Interesting Month August. Though, traditionally, it is the month of vacation it is a time of reflective change. Between the sangria, sea and text we enjoy (100 million a day to keep in touch with what we are escaping from) everyone takes, even if just a moment, the time to consider how our lives might improve or change from September.

We tell ourselves that we will make the effort, that we will hit the ground running, that we will no longer drown under debt, that we will get that job, position, or promotion. That we must hit the budget, and that we must move forward, or, if you are investment banker, we must receive a bonus. We try to convince ourselves that after a holiday when our batteries recharged things will get better.

Within a week of return, however, too many of us have our renewed motivation knocked down as an unexpected event is encountered, blaming bad luck, the system, the government or, if in the UK, Gordon Brown. Indeed anything or anyone other than ourselves.

You must not allow this scenario to keep happening to you. If you continue thinking the way you have in the past, then you are going to continue feeling the same frustration.

After a demoralising period that has almost succeeding in reducing confidence about the future down to zero, this is the time to wake up and accept that whatever you have to do, can only ever be up to you and you must expect yourself to do it too!

Whatever adversity you have endured since last August, view it as an opportunity for you to grow. Make a short-term plan to address and resolve it. Make a promise to yourself to fulfil your plan within 3 months. Commit yourself and stop putting off what you know you have to do because you think the time is not right.

Irrespective of disappointing weather, economy, relationships, or health, the truth of the matter is that you are already Made for Life. The potential to improve, change or do whatever you resolve, already lies within you. You just have to stop putting yourself down and start believing that you actually can do whatever it takes.

And the fact of life is: that we never know what we are truly capable of until something forces us out of the comfort area. Up cannot exist without down. The only way we can raise ourselves up, is by wanting to get up from where we have fallen down. Resolve to yourself this holiday that it is now time for you to turn any down you have recently experienced into up.

As the old fisherman said: It’s not the falling into the water that drowns you; it’s the not getting up out of it again.