A Fantastic Year (2009)

How awesome has your year been?

It's great to look back at the positives from the past few months to remind yourself how far you've come.

Have you sat back and really thought about it?

Off the top of my head, here are some of the great events and achievements of the year:

• Got married! Fantastic wedding - lots of family and friends, went really well, both of us really enjoyed it.
• Fantastic honeymoon! Two weeks in Jamaica - great hotel, delicious food, lots of really good, fun excursions.
• Awesome new bathroom! Including a great power shower. After three years of suffering the old shower, it's brilliant.
• My wife got a new car! It's taken a while to get there, but we got the car she wanted and is very happy with it.
• Massive success at work! I'm particularly happy to have successfully managed the delivery of a very big (and very challenging) enterprise architecture project for a major telco. Very hard work but well worth the pain - learnt a lot and it was a massive success.
• Started this blog! More to the point - started putting some real structure around my personal development efforts (this blog is only one small part of it), and am already seeing some great results.

We also built bridges with some people who we had not been too close to recently, got back in touch with loads of old friends and have had some fun looking into plans for the future following our marriage. It's been great!

It's still important to look at areas for improvement...

• More time at home! I've been spending a lot of time working away from home recently due to my current assignment - not great for a recently married man. Worth it for the assignment, but I need to redress that work/life balance.
• More exercise and better diet! i.e. any exercise at all would be a good starting point, as the past few months have been very unhealthy. Being away from home so much means lots of meals that are bought for convenient rather than health value but there is always time to do better.
• More effort on our social life! It's actually been a good year socially, but it still could have been a *lot* better. A lot of the social improvements this year have been one-off events putting us back in touch with old friends, plus my social life has been far better at work as well. The main thing for me will be a better and more regular social life at home and with my wife.
• Environmental improvements! e.g. even small efforts at home that will make a big difference over time (e.g. maintenance efforts on the house, the cars etc.) Also more efforts on more general environmental improvements (recycling etc.)

A lot more good than bad

There are more areas for improvement that I am going to work into a real action plan - but the key thing for this post is actually the focus on the positives.

Whilst there are areas for improvement, look at the successes!

It should also be noted that even in the areas for improvement, we have made progress against them this year already - we just need to do a lot more.

How has your year been?