the truth is finally unveiled, what we find is that there's the sweet release of months of accumulated pent up feelings and thoughts.

So if we find that there was too much time spent on things that brought no income or no solid business building foundation or no learning or no commitment to the goal we set, and all this comes out of our search for the truth, we can then work from a baseline of clarity and transparency in order to fix things for the coming period.

Not knowing, or should I say not wanting to acknowledge all the above, is pretty much like pouring a cool fresh glass of water into a jug that has cloudy, misty dirty water already in it and you expect to be drinking only the cool fresh water.

We hate to acknowledge the muck that's going on in our lives.

Okay, so what are some of the key questions we should be asking ourselves to really investigate what happened over the last 12 months?

Well, what I find is that the simpler the question, the closer to the truth we get.

So, you'll find a number of questions below that will help you get a true picture of how your life really looked over the last 12 months

1. What went well?
2. What are you most proud of (your number one achievement)?
3. What would you not want to repeat?
4. What you learnt?
5. Where was your biggest frustration?
6. What one thing did you put off that would have been easy to do that would have affected your health and your wealth for the better?
7. Could you explain to someone else how much time you dedicated to your important projects?

Now of course, this is a bite sized summary of how to approach the whole process and you can get as thorough and as detailed and as dedicated as you'd like with all this but the most important thing is that you do what's suitable and appropriate to you.

Create a template of questions like the above and perform the necessary discipline to really go through the exercise for that's really the only way to know what's working in your life... and... what's not.  

And I can promise you one thing that if you don't review what went well and what didn't go well over the last 12 months, you may find that you're simply living life, going through the motions with no real idea of how good your life can really become; not knowing what effective habits you want to keep or the destructive habits you'd like to throw away.  

And I know, it's easy to skip all this and to leave it to another day, to have it all sink in the moment you read it and then leave it aside on the hard drive so you can get back to it later. I know, it's easy to do that.

But you know, it's also very easy, to do the opposite of all that. It's very easy to look at all this and say that if I simply approach this all in a logical and simple way then I really can alter the circumstances of my life... I really can change my life for the better if I simply do these simple little writing exercises.

And it's amazing that when you catch fire with all this, when you assign yourself the little task of changing your life by doing these exercises, your life can explode into a whole new dimension that you may have not experienced before.

Again I say the quality and beauty of your life is in the simple process of logically approaching the exercise outlined above. Try it. See what comes out of it. See what changes happen inside you. See the reality and the beautiful truth come out before your eyes. And yes, no matter how painful or how ugly the whole thing looks when you go through the exercise, the better you'll be because of it. 

It's better knowing that you've spent endless, mind sapping hours browsing the Internet with nothing to show for it, than in not acknowledging it and to continue on with this destructive habit...

It's better knowing that you've been struggling to create a website than saying nothing about it and hope that the current discomfort you feel about it will have gone once the New Year comes around... 

It's better knowing what your successes where... and understanding the process you went through instead of going along thinking it was all guesswork and trial and error and it came because of divine intervention.

It's better just knowing what happened during the last 12 months. Why not do it too? I think you'll uncover a few surprising revelations when you do.