It's now 2018, and often, I reflect with other people on the passing year. Many have told me that they did not have a great 2017. Personally, 2017 was a great year for me. I was able to help raise $4,500 for charity, complete a 1.2 mile swim in a triathlon (quite a feat; I am not a natural born swimmer), and just become a better person overall.

Self-improvement is something I started focusing on back in 2010 - 2011. I had just exited college without a degree and from a failed relationship all by my own doing. I carried a lot of guilt in those years for making naive decisions based off of superficial goals. 4 years of my life and I quit it all in the last seconds!

Life was not going my way and I had lost all sense of navigation. That was a lot to bear for a 23-year-old whose entire plan was to find the girl, graduate college, and get a steady job right away. None of that happened. I had felt like a failure for the first time with absolutely no network of support around me anymore.

Indeed, those were very tough, long, arduous years that I absorbed, but I do not blame that younger version of myself. In fact, I love the person I was then to lead me to who I am today. I am certain, had I completed all of my life goals at 23, I would truly have not grown and matured into anything that I authentically liked.

An epiphany moment came to me during those tough years. A lot of narrative ordinarily occurs in our mind, but when things are not going well, it becomes negative narrative and there was a lot of it that I was swallowing.

Most people around us seem to point our fingers towards political and presidential leadership. I was daydreaming about what our country would be like if it had a president like John F. Kennedy, to whom, I had envisioned and learned to be a great leader of recent times. A thought occurred to me as I was in this process.

"Trey, if you were under good leadership, would you be able to even recognize it, and are you the person you want to be whenever that leadership comes around?"

It had clicked for me! Even though I had felt there wasn't great leadership surrounding me, whether that was a fact or not doesn't matter, I was not the person I that I needed to be, nor did I feel like I was in the direction of becoming that person.

In that moment, a re-dedication, born out of grace, came to me to be ready for this. Great people are often bred out of difficult times. So, in years of commitment to myself and being an authentic human being, I found that the leader I had been craving was simply me.

Good luck with your aspirations, for this year and many years to come, whatever they may be!