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:

1. 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.
2. 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!
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. I donated about $300 to charity this year, in particular to the Save Darfur Coalition.
7. 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.
8. 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.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: Perform A Year-End Personal Development Review for Continued Success

Everyone has had difficulty with goal-setting – it’s a rough part of life. A lot of people try to do too many things at once, or they simply have a huge, ambitious goal that is too much for one person to accomplish alone – and eventually you experience burnout. As creatures of habit, it is frequently difficult for us to make the necessary changes on our own, and we give up on our biggest dreams and desires and slink back into regular behavior. It’s easier. But deep down inside you know you can do better. You undermine your self-worth when you constantly give up on what you want to achieve most.

But don’t beat yourself up! As Leo Babauta of Zen Habits recently said, when it comes to forming new habits, “It’s not a lack of discipline, it’s a lack of motivation. The most powerful motivators are logging your habit and public pressure.” Now as a budding entrepreneur, trying desperately to start my own web design and consulting company, I know how hard it can be to stay motivated! School and traditional workplaces train us SO well to depend on our superiors to tell us what to do, how to prioritize, and when to get it done. But when you go to work for yourself, or you go off into the world to accomplish some personal goal of your own, no one is telling you what to do, and often times no one is setting hard deadlines for you! It’s a new skill you have to learn to do these things yourself.

So today I’m writing to advocate that if you want to achieve those big dreams (and we ALL have them…maybe you want to go meet Al Gore and help stop global warming…or be the next CEO at Apple…or start your own business…or write a book!…or simply lose 20 pounds) – I encourage you to set up a strong accountability structure for yourself. I created a group with my peers about 10 months ago that we call Career MasterMinds, to provide a place to talk about our career and personal development goals. Every week, about six to eight of us meet at a local coffee shop and share about our weekly goals and accomplishments. This support structure is based on proven techniques that many highly successful individuals have used to achieve great things, and it provides a perfect opportunity each week to log your progress and participate in a friendly yet professional environment for public accountability.

Now many businesspeople, world leaders, and other successful individuals have set up similar accountability groups for themselves. In the book Think And Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill discussed MasterMind groups, where individuals coordinate their knowledge and effort for the attainment of a common purpose, and how these groups could multiply an individual’s brain power and continually motivate positive emotions. Andrew Carnegie, Charles Schwab and others used the principles of the MasterMind group to become hugely successful businessmen and philanthropists. Benjamin Franklin had a similar group centuries earlier that he called a Junto. Tom Peters, one of the most respected experts on business management practices, best-selling author of In Search of Excellence and Re-Imagine!, also proposes similar support groups for wage slaves tired of “Dilbert nation,” calling them a great “place to discuss your fears…your hopes…and your plans with work and non-work colleagues.”

Besides the proven success of such systems, peer accountability groups are an intuitive win because they also give you an important chance to review your progress each week and brainstorm your next actions. You can meet with your colleagues as frequently as you choose, but for me, meeting once per week has proven to be the most effective accountability tool in meeting my day-to-day goals. I recommend that you keep a binder just for your goals, and in preparing to meet with your peer group you set aside a predefined time to reflect on your achievements each week and then spend some critical thinking time about what your most important tasks (MITs) should be for the next week. Which 3 or 5 things that you can accomplish in the next seven days are most instrumental in getting closer to the lifestyle and achievements you desire? Write them down, and be sure they are specific and measurable. You can reference this list throughout the week to provide guidance each day. As you track your progress, checking off those three most-important tasks each day, it will give you the motivation to keep pressing for your desired outcome.

The second major benefit of a peer group besides having a written record of your progress is having the support and accountability of others. Answering to someone else is absolutely key in achieving those difficult goals. Knowing that someone else will hold you accountable gives you the added fuel not to let them down. And they’ll also share in celebrating your achievements each week! The most rewarding trend we have found with our group is that each week we continue to learn new things about each other – common interests we share, projects and tasks we can help each other achieve together, or maybe someone has a contact they can connect you with to help attain your goals quicker. Our members have connected each other with key contacts on several occasions…I connected one of my peers with the VP of Engineering at a company he wanted to interview with (it just happened to be where my step-mother worked!)…one student was plugged in to the Sacramento Housing & Redevelopment Agency to share his brilliant foreclosure research…and so on. Not only will your peers give you support and accountability, but they will also help you out a TON by sharing their knowledge, networks, and resources with you.

Nobody can achieve great things alone, but together we can help each other find great opportunity. When you network closely with your peers, and get to know the things that they are interested in and passionate about, you learn what sort of people and opportunities you can connect them with. And if you do this in a spirit of collaboration and teamwork, they will do the same thing for you. As Zig Ziglar said, “You can get everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.” You know deep down inside, we all wanted to be great, noteworthy people when we were kids – cowboys and astronauts! Well don’t give up the dream. Many respected and celebrated individuals throughout history have relied on their peers for motivation to become the great, noteworthy people they were! A formal group will give you a structure to track your written goals and progress, and it will provide a synergistic group dynamic where you can share your successes and challenges with others. So talk with your friends each week about your goals, start your own MasterMind group, or use a similar club as your accountability group! Just remember that to achieve great things, many heads are better than one.

Read the original article on Thrilling Heroics here: How To Use Your Peers For Fun And Profit!