Personal Best

The 2012 Olympics began with the normal flourish, pomp, and ceremony.

As always, one thinks of the gifts these athletes have as well as the sacrifices they have made to get to this event.

The years of training, practice, foregoing ‘normal’ activities. We’ve all seen the movies. Read the books. Heard the interviews and stories.

And while the titles, the medals and the honor are all worth achieving, the ‘real’ goal, in my opinion is the competition against oneself. The strive to do better each time. The drive to bring out the personal best.  Continuous Improvement.

Some people come by this drive naturally, while others need to push a little harder.

It can be too easy to fall into the rhythm of life – washing dishes, doing the laundry, the day-to-day mundane tasks.  But in order to overcome this distraction and get to your Personal Best, you need to have a starting point and a driving point. You need to know where you want to go. Have a path, goals, dreams and desires. Belief and support (internal and external).

We normally assess these things at the beginning of the New Year – we even have little ‘mantras:’ “new year, new you” and the like. This might make sense to some.

I’d suggest a different time of the year.

Now.

Whenever you are reading this.

Now is always the perfect time to start moving forward. Or start over moving forward.

For me, now works out perfectly. Today was the first day of school for my son, that means new rhythms, new patterns, new adjustments, new behaviors, tweaks to our process. In a week or two we will know what all of those are.

So for now, my forward movement consists of data collection.

My personal favorite method of data collection is simple: pen and paper. (I’m very tactile) I’ve got mine ready.

After the collecting is done, I’ll transfer my to-do’s, goals, paths, ideas, etc. to my electronic repository – I use Evernote. It’s on my computers and on my phone. Goes with me everywhere. There are dozens of similar software.

Whether you tackle this in a low tech or high tech approach isn’t relevant… but the portability of your process is. You need to be able to take it with you easily.

I’ll be spending the next few weeks reassessing my goals, paths, directions, and progress towards each.  I hope you’ll join me.

In Love and Light

~Namaste