Photo by McKay Savage (Creative Commons) http://www.flickr.com/photos/mckaysavage/

It’s the last week of the year, a great time to pause and look back at where you’ve come from and ahead toward where you’d like to go. Some people use this time to do assessments or evaluations of their past year and then come up with resolutions or goals.

I think evaluations and goals are useful… but I’m a bigger fan of reflections and intentions.

Reflections are similar to evaluations, but more subjective in tone. They can even be poetic. Rather than making a laundry list of your achievements over the last 12 months, doing a reflective process is an invitation to explore the feeling tones of your year. What you’ve actually done is important, of course, but understanding some of the deeper waves of emotion and spirit that have washed through your life this past year can bring some catalytic insights.

The difference between intentions and goals is more distinct. Intentions come from the heart and soul – they are rooted in the values that are most important to you. An intention is connected to your life’s purpose, and is a specific way of expressing it at a given time in your life.

Goals are an explicit manifestation of those intentions. And objectives take that one step further, giving us tangible ways to measure if we are meeting our goals.

Let’s say that my intention is to be in vibrant good health, because that’s how I am best able to contribute to the world — and making a contribution is one of my core values. One of the goals I could set for that intention would be to exercise more consistently. The objective then might be: go to the gym three mornings a week and do a cardio workout for at least 30 minutes.

I’ve found that my goals are much more powerful if I back myself up one step and connect with my deepest intentions.

Over the past 10 years, I’ve developed my own Reflection and Intention process, refining the flow and the questions each year. When I’m really on top of things, I’ll set aside a day at the turn of every season to do this process. At the very least I make sure to do this Reflection Process once a year, usually in the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. What I’m about to describe is the process that works best for me. I invite you to make it your own in whatever way feels right for you.

How to Do Your Own Reflection+Intention Process

Give yourself at least one full day to go through this process. Go to a favorite place where you can be assured of solitude and quiet. Bring a journal and your favorite pen. (By the way, I think the process takes on a whole different dimension if you write it out by hand rather than tapping it out on a computer.) You may also want to bring your calendar from the past year as well as any journals you’ve kept to help remind you what’s transpired during this time.

If you have some kind of spiritual or contemplative practice that helps you connect with yourself like meditation or yoga, begin your day with that.

Then allow yourself lots of time to reflect and write on the following questions:

1) What am I celebrating? What am I grateful for? What has been wonderful and magical about this past year?

2) What is one aspect about myself that I have especially loved this year? What am I proud of?

3) What would I have done differently this year?

4) What do I want to let go of?

5) What do I want to call in for the new year?

Creating space to allow this process to unfold is crucial. Give yourself at least 30 minutes to journal on each question. Take a break between each question, return to your yoga or meditation practice for a while, or take a walk. Switching gears like this is balm for the creative and reflective self.

If you think you’ve come to the end of your writing after a short time, wait a few moments more and see what comes. If you need some prompts to get you further, you might want to use the same five categories that I use for the Liberated Life Project: Spirit, Creativity, Relationships, Livelihood/Finances, and the World We Live In (engagement with your larger community). Explore each of those areas in relation to the above questions.

More About the Questions

• The first three questions are the reflective ones, questions that should evoke enough memories and thoughts to paint a meaningful picture of your life over the past year, and also to exercise your gratitude muscle. It’s fine to list some of the things that you’ve accomplished this year, but make sure to dig one level deeper to notice why those things are important to you, and how you got there. Did you have to break some old habits or patterns to do these things?

• The fourth question begins to open the door for intentions for the new year. It recognizes the truth that we often have to let go of old beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors in order to make space for new ones to take root in our lives.

• The fifth question is the most akin to goals and planning for the new year, but allow yourself to paint in fairly broad strokes here. This is all about vision and intention at this stage. Try to connect to your most heartfelt aspiration here, both for your life and for the state of the planet right now. It really is okay to be as general as saying that you want to live in more abundance in the coming year, and that you envision peace on earth. You’ll get more specific later.

As part of this fifth question, it can also be helpful to create a Vision Board (also known as a Dream Board) to give your vision and intentions a graphic dimension. Here’s an example of a Vision Board from my friend, Aysha Griffin, and her description of the process:

And Finally…

After you’ve completed your day of reflection and journaling, let this process sit for a week or so. Then set aside a block of two or three hours, return to to what you’ve written, and fill in the details for question #5. This is when goals and objectives take their place. You might want to use a template like the one that Chris Guillebeau (author of The Art of Non-Conformity) provides in his Annual Review.

If you’ve gone through the process described above, your goals and objectives will be firmly rooted in your deepest intentions, and that will provide you with an amazing spark throughout the year.

The last thing I want to say about this process is to be gentle with yourself, both in the way that you reflect on your life — honesty, yes, but please, no harshness! — and also how you carry your intentions and goals into the new year. There’s nothing worse than being a slave to a New Year’s resolution and then being devastated when you don’t keep it. This is about living from a place of love and intention, not willpower and grit.

