Each year before the turn of a new year, I sit and think about all of the things that happened to me in the last 12 months and what I’ve learned from them. Every year I have new goals, new successes and new heartaches and frustrations. However, it’s what you choose to do about all of the “new” things in your life that help you become a better person. It’s not easy, and learning things without a guide on how-to makes it even harder, but not impossible. My advice to you is to think of all the good and bad the past year has presented you with, and analyze how you dealt with every single situation. If you are happy about the way you handled it then you learned the best way for you to deal with a situation. If you aren’t, then you learned that how you handled it or what you did isn’t something you should do again. Regardless, you’re learning something and that’s what matters.

At the beginning of this year, I left a place I thought was going to be the best option for me to start the next chapter of my life, but it wasn’t. I met people there that I wouldn’t trade for the world, made memories I’ll never forget and learned a lot while I there. However, being there was not helping me grow because I wasn’t happy overall. That’s when I learned how to accept that things aren’t always what we think they will be. I left and started a new chapter in a place hundreds of miles away from there. I left a lot behind but I did it for the greater good for myself and no one else, which is something else I learned from the whole situation. It’s hard to leave something but it’s what you take from the situation that will make it easier.

This year a lost people in my heart as well. I lost a family member that I loved dearly and it was hard to accept that he was gone, but I learned how to mourn and continue with my life. I had a relationship end that was a major part of my life for years, and I learned how to move on from that and not let it tear me down. I distanced myself from friends that I felt weren’t helping me grow, and I learned how to make new friends and reach out to the people that I knew had my best interests at heart. Everything happens for a reason and so did the losses I had this year. Losing someone, losing a relationship, losing friends and losing a place I thought was my dream school was harder than I ever thought imaginable to deal with. I didn’t let all of these losses stop me from continuing with my life and that’s the best thing I’ve learned this year.

The best lessons I learned this year are that life is going to kick you down not just once or twice, or even three times, it’s going to kick you a bunch within a year’s time. It’s all about the way you cope with it that will help you learn something in the end. You can’t change things that have already happened and you can’t prevent things from happening all the time, but learning how to deal with everything is what really matters. Don’t do anything for anyone else, or to impress someone else, or to irritate someone else, do it for you. Make the best changes in your life to be successful and to achieve your goals each year by doing them for yourself because the reward and the feeling after is way better than if it were for someone else.

This is all the advice I have for 2016 and I wish you all a healthy, happy, and successful 2017.