A New Year’s reflection by Judy Piatkus

A NEW YEAR’S REFLECTION BY JUDY PIATKUS

Twenty years ago, in 1997, my company hired a business consultant to advise on what we hadn’t realised we didn’t know and might need to know. He interviewed all the staff and presented us with a clear conclusion at the end of his visit. We needed to set up an IT department so we could communicate both internally and externally via email. Twenty years ago very few companies who we dealt with were emailing one another. We became one of the early adopters of email in the publishing industry. It seems extraordinary now to think this only happened twenty years ago. How much and how fast has our world changed!

Mark Zuckerberg originally launched Facebook in February 2004. By the beginning of 2007 everyone with an email address was able to create their own page and begin the conversation. That was just ten years ago and since then Facebook has grown to be one of the most powerful influencers on the whole planet – along with every aspect of social media. I mention these two examples to remind how little we can know about the future. We are living in times of huge change and the major changes that affect our lives do not necessarily come from the directions we expect. All of us have dreams of the changes we would like to see in the world. Now is a good time to begin to visualise the things we especially care about getting better rather than worse.

In ten years time I think it perfectly possible that we will have a completely different monetary system – with or without cryptocurrencies – although my inclination is to believe that our financial transactions will take place increasingly in the cloud. I think there will be huge life-enhancing developments in medicine that at this point we can only dream about. Although not vegetarian myself at this time, I believe a far greater perecentage of people will be vegetarian or vegan in ten years. We will honour and respect animals far more than we do at present and so it will become much harder for us to think of them as anything other than living creatures as ourselves.

Sustainability and care of and for the planet will be far more sophisticated than we can dream of now. It was only in 2005 that the topic came into public prominence (that was the year my company researched the market for books on this topic and discovered how few there were). Although it is often disheartening, there has been much progress since that time and it will gather speed, in spite of America’s lack of co-operation.

In the next few years more dark secrets will be revealed and more taboo subjects will be explored openly leading to a society with clearer values about difference and equality and how to treat one another with much greater tolerance and kindness than we do now. I would love to hear your thoughts on what you see happening that could create huge change in the next five to ten years.

Meanwhile as the New Year begins this weekend, focus on thoughts of peace and love and happiness. Positive thoughts raise your energy and increase your wellbeing and as a result everyone you come into contact with benefits from that. Yes, we do need to be pragmatic and vigilant as we are still living in dangerous times. Nevertheless, each one of us has the power to spread a positive vibration in our own small sphere of influence and we can never know how far that influence may reach, improving lives for people we will never meet.

Have a peaceful loving new year and be happy.

Judy

WHO IS JUDY

Judy Piatkus is known as an entrepreneur, publisher and experienced business adviser as well as an expert, pioneer and speaker with regard to many aspects of personal development. She now has a portfolio career which includes angel investing and a variety of business activities. She is also the founder of ConsciousCafe, a network of people who have been on a journey of personal and spiritual development for many years. ConsciousCafe runs regular discussions, events and workshops and there are now several groups in the UK as well as one in Geneva.