Perform a 2007 Year-End Personal Development Review
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Optimize your Life, Rock your Career, and Make the World your Playground!
The advent of a new year is a great time to reflect on all that you’ve done over the past 12 months and take what you’ve learned, and build a roadmap for the coming year and beyond. Lea Woodward at Freelance Switch wrote a fantastic article to help freelancers apply what you learned in 2007 for continued success in 2008, asking “What have you achieved this year? In relation to what you’d planned to achieve? That you’re most proud of? Despite difficult challenges?” But it’s a great opportunity for non-freelancers too—to stay motivated about their past successes and set some future goals! Apply the 80/20 rule to your personal and professional life—what is getting you closer to the lifestyle you want, and what isn’t? Focus on cultivating the things that ARE working for you!
After some intense goal-setting, I set several resolutions for myself in 2007. I told myself, “This is going to be a good year,” and it has been. Nobody has perfect follow-through, but because I got clear on what I wanted to do with my time and focused my energy towards those ends, I achieved 8 out of 10 major goals this year:
- I stepped up my exercise routine. Unfortunately I didn’t cultivate the running habit, but I did start cycling with friends and at my peak, I’ve been exercising about three times per week.
- I registered three web domains. One for my personal homepage, one for the Thrilling Heroics blog and community, and one for my web design services, which I have been too busy with referral business to develop a website for!
- I read 11 personal development book books. A vast improvement over the average of two books per year that I have read in years past, and this number excludes fiction and pleasure reading. My top recommendations include Tom Peters’ The Brand You50, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Penelope Trunk’s awesome guidebook, Brazen Careerist, and of course Tim Ferriss’ life-changing book The 4-Hour Workweek. I’m also right in the middle of Vagabonding, an incredible guide to extended world travel (perfectly suited for my trip to Spain).
- I started working as a freelancer! I have not incorporated a full-fledged business yet, and I haven’t donated to 1% for the Planet yet, but I have been doing web design for the last four months and am working solely for myself now.
- I kicked ass at reflecting at the end of each week and planning goals for the next week! I co-founded Career MasterMinds, to meet each week with other students and young professionals and share our accomplishments and goals for the week ahead. It has been a very rewarding experience, knowing that the support system we have all worked to set up has helped a few of our members find new jobs and has helped all of us focus our energy and our direction.
- I donated about $300 to charity this year, in particular to the Save Darfur Coalition.
- I became a better networker and public speaker by synergizing with my peers, e-networking via my blog and LinkedIn, and by participating on the leadership team of a new Toastmasters chapter at Sac State.
- I purchased carbon offsets for my car through TerraPass.
What major goals did you accomplish this year? What notable improvements did you make in 2007? Or what important lessons have you learned that you can apply to your future personal development? Please share!
And start thinking about those New Year’s Resolutions! While resolutions are somewhat cliche, the New Year does offer a great opportunity to set some personal milestones and objectives. Get clear on what you want to do in 2008, and focus your mental energy and your time toward achieving those goals, and you’ll have a more productive year! So next week, we’ll do some goal-setting exercises and I’ll share my 2008 resolutions as an example.
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December 29th, 2007 at 6:45 am
Cody, I really liked reading this post. You make me think harder about what my own goals should be and how I will meet them.
It’s very powerful to read specific steps that someone else is doing to meet their goals. You could have written this all as advice, but instead you wrote is as sort of an update on your life, and I am sure that the second way is more powerful.
It reminds me of the research about how if you have fat friends you’ll be fat. Your post makes me think that if you have friends who meet their goals then you’ll meet your goals — behavior is like a cold because it’s catching.
Penelope
January 4th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Congrats, Cody! You’re doing great!
I learned a ton from my goal-setting for 2007. Here are some of my lessons learned.
March 6th, 2008 at 2:32 am
[...] how powerful it can be when you set goals for yourself. You won’t succeed at every goal, but review your progress at the end of each year to see how much you do accomplish! Simply setting the goals for yourself will greatly increase the [...]