Here we are again embarking on a brand new year with all the joys and anticipation that it brings. In 1999 I woke up on New Year's Day determined to get organized. That determination is what made it happen! The reasons behind that purpose had more to do with fear that people would find out my dirty little secret.

Now I share my shortcomings with the world because if I am having a problem then many of you are, too. I am not ashamed of who I am or how I got here. Every bad thing that has ever happened to me has made me who I am today! I am very proud of how I have taken those things from my childhood and not continued to abuse myself with those thoughts and actions. I can't change those years of growing up; but I can see when I allow that shame to enter back into my life and delete it.

I use everything that happens these days to help teach me a lesson to help others. I look at the situation and say to myself. What am I supposed to learn from this? Usually an essay comes from it, and maybe even the theme of a new book. Life is too short to just skating from one problem to the next and not use those lessons to teach ourselves how to not repeat them and help others.

Skating is what we do best. Do you remember when you were in school and you did just enough to get by? Instead of reading a chapter that was our homework assignment and answer the questions at the end; we would skip the reading part and go straight to the questions. There we go skating at an early age. We were proud of ourselves for finding a shortcut to getting our homework finished. We were just too stubborn to understand that we were really making more work for ourselves in the long run.

If we had read the chapter, processed the words in a quiet environment and listened in class instead of daydreaming; we could have answered those questions easily. Instead we picked and skimmed the reading looking for the answer. This kind of piecemeal learning robbed us of our education. Did you ever think this is why you can't remember anything from high school? You were skating to get by. Then came test time; you had to cram instead of using the baby steps of your homework to be able to pass! We thought we were so smart.