As we get ready for the New Year, it is common to set goals and resolutions for 2007. Yet, more importantly in getting ready for a New Year of growth and prosperity is to forgive yourself and others for past financial transgressions and mistakes. What is forgotten about when moving towards lofty goals is that past blame, hatred, anger, resentments, etc. will hold us back from reaching our goals.

How does forgiveness play a role? What we sometimes fail to understand is that an incident takes just a blink of an eye and then it is over. Someone may have cheated you, lied to you, or has done other things to you, yet the event itself is already in the past. We are the ones that carry it forward to today in regards to what we think it means about us.

For example, you may have not gotten a large raise or bonus from your boss last year. Thus, you feel unappreciated and may believe that you will never get ahead. Yet, you are going to give this job one last chance. You have your eyes set on a promotion that is set to open up later in the year and make your goal to get that promotion. A few months down the line you finish up an amazing project and pat yourself on the back. You wait and wait for your boss to congratulate you on the project, yet he never comes around. The feeling of being unappreciated from the snub for the raise comes back and you get angry at your boss. The next time he asks you for a favor, you answer back with an sarcastic attitude because you doubt that busting your butt will have any effect when he does not even recognize your work.

Note, the anger for not getting a raise is just boiling under the surface all year round ready to come out when you feel like a victim to your boss again. Your boss may actually have recognized all your hard work and was thinking about promoting you yet could not give you a raise due to his hands being tied and just forgot to say thank you for that project (you were never around when he went to your desk to say thank you). Yet, the sarcasm may have made him think twice about promoting you. Thus, our anger and resentments may have come back to bit you and thus should to be resolved to help you meet your goals.

You may think that this is a one-time situation that happens at work (and the boss is really a jerk). Yet, it can happen even on our budget goals:

For example, you may decide to save an extra $1,000 a year. In the past, something has always comes up that eats away at your savings. However, you are going to give this one last chance because saving up for an emergency fund is important. Even the statement (one last change) may sound angry due to the experience from the past on how life did you wrong. You find yourself moving towards your goal by saving $500 by mid-year. Then, you get in a little fender bender on the free way and need to pay a $500 deductible. I can imagine the words you would use when you got to pay the $500 deductible with the $500 in savings that you had worked so hard on. Yet, the bigger issue is that you just lost momentum to save and can’t get it back because this is how life always treats you (kicks you just as you get ahead). Thus, you give up your goal and spend any extra money that you get because what is the use saving it.

I hope you can see how anger and blame can sabotage your goals just as you are seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. The key is to release the anger and blame towards yourself and others (including life in general) and see that anger and blame aroused by how you reacted towards the event. In any one situation, someone may get angry while someone else may decide not to. The answer to meeting your goals instead of sabotaging it with blame is to decide how to react differently.

In the past, you may have gotten angry at your boss for not appreciating you. Yet, in reality, you are mad because a part of you did not appreciate yourself, first. As I told a client the other day, imagine if you had a Harvard education and someone calls you stupid. If you believe that you are not stupid, the words do not have any effect on you. Yet, if you believe it a little inside you, the words can make you angry at that person. It is important to note that you unconsciously believed at some level first.

What can you do to release the anger and blame? Forgiveness. Some people feel that forgiveness is giving the person permission to have done what they did. Yet, in reality, it only releases you from reliving the emotions (e.g., anger and frustration) from the event. So instead of helping others, you are helping yourself.

There are several forgiveness exercises including one that I wrote about earlier (click here). Other exercises include writing down what you want to forgive on a piece of paper and then burning the paper. Other exercises include writing down what and who you want to forgive every day for at least 7 days. Another exercise is about remembering that the incident is on a moment in time and that it is probably miniscule in the larger picture of life (especially if you believe in an after-life). Thus, it could be a statement like, I am a spiritual being and this event has no lasting impact on me.

Thus, as you start the New Year, take a few moments and think about what you want to forgive, so that it does not impact you in the current year.

On Monday, I wrote about being grateful for the bigger picture instead of resentful for the details of life. There is a gift to seeing the bigger picture. When we isolate on the day to day events, we can get stuck in the quagmire of details and issues. Yet, when we step back, we can see the beauty of life. Sometimes we can not see the impact of an event when we are stuck in the details. As time passes, we can see the lessons that we learned and how a single event can unfold to a beautiful master piece of life.

For me, two boys kicked a rock into my right eye when I was 5 years old where I am now blind in that eye. I could look back at the event as a travesty and be resentful. Yet, over the years, I have learned many lessons from the event. One of the most important lessons is that my feelings are not governed by the event but from my interpretation of the event. My anger about being blind was not due to the two boys but because of judgment of who I believed I was by being blind. Another lesson was forgiveness in seeing that it was not being blind in one eye that limited me (I know it seems small compared to others who have lost limbs), yet it was my beliefs that I created that limited me. When I was a child, New York State did not allow me to participate in high school sports due to being blind in one eye. Yet, when I did not allow being blind to stop me from playing intramural hockey later in life, no one could guess that I had only ½ my sight. So, in time, a single event in isolation can seem like a travesty. However, in the bigger picture, it has made me who I am and how can I complain about that.

