The New Year is coming in a few days. You are likely already planning the miracle changes for the next one. You want to lose fat. You want to earn more money. You want to finally launch that private practice. You want to travel.
You’ve written your well-defined desired outcomes, and perhaps even used our ACHIEVE framework to enhance them.
You treat the future like a blank space waiting for your performance.
We usually view self-improvement as a game of addition. We stack new habits and higher demands on top of a foundation that is already cracking. We try to drive the car faster without releasing the handbrake.
Before you demand one more ounce of output from yourself, you must address the accumulated debt. The most important resolution you can make involves a single, rational act: radical self-forgiveness.
You carry this debt everywhere. You hide it well behind professional competence and social grace, but it stays there. It lives in the pit of your stomach. It keeps you awake when the distractions (phone, internet, politics, etc.) don’t distract you long enough.
Think about the mistakes you’ve made. You know exactly which ones I mean.
Forgive yourself for the cowardice. You remember the moments when you needed to speak. You needed to defend your work or assert a boundary. Instead, you stayed silent. You smiled while someone diminished you. You prioritized the comfort of others over your own dignity. You betrayed your own values to avoid a moment of conflict. That betrayal stings longer than the argument ever would have.
Forgive yourself for the hesitation. You saw the opportunity clearly. The window stood open. You felt the impulse to jump, but you waited. You calculated the risk until the window closed. You watched someone less capable but more daring take the position you earned. You let fear dictate your outcome.
Forgive yourself for the cruelty. You hurt people who trusted you. You spoke words that sliced deep because you felt pain and wanted to distribute it. You walked away from people who loved you because you felt unworthy of that love. You stayed in relationships that poisoned you because you feared the idea of loneliness.
Forgive yourself for the wasted time. This one hurts the most. You look back at weeks or years spent in a fog. You drifted. You numbed yourself with escapism while your potential stagnated. You woke up older, yet not wiser or better or stronger.
This accumulation creates drag. In NLP terms, you attempt to build a propulsion system toward the future while you remain anchored to these failures. Your brain uses past reference experiences to predict future outcomes. When your dominant reference points consist of regret and shame, your brain predicts more of the same. You try to visualize success, which excites you for a couple of weeks, but your body remembers the failure.
You cannot berate yourself into a better version of yourself. What can you do? You need to see the distorted data before you can clean it.
Take a sheet of paper. Do this alone.
Make a list of your regrets. Write down the big betrayals. Write down the small embarrassments. Include the financial mistakes. Include the relational disasters. Include the moments where you shrank when you should have expanded.
Do not edit. Do not justify. Just list them.
Once the list exists outside of your head, look for the patterns. Notice how they group together.
You might see a category of “fear of rejection.” You might see a cluster of “lethargy” or “lack of motivation.” You might see that eighty percent of your regrets tie back to a specific relationship dynamic or a single phase of your life where you lacked resources (“that childhood trauma”).
This turns a vague sense of shame or guilt into concrete data. You chunk down the scary black cloud. At this scale, it is manageable and you can work on it. Now, you apply the tools. You understand how the body stores these memories. You can use somatic release to discharge that energy.
You’ve learned in your NLP training about time distortion. Float above your timeline. Look at that younger version of you. Realize they operated with the limited resources and awareness they possessed at that time. View that behavior through a filter of curiosity.
Re-orient your attention filters. Shift from an “Away From” strategy where you run from your past mistakes to a “Toward” strategy. Change that underlying structure. Future pace. Focus on the person you become once you stop holding on to this useless friction.
Establish a propulsion system that generates inevitable forward motion. This way you rely on mechanical consistency rather than temporary willpower or discipline to sustain you through the year. No more grandiose resolutions that fall apart by February 1st.
This process requires courage. It hurts to look at the list. It hurts to admit the betrayal. But keeping it costs you a whole lot more. Keeping it costs you your future. If you doubt it, here’s an idea: create an alert in your reminder app for next year’s Christmas Eve and read this message again.
Bottom line: Clear the deck. Enter the new year fresh.
If you look at your list and it feels too much to handle alone, reply to this email. We can work on it together. I hope that’s helpful.
Happy holidays!
Shlomo Vaknin, C.Ht
This is a copy of the newsletter that was sent out on December 26, 2025.