3 Best Things of Your Year (how to have more positivity)

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Between Christmas and New Year

At the time I write this, we are in the ‘dog end’ of the year; the period between Christmas and the New Year. It is a time when you tend to look forward to the coming year and also look back over the past year. The past year, 2020 in this case, has certainly been a historical year and one during which it has been hard to find positivity.

I am of an age when I can look back and reflect on this time of year across many decades of my life. In particular, though, I am drawn to a period when I was living in Worcester and was a member of a social club in the city. The club among its members had many single, lonely, and isolated members who struggled at times to remain positive about life and themselves. When you have been through difficult relationships, it can be hard to maintain a positive attitude or sometimes even to see the positives among overwhelming difficulties. I know that I certainly felt this way many times.

A Trick to Help Your Positivity

One little ‘trick’ which I used to help maintain positivity, and which I shared with other members of the club, was at the end of the year to purchase a bottle of champagne. This bottle was not bought to celebrate the new year but was put in the fridge. The idea was that when something positive occurred in the coming year, I would have a bottle of champagne ready to celebrate. This, to my mind, constitutes a good, positive, and forward-looking approach; does it not?

Then, one time I came to store some shopping in my fridge and I realised there were six bottles of champagne filling up a shelf. In fact, there were six and a half bottles; one year my money had been tight and I could only afford a half-bottle of champagne. Six and a half bottles of champagne in the fridge, what did that tell me?

It told me that for seven years, nothing good or positive had happened in my life. Either that or I had failed to recognise and celebrate the positives. Clearly, my approach had not been working in the way I had intended.

Having realised that my approach was not having the desired effect, I had to draw up an alternative. Before that, though, I had six and a half bottles of Champagne to drink.

Six and a Half Bottles of Champagne Later

Over the following months, I came up with an alternative approach that could get people, including myself, to look at positive aspects of their lives. This was to be a simpler approach, more direct, and more personal. It was also to be cheaper than a bottle of champagne.

In its essence, the new approach was simply to ask a person to list the three best things that had happened to them in the past year.

We have to accept that some years are worse than others; sometimes a person’s year could even be considered a ‘bad’ one. However, when we reflect upon any year we are likely to find some ‘good’ or ‘positive’ aspects and events that occurred within it. Sometimes these might only be small events, ones that are easily overlooked especially in a ‘bad’ year. It doesn’t matter how small they are, though; by recognising and acknowledging them, it helps a person to see positivity in what they might otherwise declare to have been a ‘bad’ year.

I feel we can all agree that it is easy, too easy, to focus on the bad or negative experiences in our lives. We may often completely overlook any good events and experiences. In doing so, we risk viewing our life only with negativity.

A Simple Approach

Having devised this simple approach or activity, what I used to do for several years was to ask members of the club to share with me their three best ‘things’ of the past year. This became a standard feature in our meetings around Christmas and New Year. Some people seemed to like it while others seemed to go out of their way to avoid me!

Sure, there were many people who’d say that they felt there had not been three good things, … others might complain that it had been a completely bad year, … and others who might find one or two goods things but struggle to list all three. Faced with these rebuffs, I reminded people that it did not have to be a big thing or a major event, even small good things counted.

Almost everyone could find their three good things for the past year. Some people took longer and needed more thinking and analysing than others. Almost all, in the end, felt more positive about their past year and, more importantly, about themselves.