In looking at our financial life, we can be upset over the rising prices of gas, college education, food, health care, etc. (the individual details) or be grateful for the beauty of life (having the freedom of choice to eat, work and worship where we want, having the experience of love and happiness, etc.). When we take events out of context of the large picture, we can be blinded by the illusion that events are either good or bad. We can learn that it is not the event that affects our state of mind, yet our judgments about the event. We can look at rising gas prices as bad or see it as a motivator to find new alternative fuels that will be cheaper in the future. We can see rising health care prices as bad or see that the higher prices are funding research for new procedures and drugs that are extending life. Or, we can see rising health care prices as a motivator to pursue preventative care (e.g., stop smoking programs, exercise programs, etc.) instead of using health care as a crutch for poor habits.

At the same time, being grateful for the individual things can lead to distress later as well. If we are grateful for our growing savings account or our children’s good grades, how would we feel if the financial markets change or our children start to slack off? Thus, if gratitude is based on what you have or do, it will lead to seeing events as either black or white (good or bad). If we are upset about our children’s behavior (e.g., slacking off or spending too much), we may miss the fact that having your children slacking off for a year and experiencing the consequences of their actions now is better than having them perform well only when someone is on their case (their parents for now and then their bosses). Sometimes learning experiences are done from making mistakes (what we consider bad). Thus, events are neither good nor bad; they just are (see Do You Judge Your Financial Situation?). This does not mean that we overlook negative situations either. If we are angry or upset about rising gas prices or our debt burden, we need to release the anger and practice forgiveness. Yet, we do not need to keep on going back to it either and wallow in the judgment.

In my article on Monday, I compared how life is easier today than it was for the Pilgrims to show that life is not as bad as some picture it is. In this analysis, I was isolating how specific instances are either good or bad rather than being grateful for the beauty of life which is still judging things (life is better today than 300 years ago). Thus, on this Thanksgiving, be grateful for the overall beauty of life instead of specific possessions because even if we judge a situation as good (something to be grateful for), we then judge other situations as bad.

Being the week of Thanksgiving, I started thinking about gratitude again. There are many things that we can be grateful. I am grateful for being able to spend so much time with my son while he is growing up and also grateful for The Ohio State Buckeyes winning on Saturday against Michigan. Sorry, but being from Cleveland there has not been too many other football moments to celebrate. At the same time, I also see how our society focuses on the negative instead of the positive. Part of this is the media knowing that we want stop to look over at a car wreck even though we also despise slowing down for rubberneckers who are looking at a wreck on the other side of the road. We may say that we want to be happy, yet when things are good we keep on looking over our shoulder waiting for the other shoe to drop. We say one thing (we want to be happy) yet find reasons that we are not.

I have discussed several times about what we think about expands. It goes to how we see our life. If we separate out what we see going wrong, we will not feel good about life when we are always trying to find something wrong. If you look at the news coverage, it picks out the special events that will get them the rankings while making people feel like they are unsafe, victimized and poor. We can see events about crime that gives us the impression that violence is rising, yet in reality crime rate can be falling. We can see how the middle class is having a harder time getting ahead with the increase cost of college and medical care. Yet, at the same time, more students are going to college and life expectancies have been rising.

What will finding things wrong and having resentments get us? I wonder how many people look at some stories of how hard life is (e.g., the unmanageable debt due to going to college) and then give up on their dreams because there is no use to get ahead. Yet, playing the victim role does not serve us in achieving our drams. So, why do we do we give up? Part of it is that we really do not believe how powerful we really are. I remember a time where a friend was driving down a road in an area deemed unsafe in Cleveland and stopped at an intersection. A man got into the passenger seat. Most people would freeze, think about recent car jacking stories and feel like a victim (“please do not hurt me”). Instead, she looked over and screamed “Get Out!” (she probably threw in another choice word or two as well). The man apologized and got out. The morale is that we can look at life at what is wrong and give up or know that we are more powerful than we believe we are and take action. Yet, if we keep on looking at what is wrong, we diminish our power. If we believed we could fix a problem, we would be fixing it instead of wasting energy of being resentful and blaming others for it.

Those that want to find problems and excuses will. The question is what do we focus on, individual details or the bigger picture. When we look at individual details, we may see more problems than there really are because they are easy to find if that is what we are looking for. I hear stories on how this generation may be the first ones not to have a better life than their parents. These stories make it sound like the sky is falling. Yet, as we have seen over the years, we have had times of expansion followed by things settling down and even taking a step backwards. After some time, things move forward yet again. The question on this week of Thanksgiving, do we want to see what we are grateful for or see how we may not be as better off than 6 years ago. We can see ourselves in debt and focus on that or find what we are truly grateful for.

I see how much we have to be grateful for especially looking at life compared to the first Pilgrims. We have religious freedom, equality and democracy that many people still do not have today all due to their actions. We have a life where living in poverty today is probably a lot easier than surviving their first winter here or living in some other countries today. Even with all the problems with medical care today, the uninsured receive better care than our grandparent’s generation. I am not saying that we can not do better. Yet, change comes from when we see how our action can affect the world versus how society is creating problems where we are resentful and feel trapped, just struggling to get by.