Resolutions (or not)

Last year, I joined a team of wonderful, creative virtual assistants. Every week, each blogger for The Virtual Wire puts together her (or his!) thoughts and reaches out to an ever-growing community that includes virtual assistants, clients of virtual assistants, and many others. So I’d like to start my first post of the year by saying a sincere thank you to my fellow bloggers, and a huge thank you to Stacy Brice, who gave me my opportunity to be a more visible face in the AssistU community. Happy New Year, to all of our readers, to you Stacy, and to all of you who share this wonderful task with me every week!

As 2008 rolled to a close, I had a familiar conversation with members of my family and a few close friends. It was on the question of whether we made New Year’s resolutions.

As a year concludes, I find myself applying 20-20 vision resulting from experience and hindsight. It can be a brutal process. In being quite resolute in my ruminations, I allow myself to see what did or didn’t work well, what I should keep in my life, and in some cases, what I should let go. It’s an admittedly self-centered process which, while allowing for the ‘bad’ to be examined, also allows me to celebrate what was ‘good’ or what went well. It allows me to re-affirm parts of my professional and personal life that had—someway, somehow—confirmed their validity throughout the year. For example, in the last few days of 2008 I re-examined the degree to which I was involved in AssistU and other virtual assistance communities, and the degree to which I felt I could continue on the same path.

Well; I am ramping up for a wonderful year ahead. Here are but three examples of my commitment and re-affirmation:

• I’ve already signed on to facilitate a workshop at FoVA 2009
• I am continuing to blog for The Virtual Wire (hey, I’m here on the first Monday of the New Year)
• I have recently been helped by, and have revisited and renewed my friendship and bond with some good friends (colleagues in the virtual assistance field)

Okay, so the unofficial word is that I don’t make New Year’s resolutions. But I do renew some of the commitments (personal resolutions?) I had made some time ago.