Your summer holidays are just over and many of you must have taken a vacation either with your family or with your friends. I am sure you have returned with amazing memories and a renewed energy — ready to take on the new academic year.

In the years of experience I have had working with adolescents I have heard so many youngsters make life and career decisions based on a very simplistic thinking process: “Let my marks come. I will then decide!” Is this any different from planning your journey by saying, ‘Let me take an autorickshaw and see where it goes. I will then decide where to go from there’? And yet, that is the strategy many youngsters use when they ‘plan’ their life and career.

You are at the beginning of a new academic year — a year filled with potential, hope and immense possibility. If you want to make the best of this year, then you need to begin the year with a plan about where you want to be by the end of this academic year. This academic year will offer you numerous opportunities to learn new things. You will be able to learn new intellectual skills through the subjects you study in school. You will have occasions to learn new social and life skills through your interaction with your peers in and outside of school and through your participation in extra-curricular activities. Knowing where you want to be at the end of the academic year is what will help you make appropriate choices and achieve the best in the year ahead.

Let us now take a look at what you can do to make the coming academic year a fruitful one for you.

Think about what makes you unique: For many adolescents knowing about themselves is not an important task. During the year, promise yourself that you will get to know yourself better. Start by finding out what motivates and interests you. Create a vocabulary to think about yourself, to describe who you are and what interests you. Write down as many points you can think about yourself and then write a brief ten to fifteen line paragraph that describes what makes you unique. Try and do this within the first month after the reopening of school.

Write a vision statement of who you would like to be by the end of the year: Having a personal vision statement is a great way to add focus and direction to your life. Over the years, I have worked and reworked mine again and again. Today my vision statement is: “My life vision is to bring life and life in its fullness to all whom I meet by comforting the disturbed and by disturbing the comfortable.” This vision brings greater clarity and direction to the work that I do as a psychological counsellor or in my work in the education sector with schools across India.

So how do you write your own vision statement? Start with the list that you have prepared in your pitch about yourself. Ask yourself then, how will you like to use these in the coming year? My suggestion is to think of three things when you are writing your vision statement: 1. Your most important talents — those things that make you absolutely unique; 2. Where you would like to use these talents — your school, your community, your neighbourhood, your home; and 3. Why do you want to use this/these unique things in the areas you have chosen.

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One needs to begin this academic year with new hopes and a positive mindset to make it a memorable period in one’s school life. A new academic year gives one a chance to begin the coming year afresh with many opportunities to be discovered. It is another year to look ahead and work harder to make a brighter future. A fresh beginning will present us with a great deal of possibilities if we are alert, focused, optimistic and committed.

The following success sutras may help us pursue a new successful academic year: One – the secret of success in life is to do everything passionately. When study and other academic activities become just a routine, we tend to procrastinate which will kill our passion. Second – when we experience failures and feel like quitting we must ask ourselves, why we started at all. Late Muhammad Ali, American heavyweight boxing champion and civil rights activist, has said, “I hated every minute of training, but I said, I won’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion”. Third – it is not about being better than someone else; it is about being better than what one was yesterday. It doesn’t matter what others think about us, it matters what we are doing. Fourth – always find time to do the things that empower us and make us feel happy. Determination, persistence and hard work are the ingredients of a successful and fulfilled life. And finally we must remember that we will never have this day again, hence the need to make it worthwhile.

Aiming high in one’s life is very important; Michelangelo says, “The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high that we can’t reach it, but that it is too low and we reach it”. Challenges, problems and difficulties are part of our journey through life. Facing them and overcoming them will help us reach our goals; Helen Keller, though deaf and blind, defied her limitations to become a famous author and political activist. She travelled across the world challenging and inspiring people everywhere.

Education is the most powerful tool which will help you realize your dreams and build up your future. Your education does not end with school or college education. So keep learning from books, teachers, parents, friends and various events in life. Meanwhile be focussed in the pursuit of your learning which should set your soul on fire to take you to the heights of glory.

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