The 2011 Recap

“But I have a sense that it will be a great, action-packed year.”

That was the last sentence I wrote in my 2011 manifesto. True to form, it was. I had more enjoyable experiences than I had planned. I was even more successful than I had originally described on Twitter. I met a lot of great people throughout the year and had a lot of great opportunities come to fruition.

For me, 2011 was really the tale of two separate timeframes, with June as the dividing point. Plans that I made in the beginning of the year didn’t hold up, and it felt like post-June that there was another plan that unfolded. I’ll speak more about this later in the post.

2011 Commitments

I did about what I expected at the beginning of the year with respect to keeping commitments. Some worked great, some did not.

1. Set aside the idea of starting my own business, at least for this year. I believe I was successful at this with the caveat that I asked about career opportunities when I booked coaching sessions in August.
2. Only read business or personal development materials when I need them. I did not read a business book this year. As for personal development, it largely depends on what one considers PD. I read a couple of extraneous books, but by and large the materials I bought were for personal interest than anything else.
3. Continue with writing and creation (the goals from last year). I didn’t do as good of a job as I intended past July. The first six months were great: I largely kept to a weekly blog entry and wrote the Augmented Humanity HOWTO (or most of it).
4. Continue down the path of minimalism. I did okay here. My travel for the past six months made me realize that I do not want to live out of a suitcase. I was also tired of having no living room furniture. I realized where minimalism was heading early on in 2011, but committed to stuff reduction. Even with buying some new furniture I believe I have less stuff than I did back at the beginning of the year. For instance, my garage only holds my car, my bike, some electronic items for recycling, and some boxes.
5. Make adjustments to improve my health. I did more in December for this than any other month. I embarked on a 30-day “no caffeine, no chocolate” trial and succeeded so much that I like the idea of continuing once my tea stash winds down. I also started structural integration work in July, which has been a marvelous transformation tool. The diet and exercise regiment didn’t change significantly.

Projects For 2011

My project success was decidedly average.

1. Learn bike repair to a beginner/intermediate competency. I dropped this early in the year once I realized how much work it was going to be with my current bike.
2. Commit to funding portions of 50 Kiva loans. I funded my 51st loan on 12/28, which was my 50th loan of the year.
3. Start a mentor program for the Toastmasters club at work. I started it, but it didn’t lift off like I thought it would. I do need to put more effort into this next year or transfer it to someone else.
4. Commit to receiving the Toastmasters Advanced Communicator Bronze award by June 30th. I completed this on 6/29.

The Words of 2011: Minimalism, Travel, Business

Each year I sit and think of the words that guide the year. For 2011 they were “minimalism”, “travel” and “business”.

Minimalism: I covered a lot of this earlier, but my goal was to pare down to only what I needed, and hopefully by Memorial Day. That didn’t happen, and in fact I was starting to feel less abundant because I was paring down so much. I still did a good job of liberating what I didn’t need, but I have a ways to go.

Travel: I traveled a lot in the past seven months. In fact, this was the busiest year in travel since 2002. I visited Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, El Paso, Chicago, Montreal, Denver, Las Vegas twice, and Honolulu – all since June. I estimate that I was on the rails for 2500 miles and in the air for about 17000 miles during this time. Most of my air travel was between September and early December. I had a great time, but it just got to be too much. Most of my travel was over weekends or spending a day or two in each city. I was actually becoming travel fatigued when I went to Hawaii, only because I was on a plane so much.

Business: I didn’t believe this when I came up with it. However, when I received a few coaching sessions in August, my coach and I discussed potential career paths. The conversation we had was very insightful and revealed things about me that I wasn’t really aware of. That was the basis of a discovery process that will go into 2012.

I spent a fair amount of time exploring this in person, and a day or two in Hawaii outlining some potential posts for a new Web site. I still have designs of launching a new site for my next career and/or business, but we’ll see what 2012 brings first.

My 2011 Focus

If there is one thing that I would say I failed at, it was identifying my focus for the year. I wrote in my manifesto:

This year I am shifting from the focus of personal development and self-employment to interpersonal skills and helping others out.

I got the movement away from personal development and self-employment correct, at least from the standpoint of just reading books on it. I completely failed with respect to the latter half of the statement.

As I said before, this year felt like it had two distinct parts. There were only two things I was sure about on January 1st: I had a trip to the World Domination Summit, and I was still in the throes of minimalism. The former was a catalyst for the second half of the year, while the minimalism was not. In fact, I had felt a huge shift coming on when I wrote an update in April. I can’t tell you the exact trigger, but I remember not writing on minimalism starting in February and focusing on writing different topics. My only guess is that I read “The Empathic Civilisation” and some of Ken Wilber’s books and resonated with that more than minimalism, at a deeper level.

By the time I left for Portland in June, I knew something had changed. Little did I know how much it was going to change. Travel allows for some great unfolding, but being around 500 great people I didn’t know perhaps set me on a different path. Between coaching, structural integration, more travel, and some alone time in Hawaii in the second half of the year, I just feel like I’m a very different person than I was in January.

So I had the “Year of Others” pegged incorrectly. This year was the “Year of Exploration”.

My thoughts about 2012 will be in the next post, of which I intend to have posted by Monday. I’m still not even sure how 2012 will unfold given this year, but I have a sense it will be as fulfilling as this year.