Your Annual Review

This title might sound dreadful, if you’ve ever had an annual review to measure your job performance. Leave out the dread and think self-review with the goals of patting yourself on the back for a job well done and redirecting your course in the year to come for goals you’ve missed.

The review I suggest isn’t your typical report card to Mom and Dad, even the Mom and Dad in your mind. (If I could learn how to turn off parental voices in my mind, I’d be the richest woman on earth when I shared that secret!) What I’m suggesting is an objective, loving look at your course and whether or not you’re getting closer to where you want to go. I talk a lot about my GPS or God Positioning System. Have you veered off course? That’s all … and if you haven’t, it’s time to get excited about whatever represents Paris, Rome, or other exciting destinations. You’re getting closer!

My Year-End Review

No joke, it’s more than a rear-end review where I measure how much weight I haven’t lost! I review my journal to see what’s really been going on in the past 365 days. I play Objective Observer and view the scene from further back than too close to see what’s really happening. If you don’t already journal, read Journals: The Sort-It Detail and consider starting one as a goal for the new year and decade. But even if you don’t journal as yet, you can do a meditative review of your year by simply observing it as a movie in your mind. Do it as early as possible in the new year.

Keep a calendar or PDA? Use it as a memory jogger to recall key events. Find a quiet corner and an hour to do this exercise. Start with January, and month by month, see what you were up to. Drink in the events as your memory movie unfolds, then contemplate them for 3-5 minutes to sort out the feelings and learning. Next write what comes up for you. What were your key lessons, feelings, progress, stumbling blocks?

Once you’ve got 12 monthly blurbs, you can check for common patterns and truly experience the magic of Objective Observer or Overseer. Remember, there’s “seer” in that last role, which means you are seeing with wise eyes and the ability to notice the course you’re taking. What would you redirect? What would you “not change for anything?”

Enter the New Year Softly

Wave hello to 2010. After all, it’s a new decade. Wasn’t it just yesterday that we were worrying about terminal crashes to our computers (pun intended) and stashing food for the dreaded domino effect of bad programming fallout in our electronic devices? Bad programming is what we’re trying to avoid taking into the new year with us. To change a pattern, we have to see what it is—and tinker till we get ourselves back on the path we want to travel.

I can’t repeat too often, winter is an inner time. Be joyful, celebrate the New Year, but the real celebration is another year of growing as a spirit embodied on Earth.

What’s your “10”—your hottest projected accomplishment—in ’10? What do you aim for? What looks like success? At the end of this new year, you may change your mind and discover in this process that your truest accomplishment was something different all together.

That’s the inner adventure. May yours be fulfilling and dotted with exciting surprises. May the 2010 decade overflow with cool insights.

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