A New Year With New Opportunities

I feel like making a blog post, but I am afraid I don’t have enough focus. This is a relevant challenge and familiar feeling, though usually I am assessing a client’s resume in light of their goals and career strategy and easily seeing that they could use some more focus and some ways in which they could achieve that.

Many people are making new goals and resolutions for work and other areas of life, and I want to do this as well. However, I want to be reasonable. I want to be aspirational, but commit to something that is within reach. I find that writing is a path or practice to help me be more clear on what I want to reach and what the boundaries are around what expectations would be the right balance of support and challenge for myself.

I hope and even intend to finally be more consistent in writing this year, starting as early as next month, but for now bear with me while I explore.

What is my passion, what is my focus, what do I resonate with? I am continually drawn to the themes of learning, writing, education, and integration. What are my top “learnings” from 2010? I have some confusion around my framework/strategy that supports my  hesitancy around writing this. However, I need to break through the blogging and branding paralysis. I want to deeply own where I am and what is, or what the current reality is, but I know that part of this desire is an impatience and a frustration to “let come” and feel flowing, validated, productive, and meaningful…I feel a need and responsibility to cite sources of psychologists or business leaders or career experts in order to support my writing. In due time, I definitely will share these resources.

This – right now – is my own form of presencing — deeply feeling, sensing, seeing, and owning what is, getting a taste and a picture of the current reality. If we don’t know what here is, then it seems that it would be more difficult to take the next step or become what I imagine or even to imagine at my best.

Back to my spontaneous integration of my top three themes I learned about in 2010:

1) Ownership — I don’t make every deadline, but I set intentions to be present and give my best effort and do many things such as design my work day and space and life so I can focus as much as possible on my work. I am not perfect and strive to have patience with others as I experience what I perceive as imperfections. I am honest in my edges, expectations, and shortcomings, and if I sense I cannot deliver, then I will tell you and help you get some help elsewhere…even this is not perfect, but there is progress.This theme is related to responsibility, commitment, and accountability.

2) Reflection — For me, regular reflection is critical to my well being, growth, and performance in life/work. Whether internal, in writing, in talking…reflect. Am I meeting my goals? Did I take steps on/to my path today? Am I more aligned with my intention? If not, was there a formidable reason for this? IS intention completely overwhelming as a concept? Am I getting some feedback from people in my network? Better yet, perhaps this is action and reflection, but I have been doing a lot of action, and even a lot of reflection, and I believe I could integrate this even more.

3) Appreciate — I appreciate my friends, family, colleagues, and clients. Without Writing Wolf and Joe and the many clients I served last year with freelance writing and contract business services, I just would not be who I am in the same way, and it is important for me to tell them (you) that I appreciate you. This appreciation practice is not only good for the spirit and mood, but also when authentic and specific, can be a key link in maintaining relationships and contributing positive energy.

It is my hope and intention that this post is authentic and useful to someone…it has been useful to me. I suspect that if we all had to say what the top things we learned last year were, they might all be very individual reflections. If anyone reads this and wants to share what you are learning or some other way you are integrating parts of your self and life, I would love to hear.

I have been curious and open, and without that, these words would never have emerged in the way that they did…I still don’t know how consistent I will be on this blog, but I have been writing 750 or more words since September 5th and only missed four days. After losing my 109 day streak, I am now back at 8 days in a row and am going to attempt to use the writing not only for spontaneous reflection but to stimulate some more focused blogging. Click here to check out the site, and let me know if you do this practice!