What I Discovered From My Reflection+Intention Process

Last week, I did my year-end process and want to share a few of my insights with you. One reason I’m doing this is that some of my specifics might help shed light on your process. The other reason is to invite you to be my partner in accountability. There’s something about declaring one’s intentions to the whole world that really turns up the fire on personal growth and liberation! Give it a try ; )

What I’m Celebrating and Appreciating

I was happy to discover there’s a whole lot to celebrate from this past year!

• I’m very grateful for the relationships in my life, and the addition of a four-legged friend, my dog Lucy, who has opened my heart in more ways than I can count.
• After quite a transient time in my life (10 moves in one five-year period!), I’ve now lived in the same home here in Santa Fe for almost two years now. I’m notice what a difference this makes in the energy I can devote to more creative endeavors.
• This year I put a lot of resources into developing my business, Five Directions. Back in January, my goal was to have two new clients. By the end of the year, I had exceeded that goal with five new clients. 
• I love to write, I’ve done lots of it this year, and my writing has received more exposure (like this) and even some recognition (my Buddhist blog, The Jizo Chronicles, was named “Blog of the Year” by a panel of judges).
• I have a tendency to get bogged down in thinking about things and trying to get them “perfect” rather than actually doing them. This year I broke through that “paralysis analysis” to get some exciting projects going, like the Liberated Life Project. I’m proud of the initiative I’ve taken, breaking an old pattern of passivity.
• And most importantly, I’ve been much more consistent in my Zen meditation practice. In addition to directing the Upaya Zen Center Buddhist Chaplaincy Program, this year I’ve also become a student in that program. This has given me a wonderful container for my spiritual path and service.

What Would I Have Done Differently

• I didn’t meet my goal for saving money. However, this was mostly because I invested in myself and in my business, things like signing up for Chris Guillebeau’s Empire Building Kit (which has been an incredible professional resource), upgrading to a new laptop computer (I had the old one for eight years), and joining a gym. I don’t regret any of these expenditures, and I’m certain that some of them will more than pay for themselves through better business outcomes in the next year.
• I notice that I’m still tied in to some negative beliefs in a deep way, like how I relate to money. I realize that I have so much potential for generating more money if I believe that I deserve it and can do it. By the way, the reason this is important to me is not for the sake of money alone. In 2009, I finished an eight-year journey to get free of $32,000 of credit card debt, and I can’t tell you how liberating that was! I still have a significant (though not insurmountable) student loan debt and it’s important to me to pay that off in the next few years. I want to be able to re-direct my financial resources from debt repayment to investing in causes that are close to my heart.
• Too often, I’ve indulged in unproductive, non-nourishing habits like too much aimless time on Facebook and Twitter. This is a real drain on my energy.

The Big Intention

I’ve accomplished a lot this year. At the same time, I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of energy. Ironically, given the theme of this blog, I’ve actually had a bit too much freedom. Recently I’ve been reading The Power of Full Engagement and love the way the authors talk about “managing energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”  I’m imagining what my life would feel like if I managed my energy better this year. This feels like the biggest barrier I’ve had to being truly present for those I love and also to having some of the projects I’ve started reach full fruition.

After I put my reflection process aside for a while, the phrase that popped into my head was “Liberating Discipline.” As in, what will most support me in 2011 is to instill some more structure in my life, in a loving way. So I’m declaring this my theme of the new year. Some objectives I’m creating around that include:

• Setting up and actually following a schedule each working day (those of you who are freelancers know this can be challenging).
• Limiting the number of times I check email each day. I’m going to aim for three checks, morning, afternoon, and evening. And that’s it.
• Turning off my web browser during my creation/writing times so that I don’t waste time on Facebook and Twitter.
• Doing 60-minute ‘sprints’ of intensive work on one project at a time rather than multi-tasking.

My intention is that this higher level of focus will free up more creative energy as well as quality time with my loved ones.

At the start of 2010, I attended a great webinar by business coach George Kao that gave my a new vision for a more sustainable way of working. I’m learning how to shift from trading my time for money to more of creating tools that will benefit people and also have the potential to generate income, including the Liberated Life Project.

The wonderful thing about the LLP is that even if it never made a cent, I’d still be incredibly happy to connect with all of you here. At the same time, I hold the intention that this project will be a source of income by the end of this coming year, through an e-book I’m writing on credit card debt liberation as well as affiliate product sales. I’m also really excited about a series of interviews I’ll be doing with artists, spiritual teachers, entrepreneurs, and more… stay tuned! Right now, after a month in existence, the Liberated Life Project has 36 subscribers. I’m going to take a bold step here and envision at least 1,000 people who will be members of Team Liberation by the end of 2011.

The other thing I’m calling in for the new year is more in-person connections with the wonderful folks I’ve been meeting online, and I’m setting the intention to be more present and available to my loved ones. And finally, I’m looking forward to a month-long adventure in Thailand this January, where I’ll be doing something that’s been on my “do before I die list” for a long time: hanging out with elephants on a trip with musician Jami Sieber.

Well, this has been an epic post! I truly appreciate you reading this far.

How about you? Do you have some kind of year-end reflection process? What are you celebrating from 2010? What are your deepest intentions for this coming year? If you could fly a banner above your head to remind yourself of your theme for 2011, what would it say?

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