2012 New Year's Resolutions

Around the end of the year, our family has a tradition that we uphold to: year-end family meeting/service. It started when I was in my young adolescence where my dad would initiate a family meeting with mom, sister, and I. He would open up the meeting with a word of prayer and praises. He would then choose a passage from the Scripture and share our thoughts around the message. With this leading service, the main topic of our discussion shifts to how each one of us spent the past 365 days. Usually, we would spend some time to gather our thoughts before this meeting, but nonetheless, we start to talk about key events and accomplishments as well as failures we encountered in life. This discussion led into what we expect to accomplish for the following year. In all of this, we never lose the context of how Jesus Christ is at the centerpiece. When I was younger and lacking maturity, this time with our family wasn't exciting and simply boring. However, after living apart with my family for over a decade now, I learned how important family has become in every facet of life. I now very much look forward to these type of family events.

As I mature every year, I find myself amazed how my perspectives and thought processes changed. Just last year in 2011, as I review my New Year's Resolutions, it is self-evident of how highly ambitious and focused I was particularly around building my professional career. Many goals were supplementing my goal to become a successful professional.

After a year or so, I have seen the things that worked and didn't work. Thankfully, I have a stronger grasp of who I am, my natural inclinations, tendencies, strengths, talents, and weaknesses, and core values which have enabled me to constantly reinvent myself. Prior to 2011, my extensive and proactive involvement in my business school has shaped my goals, underlying assumptions around work, and values to a certain extent. However, these goals and assumptions were tested in the 'reality' and I was compelled to make necessary changes to adapt. I have thus expanded my perspective into a more holistic viewpoint of how I view life. With that, I have made significant revisions on the framework of how I develop my New Year's Resolutions for 2012.

Below, my 2012 New Year's Resolutions are categorized in six dimensions in life: emotional, intellectual, professional, physical, spiritual, and social. Thus, instead of focusing on one dimension, I applied a more holistic approach to goal-setting for the new year. Also, with respect to wording, I have used past tense in order to help me visualize the changes that I already have done from a end first perspective in mind.   Thank you for reading.