Today will be my last post for 2006. Aside from celebrating the holidays with family I’ll be without internet access for a little over a week, so that means no new postings. I should be able to resume soon after the start of January.
Given that the year is about to come to a close I thought I’d spend a little time reviewing the past events and giving a quick update on my future plans. Normally I avoid self-indulgent posts discussing myself directly, but I think some of you guys and gals might like to know what is going on behind the scenes here.
This Website
A lot has happened in the ten months since I made my first posting here on this website. I’ve written close to two hundred articles, released an interactive goal-setting program [1], and seen my traffic ratings go from a few views each day to a couple thousand. A lot of growth in this area and it shows no signs of stopping.
Right now I have no major plans in the works for this website aside from continuing to post, trying to increase the amount of value I can provide while increasing readership. Sometimes the simplest strategy is the most effective, so I’m just going to try to keep creating valuable content and hopefully things will continue moving upwards.
While I believe some of my readers might benefit from additional forms of content (podcasting, vidcasting, newsletters, more interactive content etc.) I think that for creating the largest amount of value to the largest amount of people can only come from just improving the posts that I write here.
Although ads and donations provide a small amount of revenue, I don’t believe they are the most effective methods for making a living off of this. Instead I will probably release a secondary product or service once the readership for this website gets high enough and the value I can provide increases. Depending on the growth I can create in the upcoming months that might be a year or two from now.
The beauty of this website is that it feeds upon the growth that I make and experience in my own life. The more I grow and learn, the more I can share here. So aside from continuing to post, I feel the best way I can improve this website is to improve myself. Which brings me towards my own life.
My Life
As some of you may know, I started attending the University of Manitoba this fall. As I hail from a small town originally, this required moving out on my own to a bigger city for some completely new experiences. Here is some of the more important points:
Habitual “Spring-Cleaning”
When I came to a completely new environment in the fall, with completely new and different objectives than I had back home, I decided to loosen up a lot of the habits I had created over the past year and a half. Although many of my habits stuck, I relaxed a lot of the structure that I had previously created.
Now that I’ve had a little bit of space to adapt to a new environment, I’m thinking of slowly building some new habits into my life. Considering it has been a few months since I’ve gone through the process of conditioning a habit, I’ll probably have to start small.
My new goals for interpersonal effectiveness require a lot more flexibility than when it was just myself, so I’ll have to be careful with what I try to do. It’s a careful balance between flexibility and organization, chaos and order.
For anyone who is just on the first steps of there personal development I can tell you it is an amazing feeling to know that you have the tools and skills to change any aspect of your personal life. Personal development is a skillset. Build the appropriate skills and you have immense power to guide your life.
Interpersonal Development
The past few years for me have been a time of major personal development. Cultivating an understanding and effectiveness of my own mind. I’ve learned a lot over those past few years and it has been extremely helpful in my life.
Recently, however I decided to move my focus towards interpersonal development. The last four months have been spent trying to be able to understand and effect all the relationships in my life. The complexity and difficulty in mastering this field is at least an order of magnitude greater than it was to build up personal strength.
There was a point not too long ago where I felt my own level of personal development click. I looked back and all the times I had failed, been frustrated or struggled and they started to make sense to me. Although I am by no means perfect, there was a sense of pride that I had a deep understanding of what makes me tick.
I’m not at that point yet with my interpersonal effectiveness but I can see it coming. I feel that if I continue pushing hard on the current path I’m in I might actually have some useful insights to share on this blog. My understandings and ideas are still too fuzzy and inexperienced to be meaningful, but I’m hoping a few months will give me the experience I need to start offering some small insights here.
New Activities
I haven’t started as many new activities as I had hoped when coming here. I blame this mostly on simply the time spent adapting to a new environment. Relatively, I’ve been in a place of stimulation overload most the time so getting used to things was my first priority.
Now that things have settled a little bit, I plan on taking up some new activities. I have a surplus of energy and time that can be invested in something new, so I plan to spend it wisely.
When I pick activities to try I focus on how I can generalize any skills I learn. For example, in Toastmasters the specific skill I learn is public speaking, but this can easily be generalized to improvements in basic communication. So I’m hoping on picking up a few activities that have some skills I can generalize to other areas of my life.
Right now I’m considering with the ideas of improv, dancing and martial arts. Each would be fun to try and has some skills that I’d like to generalize. I’m avoiding strictly personal activities/hobbies at the moment to go along with my interpersonal focus.
I wish all of you the best times over the holiday season and all the best for the new year. I’m going to keep pushing onwards in my own journey and I wish you the best in yours. Hopefully the road will teach me something I can share with you, and if our paths ever cross don’t be afraid to say hello.