As we enter the final two months of the year, it is a great time to step back and look at your life and ask yourself what you would like to improve.

Doing this exercise now means you have the time and space to develop a strategy to introduce changes to your life that will begin a journey toward becoming the person you want to be.

No life is perfect; we all have our strengths and weaknesses. But, sometimes, we become more aware of our weaknesses than our strengths, which can drain our sense of well-being and happiness. However, we have the power to change anything we want within our lives and to turn a perceived weakness into a strength.

Let’s imagine you are terrible at managing email. If you spent a little time over the next two months to review your email processes, develop and refine your approach and come up with a different method that works, you have taken something you felt beyond you and turned it into a strength. You can then teach that new process to your colleagues and share the knowledge.

Another common area people need help with is being too willing to say yes. That three-letter word has done more damage to an individual’s productivity than anything else. What could you do to become less willing to say yes? What could you do over the next two months to learn to say “no” more than “yes”?

A new year offers us immense opportunities to change our lives. While you can make changes at any time, the start of a new year always feels like something new, which is why it is a great time to change old habits.

However, to make changes, we first need to know what needs changing, which is why using the final months of a year to assess where you are, where you feel great and where you feel there needs to be improvements.

One area for me that needs reviewing is my exercise. I exercise every day most of the time. However, there are periods when I fall away and struggle to stay consistent. While I accept there will be a few days each year when I may be tired and require rest, these periods are often two or three months. 2021 was a particularly bad year for me as I went almost six months without getting into my stride, and exercise felt like a chore and not something I enjoyed doing.

Reviewing this, I realised I needed to create some goals/milestones. That could be a race or a weight target. All I required was something every three months to challenge myself. Now, I alternate between preparing for a race, whether 10 km, half-marathon, full marathon, or weight training goal. I also take advantage of the thirty-day months. Whenever I start a 30-day month, I will do a 30-day challenge. November is focused on stretching every day (I’ve recently developed some back pain owing to a lack of flexibility in my core and legs)

There’s always something in our lives we are not entirely happy with, and the final two months of the year give you a chance to review your whole life and see where you would like to make some changes.

Over the years, I’ve decluttered my closet. I embarked on a minimalist project around three years ago, which has been refreshing. It’s surprising how much stuff we collect and never throw away. This was a gratifying project, resulting in me changing my approach to what I purchase. I began with my clothes and then moved to other stuff I had.

Now, I have a set of rules for purchasing things like clothes. The first rule is I only buy natural fibres. That means the only fabrics I can buy are cotton or wool (and silk). The second rule is if I purchase a new item of clothing, an old item of clothing must be thrown away. (The only exception here is with exercise clothing — there, I do purchase non-natural fibres)

So, in these final two months of the year, create a list in your notes app and write out everything you would like to improve or change in your life. Right now, you do not need to make any commitments. All you want is a list of things you want to change. The chances are the list would be too long for one year, and that’s fine.

When deciding what you would like to change, select two or three things from your list and commit to making the changes.

Have fun with this. It’s all about self-improvement and working on yourself to become the person you want to be.

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