Reflective Questions for 2008

 

As we approach the end to another year, I thought it would be beneficial to send out some questions to reflect on the year we’ve had. Try to go somewhere quiet and write out the answers to the below questions:

 

1.    What are you most proud of in the last year?

2.    If there were a newspaper headline describing this past year for you, what would it say?

3.    What unfinished business do you want to resolve before the year end and when will you do it? (i.e. lingering relationships, apologies, goals yet to achieve)

4.    When were you most excited about life in this past year? What were you doing? Who were you with?

5.    Looking back, what would you have done differently in 2008?

6.    Who most inspired you and why?

7.    What new dream for yourself did you achieve?

8.    Where did you let fear hold you back from a goal you had?

9.    What was boring to you this year that you hope to change for next year?

10.  On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with each area of your life in the past year?

Health ___

Career___

Money/Finances___

Significant Other/Romance___

Friends___

Family___

Physical Environment___

Fun & Recreation___

Personal/Spiritual Growth___

Self Image___

Knowledge___

 

Next year will be a very exciting one for me as we are expecting a little boy in February! I am sure that the experience will stretch me in ways that I didn’t know were possible. I am looking forward to sharing my experiences and continuing to stretch all of you to achieve things that you didn’t know were possible.

 

Wishing you all a warm and wonderful holiday season and a happy New Year!

Dreaming Big

As the college football season begins, I thought I’d relay a story that I read about the famous Notre Dame Coach, Lou Holtz. In 1966 he was 28 years old and his wife was pregnant with his third child and he was the assistant coach at a small school in the South. It was then that he lost that job and was out of work. He read a book called “The Magic of Thinking Big” which encouraged people to think big, dream big. And so he did. He wrote down 107 goals that he deemed “impossible”. They included having dinner at the White House, appearing on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, meeting the Pope, coaching at Notre Dame, leading his team to a national championship and shooting a hole in one.

 

Lou has now achieved 81 of these goals.

 

What I love about this is that it shows the importance of dreaming big before we even know how to accomplish it. The “how” is not important in dreaming. If you focus on the “how” all of the time, you’ll get stuck and held back on ever trying. You’ve defeated yourself before you’ve even tried. The more attached you are to the reasons something will never happen, the less likely it will happen.

 

So, what are your “impossible” goals? Will you make a list of 50 of them this week? I will do the same and I will post those “impossible” goals on my blog by this Friday.  Check back in to see what I’ve written and I would love for you to post yours there as well under the “comments” section of the blog.

 

“If you’re bored with life – you don’t get up every morning with a burning desire to do things – you don’t have enough goals.”
Lou Holtz

 

 

Inspired by Michael Phelps

While I was glued to my tv the past few weeks watching the Olympics, I heard one of the announcers talk about Michael Phelps and his routine before he came out to swim a race. They said that before every race he writes down the time that he wants to swim on a piece of paper and folds it up. He doesn’t show it to anyone but puts it down on paper so he knows what he’s working towards.

I don’t know what the times were that he wrote down but I have a feeling that he achieved almost every one of them. I thought this provided great inspiration for being really clear on what you want. How can you acheive what you want if you aren’t clear on what that really is? So, I ask you, what is it that you really want to acheive?

“You can’t put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.”
- Michael Phelps