Holy s#$%. That was quite a year. 2016 was wild. It was hectic and chaotic, filled to the brim with gorilla memes and especially unexpected presidential results.

Part of me feels like the way 2016 is ending is how an epic car chase movie scene ends. There’s a car in the background on fire and right in front, strutting her stuff is a badass woman walking away like her work has been accomplished. She’s confident, intense, and most importantly-in control.

Since my life is slightly more tame than that I’ll have to stick to the reality that yes-I’m walking away from this year with epic life lessons that have taught me more than I could have ever imagined-but they certainly didn’t involve how to go about an action scene wearing high heels.

2016, just like any year, brought tears, laughter, loss, and change. Yet this year something big was different and that was my mindset. I decided to change everything about how I saw my life and how I was living it and in turn it changed my life and how I am living it into this beautiful, positive, and interactive way of living.

Here’s what I did:

 

1. I learned how to fall in love with myself

Yes it sounds narcissistic but no I don’t sit in a mirror and tell myself how pretty I am all day. Falling in love with yourself doesn’t mean you think you s*$# doesn’t stink. It means that you have complete and total respect, loyalty, and confidence in yourself. It means that you’ll stick up for yourself if someone is trying to take advantage of you. It means that you’ll actually go for your dreams because you have the biggest support system around-you. It means that you become true to who you are inside and not who you feel like on the outside. It means that you 100% care for and nurture yourself so that you can honestly be the best version of yourself all the time.

2. I learned the importance of doing things I like to do everyday

At the beginning of the year I wasn’t a happy camper. If someone had asked me I would have said I am genuinely unhappy with my life. I had an epiphany one day that in order to like my life I had to do things that I liked It sounds so obvious but so quickly we forget that we have to feed ourselves good energy in order to be able to give it to others. This year I learned that I have to do at least one thing that I really like to do every single day in order to feel fulfilled, happy, and productive. It has absolutely changed everything.

3. I learned to set small goals

I’ve always wanted a big epic career. I want to work hard for it and I want to create something beautiful, original, and positive. Yet when you tell yourself I want this big, huge massive dream of mine to come true but I have no idea how to get there, it ends up making you feel pretty crummy. So I did something different. I broke it down. I said here’s my end goal AND here is a step by step list of how I get there. I now have daily, weekly, monthly goals that I want to achieve that will all eventually add up to my biggest dream. This realization is the singlehanded most productive tool I have used to get myself closer to accomplishing my big goals and dreams.

4. I learned to be who I wanted to be

Huh? Let me break it down. There’s who you are now and then there’s the person that you picture yourself to be in a few years when you have everything that you think you want to have. For me, I saw myself as I was today and then I saw myself as I was after accomplishing my career goals as two different people. Lightbulb moment…I could be accomplished-career-Eva today, right here right now. I didn’t need the big epic career to do the things that accomplished-career-Eva did. I could have a solid gym routine now, I could eat healthier now, I could wake up earlier now, I could hustle for my dreams now, and I could be the genuine and trustworthy person that I wanted to be right now. I started to embrace this and act as she would, talk as she would, read like she would, spend money like she would and it has been an insane catalyst for my dreams to start to materialize in front of me.

5. I learned that everyone (including myself) is just trying their best

I sometimes forget that my parents weren’t given a “How To Raise A Good Child” manual when I was born and that they had to use everything that they had previously learned to try to raise a semi decent human being. I’ve realized this more as I see friends and siblings have children and I make the connection that they don’t know what they are doing, they’re just trying their best. My parent’s have no idea how to parent a 24 year old. They’re just doing their best. My coworkers are just doing their best. My friends are just doing their best. I am just doing my best. When I look around and I see people everywhere just trying their best to live good lives and to make themselves and others happy, it makes me see the human inside of them and it makes me realize how infinitely connected we all are. It makes me stop judging people. It makes me give everybody a chance. It makes me compassionate. It makes me a better person.

 

There’s something about 2016 that was epic. For me, it changed everything. I am now living a life that is completely different than I was in 2015 and I have to chock it all up to these gravely important life lessons that I encountered.

There’s no way that I could have ever felt like that badass woman walking away from a fiery car wreck in stilettos and a Gucci jacket in 2015, but 2016 has me feeling some type of way.

With these lessons you can take 2017 by the horns and take control. Live life genuinely, honestly, and passionately and you’ll find yourself walking out of 2017 in those same stilettos and Gucci jacket, tossing the keys over your shoulder and heading straight for 2018.