Around the turn of 2011 I decided to post my New Year's Resolutions. As 2011 is zipping by, I thought it would be a good time to check-in on how I'm tracking against my personal goals for the year.

 I set the following 5 goals for 2011:

1. Love my friends and family completely.
2. Make better decisions.
3. Continue to meet new people and grow my circle of friends.
4. Give and experience as much as possible as a marketer and author.
5. Stay healthy and fit. 

So how's it going?

1. Love my friends and family completely. When it comes to loving my family and friends completely, I've learned that love is expressed in many different ways. Love can be that warm fuzzy feeling. It can surface through supporting friends through a difficult time, and it can also appear in the form of tough love. When I wrote the goals, I think I had the first two in mind. I hadn't quite experienced tough love yet in my lifetime. As 2011 progresses, I see how people have loved me so completely that it's caused me to re-evaluate my perception of love. I had to show some tough love this year, and it was one of the more challenging experiences of my life that will help me approach loving people more wholly than I knew was possible when the year began. It isn't happening the way I imagined, but I am learning and progressing in this department.

2. Make better decisions. Making good decisions is a life-long process. With age and experience, we learn. How often do you look back five years and think how naive you were? It scares me to think how much more I'll know five years from now. That's why I sought out a mentor. Fortunately I have an amazing sounding board in Rhonda Shasteen, and she helps me to get smarter faster so I can avoid learning some lessons the hard way. This year I've learned where I'm ok at making decisions, and where I need some work. My eyes have opened a little to areas needing improvement, and I'm practicing every day to grow into a better decision maker. 

3. Continue to meet new people and grow my circle of friends. I have been meeting new people though attending new professional groups like the Social Media Club of Dallas and area Meetups. Some things happened in the first six months of the year that led me to stay home more than normal as I tend to be quite the social butterfly. Once that season passed, I resumed my commitment to get out and meet people, and I have a long way to go to meet that goal for the year.

That's a lot for one day, so I'll leave you hanging until next time.  Then we'll look at #4 and #5. Take a breath and keep going because you can!